I had hoped to go to Longwood Gardens on Saturday night, but all the kids had done stuff during the day (playdates! skiing! tech rehearsal for a play!) so no one wanted to go. Rather than fight to drive an hour and walk around in the bitter cold (the wind chill was something like 11 degrees) my husband and I elected to go out to eat instead while the big kids babysat. We went to a tapas place — it was really good. Maybe I can add that to the list of first-weekend-of-January traditions!

Something I don’t hope to add to the tradition list: We just got the robo-calls from the district that schools are closed tomorrow. It doesn’t really look like we’re getting that much snow, but we shall see. There will be a lot of screen time, but if it does really snow, maybe there will be some sledding too…

In the meantime, here’s a little sonnet on singing Bach’s B-Minor Mass…

For this, I leave the house by six-fifteen.
For this, I sit in traffic near downtown.
For this, I work to make melismas clean
until the notes sound as they’re meant to sound.

For this, three hours on a Monday night.
For this, some ninety minutes in the day.
For this I’m testing out the parts, the tight
chromatic harmonies, the rhythmic play.

For this he labored centuries ago.
For this he pulled a life’s work in a piece.
Did he imagine how we’d get to know
such genius that with time does not decrease

in beauty? When it strikes we stand in awe.
Whatever cost, it’s worth it — worth it all.

It is also snowing! The new yard is beautiful in the snow and I went for a good stomp around this morning as a break from supervising virtual school. Yep, virtual is back, though just for the weather — the district has been making do even with staff members out for isolation and such. The older kids have done fine with online classes. The 6-year-old has been diving onto my lap and racing off and declaring that he hates zoom and asking what time it is every 7 minutes and so forth. This with a teacher he absolutely loves. I am hoping everyone is back in person next week.

Today should be the last day of the movers – it has been a four day project with packing and loading and transporting. We have furniture coming next week and no doubt a great many hours of unpacking and organizing but I am telling myself that things are improving. And so far the car hasn’t died again, so there’s that! I have walked away from this blog post — this short blog post — half a dozen times to deal with things. So may as well hit publish now.

(Just a quick reminder to sign up for the Time Tracking Challenge if you haven’t! Link is in the last post. If I go look for it I’ll get distracted again and never publish….)