This is Dayton

So as you probably can tell by my lack of entries for the whole fall semester, I got a little busy.  Once I realized that I’m going to be even more busy this semester and probably forever after (gotta love academe) I decided that I just need to suck it up and make time for the blog.  I’m going to try.  

Anyway, this is Dayton.  Beautiful place isn’t it?  

Although the persistent gray skies, plummeting temperatures, and the constant burden of scraping ice off my car are hard to deal with, I find that the dusting of snow over everything makes the world look nice.  Well not everything.  The campus looks dreary and horrible under a layer of snow, but when I drive through my ‘hood, I find that the snow covers up much of the trash and debris strewn about and it keeps all but the most tenacious thugs-in-pajamas (that is actually a thing here.  How can you be a thug in your PAJAMAS??) off the streets.  Snow covers up the raggedy rooftops and unkempt lawns and it makes even the roughest parts of East Dayton look like a Norman Rockwell painting…. If Norman Rockwell ever painted images of meth-addled neighborhoods in the Midwest.  Anyway, it’s 2015 and this is where I live.  And at least until the snow melts, I’m choosing to believe that I live in one of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Midwestern towns, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

This is Dayton.

                                          (Gratuitous Lulu photo)