Night fever.

In the past few days, I've spent more time outside at night than perhaps any other time this semester--a strange thing for someone who used to end up walking home from the office every night well after dark. Friday was the coldest, most crystalline night we've had all year; by last night, the temperature was rising again; tonight, the snow is gone once again from the courtyard outside my apartment, and the leaves rustle in the night wind. I'm barely even another half-mile away from where I used to live, and yet somehow that extra distance has meant that weekends--and even some evenings--escape from work, and that I'm more likely to find myself staying in the apartment complex, writing an exam script in my flaming-sworded friend's rocking chair, than to make it all the way to the office, even if that's where I meant to go when I walked out my front door. I will confess that it's a little exhilarating to separate myself a bit more from my workplace--though you can hear from my rhetoric that it's also (apparently) a little scary.

"Do you think I'm about to give them an easy exam?" I asked partway through compiling the passage ID section.

"You're working too hard for this exam to be easy," my flaming-sworded friend replied. Not much later, her excellent husband brought me a piece of warm pie, and then the moon walked me the short way home. Coming back out to take its picture seemed the least I could do to say thank you for its company.