Spring Before Winter???

Snow melts the minute it hits the ground.  Surely this is some kind of bizarre joke -- when does winter start?  It's already February first.  Or maybe I'm just being a Minnesotan who KNOWS (has always known) that Michigan typically has really pathetic excuses for winters.  This one is just particularly wimpish!

The plans for the spring season are already forming.  I really look forward to the fiber festival season this year; I am yearning for a series of road trips -- anything to get me away from the computer and these messy, unfinished footnotes, maybe with chunks of text stowed on a laptop so that I can work them over in the peace and quiet of motel rooms, where phones don't ring and e-mail doesn't seem so urgent.

There is an intriguing tiny festival (maybe a dozen vendors) in Indiana in early March -- the Jay County Fiber Festival in Portland, Indiana, from March 8-10, to which I've never been.  Might be the first year of the event -- can't tell from the website.  I may just rent a car and have a look on that Friday -- it's only 4 hours, maybe less, the way I drive..........I note with more than the usual interest that Portland, IN, seems to be some kind of mecca for antique shops.  Larry might want to come with me (buttons!!!!).  Then Greencastle, also in Indiana, and of course after that, the pace quickens.

Also, Larry and I will go to Minnesota at some point in my spring break -- between March 12 and 17th -- for at least 4 days.  What a good thing.  I can see my dearest old friend, Julie, and her partner, plus my two (or three or four) nieces and favorite nephew -- and maybe hit all the antique shops and wool shops while showing Larry why I think St Paul and Minneapolis would be good places to live.  I really do think that.  I have some fears about such a return, which I won't spell out here -- it's family stuff.  But in the end, I have yet to find an affordable city with such wonderful amenities.  Chicago is better in physical terms, but it's WAY too expensive for people like us.  The only down side, of course, is the horrible winter.  But the cool thing about Minnesotans is that they adapt -- really well -- with tunnels and lots of other clever apparatus.  So we will go look.  If he hates it, we'll hunker down here, once I retire in a couple of years.

svb