Jamieson Ridenhour

It was 70 degrees on Sunday, and well into the 60s yesterday. We worked in the yard yesterday afternoon, planting grass by hand (hoping to supplement the big planting we did last year) and mowing some of the tumbleweeds in the tree line before they could begin to overtake things. Tumbleweed isn’t nearly as invasive as kudzu, but it has its own tenacity that takes just as much vigilance to combat.

It’s lovely here, but already it’s cooling off. Today the high will be around 60, and we’ll drop through the week until the weekend, when snow is forecasted. So the spring has just been a tease. But it is coming–we’ve seen its harbinger. I can’t wait, and Gwyn is beside herself planning multiple garden plots and starting seedlings in the windows of the dining room. The kids played in the yard yesterday and felt liberated form the house, and even I had a great time in the milder weather.

The play ran last Thursday through Sunday. We had good turn-outs, especially Friday and Saturday nights, and good, literate audiences who followed the plot and the language. Much of that is due to the exceptional actors we had on stage–our students did well by the Bard, n ot just delivering lines but understanding and feeling them. I had an obscenely fun time; I haven’t been on stage as an actor for thirteen or fourteen years, but I immediately remembered why I devoted most of life to the theatre for four years in college. It’s a beautiful feeling to work with a group of twenty or twenty-five people toward a common goal and have it succeed as well as it did last weekend. The play was really funny and really entertaining, and that’s due to a concerted group effort that was sheer joy to be part of.

Having said that, it sure is nice to have my evenings back. I want to stay involved with theatre here (I hope I can direct, maybe next year), but for now I’m glad to return to what passes for normalcy.

Got to visit Friday and Saturday with our good friends Margee and Deaver, who are our fellow Carolina to Dakota transplants. They both teach at Black Hills State in South Dakota, and both of them were at USC with me (Margee and I shared an office for half my tenure there). They came up for the play, and we had a great, though brief, visit.

That’s all here. Planting and acting, and living life. I am right now very happy with life in general. If we have to stay in Bismarck for a period of time, it certainly feels like there are worse things. I may change my mind tomorrow, of course, but right now I like where I live, what I do, and who I’m around. And that’s worth celebrating.

I feel like a real writer as I type this post on my new laptop. I got a Toshiba Satellite that’s making me very happy. Yay, me.

Spring Break is over, and I wrote not a word on the London book. First off, “Spring break” is a woeful misnomer–we had the first actual blizzard that I’ve seen in Bismarck over Thursday and Friday. High winds and blowing snow kept the roads in a state of perpetual crappiness that the municipal fleet of snowplows couldn’t keep up with, and visibility while I was picking up the kids from school Friday (because the schools never close here, ever) was about fifteen feet.

I didn’t do the school run terribly often last week, though, because the whole family, except me, was down with a sinusy, coughing, sneezing, fever thing. Gwyn was eventually diagnosed with bronchitis, and Ian and Eva both missed a couple of days of school, and one of drum lessons. I stayed mercifully well, as did our good friend Noelle, who came to spend Wednesday through Sunday with us, unaware of the hellish den of germs and frozen tundra she was entering.

BUT. It was wonderful to see Noelle, especially for Gwyn, who’s been feeling (on top of the sickness) a little isolated in this land of Republican Christian meat-eaters. Noelle was a welcome reminder of our close friends across the country–and she brought 40-year-old Virgin, which was really funny.

And, once the storm went away, the snow was beautiful and deep. The air was crisp and temperatures soared into the 40s. And yesterday I saw a huge white jackrabbit in our yard, sprinting away from me as I pulled into the driveway.

Now back at work, I’m doing conferences with my 103 students on first drafts of papers. Twelve conferences a day for four days, fifteen minutes a conference. My favorite student sentence from this morning: “Assisted suicide continues to not only be illegal throughout the United States, but it is a crime.” Which is as true as it can be.