It's currently 65 degrees (20 for the rest of the world) and extremely windy. It is officially fabulous outside, at least for February in this particular burg. Chicago has nothing on my uni for wind. Frequency of wind, milage of the gusts, chill of wind, I just can't believe that Chicago could beat us. The university sits on the edge of about 80 miles of field. The next closest city large enough to act as a windbreak is about a 45 minute drive from here. But the temperatures hoovering right around seventy were fabulous, unless you had to work in a theatre during the nicest bits of it, as I did.
To be sure, I wouldn't have been outside if I hadn't been working; I would've been cleaning the house, but it's all about the concept of going outside to enjoy the weather.
It's expected to snow tonight. All quotes ring true: "If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes, it'll change." This is why it's such a topic of conversation here in the Midwest, it's not that we have nothing else to talk about, it's that the weather won't allow us to talk about anything else.
I'm sure in San Fransisco, for example, they rarely talk about the weather. There are only so many times you can say, "Oh, yes, the weather is perfect," before you and your neighbors are all sick of hearing it. And you don't get to talk about the changes in the weather because when it does change, it's either an earthquake or a hurricane or something else life threatning, and then you can't see your neighbors to be able to talk about it.
That must be why idyllic climates are so full of movie stars. Their changing lifesyles substitute for the lack of changing weather thereby giving the rest of the populace something to talk about.
I, obviously, have very little to talk about. Why else would I be yammering on about the lack of weather in places I have never even visited? I need something to occupy my time with.
I finished reading The Mill on the Floss. I think I prefer Middlemarch on the whole. The characters are much more clearly drawn in Floss, but the ending seems to come out of nowhere. There doesn't seem to be quite an appropriate enough build to the final chapter. The river is mentioned through the whole thing, and the flood is prepared for, and isn't there lots of early talk about the Biblical flood, too? But it ends too quickly. It seems that perhaps the situation between Maggie and Tom should be made clearer closer to the end. A more final, more recent exchange between the two of them to make the last part all the more interesting. I do like how sudden the accident is. In my copy it spans a page turn and I had to look back to make certain that what I read indeed happened, and that I hadn't skipped a page.
But I say, I think I prefer the other because it gives plenty of time for everything that needs to happen to happen. I don't wonder why there isn't another chapter or so in the book. Of course, it does make a nice effect because, just like a flood there it is where it shouldn't be, but since it's been foreshadowed through the whole book, it's only a matter of waiting for it, and Eliot might have had one or two other things happen first.
I do prefer it absolutely to Our American Cousin. The only thing noteworthy about the entire thing is that it happens to be the play Lincoln was attending when he was shot. Other than that, it is even more awful than Uncle Tom's Cabin. I realise that Stanislavski had not yet caught on, so the theatre was much more presentational than it was a reflection of life, but, ugh.
Mary Todd Lincoln was supposed to have had a premonition that her husband should not attend the play that evening. I should say she had a precognisance of how awful the play was rather than that Lincoln's life was in danger.
There is a ginormous spider on the ceiling that, according to the Internet, is a daddy long leg. The thing that bugs me about this is that I know daddy long legs, quite intimately. You spend more than half the summers in your life living outside, you get to know the little gentlemen. And this one doesn't look like any of the ones I know, its body's too long. Actually, it looks like a bigass mozzie. Oh well, I guess I'll say that the Internet is right and this is a variety I'm not yet aquainted with.
But if I don't update for a long while, I was sucked dry by a ginormous vampire mozzie.