After several days of unseasonably warm (nearly 20 degrees above average) weather, the St. Louis area is facing winter storm warnings as an arctic air mass collides with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and moves through the area. It is only raining at the moment, but the rather diabolical forecast has temperatures to continuing to drop throughout the day until the precipitation turns to freezing rain and ultimately snow.

With a high of nearly 70 degree yesterday and today’s freezing temperatures, I simply can not get the cartoon image of a thermometer whose bulging bulb shatters as the mercury knifes it’s way through the bottom of the glass. I guess I must have watched too much Tom & Jerry as a kid.

If you are affected by this storm, be safe!

I had this dream last night that music appreciation students everywhere, forced to go to concerts and recitals, suddenly remembered the early semester class session about concert etiquette. You know, the lecture that included warnings not to bring food or drink into the auditorium, not to talk or shuffle papers during the performance, to turn off cellphones, sit still, wait until the majority of the audience claps before joining in, etc.

Then I woke up…

… and remembered the young man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and the camouflage baseball cap who was so taken with my wife’s performance of Beethoven’s third cello sonata that he decided to play a video game on his cellphone…

With the volume turned up!!

The most annoying part of the story? He’s in her music appreciation class and probably used her recital to fulfill a requirement for a grade!

Once again, I’m back after a long hiatus. I seem to be falling into a pattern of regular posting and regular breaks in about two week cycles. I’m not sure why I do this, but I will offer the (lame) excuse that I started teaching a three hour World Music course on Tuesday nights and the first class coincided with my last post. The new workload disrupted the nice pattern that I had established and it has taken me a bit of time to adjust. I will try to be more consistent in the future.

What better time to return to the blog than in the afterglow (-math?) of Tuesday’s election? As a die-hard Democrat, these are happy days for me and I hope that maybe, just maybe, this might be the first step towards restoring the American values that I find important. I might be fooling myself, but after 3 frustrating elections, to finally have this victory for the party I support feels amazingly refreshing. It seemed so bleak for the Democrats just two years ago, so please forgive my brief gloating paragraph.

Two items have emerged in the wake of the election, one big and one small. The big one, of course, is the resignation of Rumsfeld. I tend towards cynicism, so I’ll let you guess my feelings about the timing of this move. The minor news I is major to me: Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, has filed his documents with the Federal Election Committee and announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for President. This is important to me because I’ve been talking him up for two years to anyone who would listen. As a dark horse candidate and a populist governor from a “swing” state, I like him strategically and also feel that he might be the tonic for the “elitist” label that has dogged other Democrats. I’ll be very interested to see if he turns out to be the real deal or if he fades in the early days.