Tuesday, March 12th

Today is the start of a beautiful season that springs up about this time every year; college basketball. Time for madness, playoffs, the NCAA tournament and the massive craze of bracketing. Where for at least the first week, the sports world shuts down for the entire country to pour over the slate of games and the winners.

You know what I'm talking about, right? The brackets? Filling out a bracket sheet for the field, picking winners for the entire tournament. March Madness.

It's a pretty big deal here in school. There's a stack of empty brackets in almost every room today – the field was just set last night. It's the buzz, it's what we're all doing before the bell of each class. Huddled up in groups, analyzing and critiquing each other, quietly passing around dollars for buy-ins.

Mr. Nude even gives us half of gym period to give us time to enter into a pool that he'll run for the particular class. By the end of the day, I'll have filled out three different bracket sheets, each a little different than the last. Each with just enough upsets to make mine unique in case all the dominos fall in the right direction.

Good news comes during Photography as well. As we're sitting through a lecture from Flock on retouching, we hear a scream from out in the hallway.

"It's snowing!" someone shouts at the top of their lungs.

It's snowing? Big deal, you'd think. Wouldn't be able to tell down in here, the only windows are up by the ceiling, little slits that let in a bit of light but tell you nothing about what's beyond them. I make a move to sharpen my pencil, which requires standing at the sharpener underneath one of the windows, and sneak a few glances up at the window. All I see is white overhead.

The lecture ends halfway through class and we scatter to the computers and darkroom. I beeline towards the hallway outside the room, and to the door just beyond it that leads outdoors.

It's a complete whiteout. Snow whistling by in a solid sheet, white blocking out the sky and everything else outside that's more than a few feet beyond the door.

"Now that's what I'm talking about! This is legit!" Cat gapes behind me.

"Yeah, a real snow."

"D'ya…d'ya think we can get home?"

"I don't think it'll pile up much. These things usually don't last too long."

I was wrong. Normally when the temperature's hovering around the freezing mark, which it does for a good half of the year here, tie favors rain. Or it'll say, rain for a week straight at 33 degrees, but as soon as it dips down to 30, suddenly it clears up. Or if it starts snowing, the temperature climbs up a few degrees to set it back to rain. I guess it stayed cold through the afternoon, because the snow stuck around, and by the time the last bell rang, it was still a mess outside. Cars and buses crawling through the streets, all slip sliding around. I offer Cat and Luke to come back to my house, but they say they'll make a run for the coast.

I said a while back that there was a difference between Dumb and Stupid, and what defined C.J. and Luke to being one of those.

I was wrong. They're both, both of them.

So snow was good news, changing up the lay of the land and spicing life up a bit. Snowball fight through the streets on the walk home with Eli, laughing at everyone else loosing footing and getting wet while I'm warm and comfy in boots.

The bad news is that Alexis is coming, flying in this Thursday and staying with us until the next weekend.

What kind of Spring Break is that? Her school's in what, Connecticut or Massachusetts or something, and they get off the middle of March. It's not spring here then, and I doubt it's any warmer there. Might be colder actually.

I'll see how frigid she is.