Outside it is all lightening and rain that turns to ice over the power lines. A work of both intense beauty and ugliness.

I am inside the swollen warmth of my own home, listening to music and reading poetry and a novel I have been looking forward to reading since it arrived in the mail. It was nice to pick it back up this evening after a failed attempt to teach Garrett, the eight year old that lives next door, to do the box step waltz.

I woke up with a bad case of the shakes this morning and it took a while to get straight again. I think it was from my lack of enough sleep over the last two weeks, but I wouldn't have changed a moment. I used to always say you can sleep when you're dead and I still believe that silly idea in some ways. There are only so many moments in life when connections are made or laughs between friends and love ones are happen. It is best to take advantage of these things when one is presented with them.

I have finals today and saw some of my students for the last time. My elderly student pressed ten dollars into my hands when she came to bring my lunch to me. Tot Thi Dang had bought me lunch three times a weeks for three months. I have never ate any of it, save some fresh fruit and a can of coke. It was the fact she tool time out of day to think of me that was the importance of the gift. Not how it was packaged or how awful it smelled. She is a cleaning lady at WSU and I was for a while she would find her gift in the trash, so I would throw them in trash cans in other buildings and in bins outside as I know it is the grounds crew who collects that trash. I tried to give it back to her but she quickly walked away and I realized she would have been insulted if I
had so I have decided to buy a gift for Toys for Tots with the money. To bring her gift back full circle. It seems the only right choice.

I have many things I will be able to start doing again now that I am almost done with school till the spring, laundry seems to top the list, and then cleaning through all the papers on my desk. It has really plied up over the last few months. I think I will also start some collages. Maybe bookmark size. There are also Christmas cards to mails and a few packages to put together. I have already started some of these things.

I think I will watch a movie now. I haven't watched a film in a while and seems a nice way to spend the rest of my evening as I listen to the rain slowly come down and turn to ice.