Did not do much yesterday and went to bed early because of a headache from lack of sleep. C and I drove around in the storm looking for a grocery store or supermarket. They were all closed and so we ended up going to Wawa for a few items and Subway for lunch. The Subway was located in a Pilot station which serves truckers. It seems that they were all congregating there because of the storm. It was slow going, but nice to be out driving on snow-covered white roads with the snow blowing all around.

Still have not started the readings. After coming home yesterday, I was a bit tired... oh, that and plus I had to shovel outside the mudroom. C doesn't do a very good job of it and likes to bring out his electric snow shovel. I don't think the electric shovel does as clean a job as shoveling the stuff manually. Back to the readings, I hope I can catch up with last week's readings today. Tomorrow, I hope to start next week's readings and maybe even finish it all. I was taking notes in MS Word for each article and chapter I read, but I think I will stop that. It takes me a lot longer to get through the assignments and I also worry that pulling out bits and pieces of information may not be a good idea since I may miss part of what the author is trying to say or if I remember it, I will have forgotten it by the time I re-read my notes. I am hoping that it is enough to make notes in the margins. I wonder if students of yore had this much work to do or whether it is something of the modern age where faster is equated with better. I don't see how anyone can really absorb all that information in such a short period of time without having the time to mull over the readings.

Today is a sunny day. The local grocery is probably open, so I will go down there to pick up some items for dinner. I am planning to make shepherd's pie tonight. I had planned to make it last night, but again, the grocery stores were closed.

Yesterday, with C's reluctant help, I was able to plant sweet woodruff, sage and lamb's ear seeds. Hopefully they will germinate. I also brought some germinating mix, balanced fertilizer and greensand from the Gardener's Supply Company. I used up all of the Miracle-Gro seed starting mix yesterday and thought that I should give their germinating mix a try. The product has received rave reviews from customers and I find that the Miracle-Gro mix tends to have small twiggy parts in it, which I read somewhere was an indication of poorer quality mixes. I also brought 100 small round transplant pots and wooden plant labels from Jung's. Not sure if I will actually need 100 pots, but I'm sure that I will be giving some plants away. Besides, it's always nice to have extras on hand.

I think I will not finish "The Okinawa Program". I took a look at the recipes in the back of the book and they do not seem like anything that C will eat and I find some of the low-fat recipes a bit hard to swallow, so it doesn't look like anything I can realistically do. I guess I will have to move onto something else that seems a bit more do-able. At least, there is one less book that I feel compelled to read. It will probably go back into the BookMooch queue for someone else who might be more accepting of healthier foods. For now, I will just try to eat a bit more sensibly, cut portion sizes and eat in moderation. I will have to try to find some more healthy, but tasty recipes. I guess adding fish into the equation wouldn't hurt either. I've always liked some fish, although C seems not to enjoy eating them. It's difficult to live with a finicky eater (sigh).

I am going to finish up or at least try to finish up my order for the seeds today. I think I will need a few transplant pots too. I was hoping that I could find them in a nursery around here to save on shipping costs. Home Depot doesn't seem to carry them.

I didn't get much sleep last night. I went to bed around 2:30-3 AM and woke up around 7:30. That's only 5 hours. I had told the other officers in the S Club that I would send the meeting minutes out by 8 AM and wanted to stick to my word. I figured that I would be up at that hour anyway since I had to prepare to leave for school. With the snowstorm, school is closed today so apart from getting up to send the meeting minutes, I didn't have to get up early. Oh well... maybe this will force my sleeping pattern to get back on track since I will be tired tonight.

Hopefully I can catch up on all of my readings for last week. I think that I am reading ahead since we seem to be slipping a bit behind schedule in class. That's okay though. I wouldn't want to be caught behind and it doesn't hurt to be ahead. I still need to do some research about magic and miracles though. I wouldn't want to get behind on that. I should probably start my paper by writing a few preliminary words on it, just to get the creative and thinking process going. It seems less intimidating if I think of writing a page a day than if I were to put it all off until the very last minute. At least I would feel that I have something that just needs a bit of fine-tuning. Often in the past, I would find that although I did a lot of reading and note taking, I don't have a coherent paper until there are actually logical thoughts and paragraph progressions in the paper. Since this is my only class, there is no excuse for not having a strong paper by the end of the semester. Unless I have chosen a poor topic...

No school tomorrow due to a snow storm! Hurray! I can catch up to all of my readings tonight. I was also worried because my sleep pattern has reverted back to falling asleep at 4 AM. Right now the streets are wet, so I think we are going to have heavy wet snow. Not very nice... especially when one must walk the dog.

I guess I will have time to do a bit of seed starting now that I don't have to go to bed early. I really should start some of them. I planted some tulips, muscari and irises in pots and covered the bulbs in potting soil. Then I read that the tops of the tulips should not be covered. Oh well! I guess this will be a learning experience. Let's see what happens.

It's funny. I think I must have Attention Deficit Disorder or something. I can't bring myself to sit still and read my schoolwork, but when I finally do, I find it really interesting. My mind has been on seeds and plants lately. I've been trying to divide up tasks in my Franklin Covey planner pages so that I actually do what I am scheduled to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes I procrastinate. A lot of the time, I use it to jog my memory about what I should be doing on a particular day. For example, today I am supposed to make some ham and cheese biscuits which I haven't yet started.

Tomorrow I will have to do a bit of grocery shopping since we are out of the basic necessities like eggs and such. I wonder what I should make for dinner tomorrow. I would like us to eat healthier. Shepherd's pie sounds good and the last one I made was delicious, but according to my book, "The Okinawa Program", (yes, putting the comma there was not a mistake. The English style of punctuation makes more sense to me than the American style, but that's another matter) meat is one of those things which one should not have too much of. Maybe it is okay for tomorrow since it is going to be a cold and snowy one. Nothing like hearty comfort food! Maybe I should make some chocolate chip cookies too. I made some brownies from a new recipe from my Penzeys catalog yesterday. They weren't bad, but they could have been a bit more chocolaty. I burnt the edges though so I cut those parts off before sending C to work with a plate of brownies to share with his co-workers.

Yesterday I picked up my Kindle (which C had given to me for Christmas) and read a chapter or two from Dumas' "Twenty Years After". My friend V gave me a physically copy for my birthday last year, but I never finished reading it since schoolwork and taking care of a new puppy kept me busy most of the time. C felt bad that I wasn't using the Kindle, so I figured that I would compromise and try to do both at once. It really is a nice device for reading casual books. I especially like the somewhat instant dictionary feature.

I'm still pondering whether I should apply to a Medieval Studies program under the history or art history department. Historians, for some reason, just seem a bit more cautious about making assumptions and seem to carefully construct their arguments around written evidence while art historians seem to make some broad stylistic conclusions sometimes. I suppose that written evidence is more concrete and is spelled out while visual evidence may leave much for the imagination. I'm planning to write my art history seminar paper on miracles and magic. Hopefully I can find enough visual and written evidence to form a strong and coherent thesis since there does not seem to be much written about it at present. At least, according to Mathews's book, "The Clash of Gods".