summer in winter, winter in springtime

Winter is here. It's been bucketing with rain at intervals for days, the nights are moderately icy, and the four cats are occupying precisely-defined positions around the heater, mathematically aligned by status and level of feline bloody-mindedness. I love this time of year. So, apparently, does the garden: my vegetable boxes have been unduly encouraged by a week's pattern of rain-rain-astonishingly warm sunny day-rain, and are leaping skywards with unseemly enthusiasm. I've just had to beat back the tomatoes again, they're making a break for next door.

It's been a busy weekend, if only slowly productive because I'm all sinusy and glandular again, sigh. While I spent a good part of Friday and yesterday wrestling with complicated minutes for a meeting of a committee I don't belong to and for whose deliberations I have absolutely no context, I also have a pile of vampire essays to mark. (This is a good thing. I'm weird that way). Students choose their own text to analyse: so far there is a predominance of True Blood, but we also rejoice in Buffy, Lefanu, Tolstoy and Robin McKinley. So far, no Twilight, which means students are actually capable of insight if it's a matter of self-preservation. I suspect the whisper is flying around the class, "She hates Twilight! you'll fail!" Which is not, in fact, the case, but it's a difficult text to discuss in erotic terms, mostly because it's constructed around absence rather than presence. Oh, and it's very badly written. I may have mentioned this once or twice. A minute.

There's also a maddened outbreak of The Vampire Diaries in this pile, it seems to be the text du jour. I've watched the first four episodes. It's ... cheesy. Slightly lame, cheesy teen television whose primary effect at the moment has been to make me realise how absolutely unoriginal Twilight is. Protective stalkery non-human-drinking fated-lover high school vampire boyfriend, anyone? Books published in 1991, Twilight in 2005. Not to mention the echoes of Roswell (1999). About the only thing I think Diaries may have going for it is its small-town setting, and the way they seem to be working the vampires into the history of the town. It could be interesting. But I bet they screw it up. Mildly amused but not impressed, me. Also, it's making me realise how good the Buffy scriptwriters were.

Tonight we celebrate the weather by feeding raclette to dicedcaret and Tanya and first_fallen and librsa and all. Plus gingered hot chocolate pudding. Did I mention I love winter?