Hazelnut Reflections

Friday Five

or, my Laura Ingalls Wilder moment with the General Ordination Exams:

) Snow: love it or hate it?


Love it, love it, love it. Well, except for the driving.

2) First snow memory

I'm from Chicago, so it's hard to identify a first. I grew up next door to a park along the lake, and remember especially walking along the beach with all the snow and ice in the winter.

3) Best Snow Day ever (actual or imagined)

I'm going to add a memory below, perhaps not "best" but certainly "most memorable."


4) Best use of snow in a movie, song, book or poem

How about a TV episode? The 3rd season Buffy episode where the First tries to get Angel to kill himself? And then it snows in Sunnydale and so the sun never rises so he can't.

5) What you are planning to do today, with or without snow
Work on a sermon. Work on a meditation for tomorrow's ECW Regional Meeting. Odds and ends. Knit.

Ok, now for the memory. Seminarians of the Episcopal Church know that in one's senior year one faces the dreaded General Ordination Exams, or GOEs, in the beginning of January, and that one's Christmas break is pretty much ruined by either a) the fretting or b)the organizing of notes and books or c)all of the above.

I had a desk space in the basement of the Seabury dorms. This study area contained a number of workspaces and was delightfully referred to as Purgatory. I was living in one of the apartments on the block so I could have my cat with me, and thought it would be a brilliant idea to lay out my notes in some kind of order down in Purgatory. Then, so my plan went, in the morning, when I went to pick up the day's GOE questions from the inimitable Newland Smith in Seabury Lounge, I would take a brief detour down to Purgatory and pick up the appropriate class notes, thereby keeping the amount of note clutter in the apartment down to a dull roar.

This was a fine plan, and I spent Christmas break rereading my notes, and making little indices for certain dense classes. I lined up my notebooks the Saturday before GOEs and walked back over to my apartment. (This pretty much exhausted whatever store of organizational skills this ENFP could muster at this time in her life.)

All was well until the snow started falling early Sunday. And falling. And falling. It got so deep I could no longer see Floyd the bike locked to the bike rack under my windows. It got 20 or so inches deep (anyone who remembers the exact total, feel free to comment). A few hardy souls (non-GOE takers) got out to break some paths around the parking lot, but it was still pretty deep around the Block.

Monday dawned. GOEs finally here. I received my questions from Newland, and sure enough, those notes in Purgatory would be helpful. And so I had to break a path down to Purgatory to get those notes. This was in the days of "the construction" so one could not just pop across the driveway or through the nice shiny new building to get to the basement of the dorms. No, it required going all the way around every time. Every morning. Through the fresh snow.

GOEs were fine in the end but I still laugh at the memory of trudging through the snow to fulfill my fine organization plan.

posted by Emily @ 9:21 AM