Sunny, cold days

It is in the 30s these days, but at least - unlike poor Alaska - we're not having snow. Being that I got into a fenderbender last weekend and my car is quasi-driveable, I am glad for the lack of white stuff. However, I got a $10 LLBean coupon in the mail so today Veeka and I went to the store to see what we could get for that amount of money. She latched onto - I kid you not - something that looked like a cross between a red plastic pair of tongs and an ice cream scoop. The clerk told us it was a snowball maker. OK....The photo here is of Veeka posing next to some artwork she did for a class last month. Her teacher thinks she is quite talented so I am trying to encourage her art. And a few other things: She is taking a swim class at the county pool on Saturdays but because she could not glide far enough, she was demoted from Level 2 to Level 1 to get her stroke down. She is so thin, she shivers in the pool so I am looking about for a thermal suit to buy her. Other news: My "Days of Fire and Glory" book finally made it into Kindle so you can download it here.And some friends of mine who run a think tank known as the Edmund Burke Institute just ran one of my essays here. This week has been filled with preparations for teaching a religion writing course at the University of Maryland starting Jan. 25. I finally turned in my syllabus, which took more work than I thought. It's tough to think 15 weeks in advance as to what you might be teaching as this is a new course and I have no idea how long certain things might take to cover. And my class is a nearly 3-hour marathon on Wednesday mornings which saves on parking fees but basically mandates a coffee break midway through. So now I'm getting all sorts of emails from the university and gradually getting to know the campus as I drop by to get my faculty/adjunct ID number and next, my parking passes as there are parking ghouls aplenty on that campus that literally sit and wait for you to be one minute late to your car. One was waiting for me in a white pick-up on Thursday; fortunately I had three minutes on my meter but I would have loved to have fired a dart into one of his tires.