Here are some lovely pictures I took this morning around Belfast; slowly awakening after a very long, very cold, very snowy winter.  I’m restless, so I’m just going to grab the spring lamb by the balls and drag it into summer.  Dammit.

 “It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
― Mark Twain

March Madness basketball this year has been less mad than we all hope it will be.  Duke, Ohio State and Cincinnati are done, that’s true, but otherwise nothing too upsetting.  Yet.

I didn’t steal ideas from anyone else’s bracket this year – thanks anyway Mr. Obama, and I created new fandangled ways to choose my teams. (As an aside, here, I like the word “fandazzled” better, though every literary source on the planet assures me it is not a word at all.  Well, neither was “Dayton” a “team” until they just beat Ohio State!)

Dayton, however, is the city in which I was born, so I had to choose them in my bracket, and that tomfoolery worked out for me just fine.   I chose Harvard because I love the movie “Good Will Hunting” and more to the point, Matt Damon, who didn’t go to Harvard but is from Boston-ish and that’s a good enough reason for me to choose the smahties to win the game.  Their chance of winning the entire thing is so minute I find myself rooting for them just a little.  I hope if they win Bostonians make t-shirts that say “how do you like THEM apples!?”  I would buy several.

I chose Florida to win the whole thing in one of my brackets, and Louisville in the other.

I like Florida because Disney. Though I’ve never been, and have no real urge TO go there, I still love old Walt and his crazy dedication to making childhood magical. It’s a place that brings a lot of joy to a lot of people — worth my vote this year, yes.

I chose Louisville because I like the way “Louisville” is pronounced by people who actually live there.  Plus I went to Louisville once.  I have a picture of me standing next to the biggest baseball bat in the world.  It’s pretty epic.  Definitely a reason to put them in the finals.

So I guess I’m doing alright, competitively, in the bracket.  Mostly, I guess, because I was born in Ohio.  Which is the only good reason I’ve ever come up with FOR being born in Ohio.  So that life mission is now accomplished. Halleluiah.   I’m second place right now in the bracket outside the family,  only to my friend Penson.  In my defense, though I like him very much, Penson actually keeps up with college basketball.  Which seems unfair.  Doesn’t it?

March Madness in this house is just a game of luck and bizarre team-choosing ‘skill’ that brings us together in an I’ll-whoop-your-butt kind of way.  No one really watches the games here except to stand witness in case of huge upset.  That stuff is fun!  We do a lot of screaming and yelling when the games are close.  Otherwise, we just watch highlights on CNN.  I think, using my methods, I have just as much chance as the next guy to win a few extra dollars.  Go Gators!  Go Cardinals!

My blog is 3 years old. It doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up, but that’s cool.   It can live here until it’s 32 as long as it pays rent.

My precious little papoose still makes all kinds of delightful toddler mistakes that make me giggle and generally happy it exists. It improves all the time, getting stronger, more capable.  But it still has this tendency to fall smack down on it’s cute little face when its thoughts go too fast too quickly that it can’t catch up to its own mouth.

Also when it’s messy or rude or whiny, as all good littl’uns can be, it is cringeworthy.  Downright exasperating.  When it knows what it wants to say, but can’t, because it gets distracted like a mole on ritalin…

Erg.

I guess you could say it’s a small child you don’t mind visiting, but you might be really happy isn’t yours.

Only it is mine.  And I’m absolutely certain I’m not parenting it correctly.  Not because I don’t want to, but because I just don’t have the skills.  So you know what this mamma’s gonna do?  She’s going to do the equivalent of following the Dr. Spock manual word for word.

She’s going back to school.

A Top 4 ranked low residency program offering courses in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Popular Fiction

In July, after a 20 year hiatus, I’m going to return to the hallowed halls of the UMaine system at Stonecoast, through USM, which offers an MFA in Creative Writing.  Add it to the list of dreams come true.  My life is charmed, and blessed, and amazing and terrifying and awesome.  Kind of like the experience of raising a child…or a blog.

I look forward to every second.