Hiking, pre-spring, another move.
Somehow moving off-campus has suddenly opened up a new Princeton to explore.
The satellite images on Google maps show a great treeless gash running through Princeton just north of my neighborhood.
It's the Transcontinental natural gas pipeline, and the treelessness runs uninterrupted all the way to Texas. A map of natural gas pipelines in the US shows them stretching from Texas and Louisiana to the northeast and midwest. Northern California is conspicuously empty.
Northeast of here are Herrontown Woods and Autumn Hill, to the southwest is Mountain Lakes. On recent lovely weekend afternoons, trails were largely deserted. A handful of footprints in the snow.
The weather is playing bait-and-switch with us.
One day it's 70 degrees,
the next a winter storm dumps the best snow of the season and keeps all the poor undergrads from going away for spring break.
The day after the snowfall, we went through four stores before finding one that was still selling winter gear, and bought sleds at the spring price of 50% off. An afternoon of rough-and-tumble sledding was enough to wear me out for the rest of the evening. I must be getting old.
I'm glad that spring is on its way. The first breath of warm air after a long cold spell is incredibly relaxing, as if some part of me has been unconsciously tense through winter. This is, oddly, not a sensation I feel when I merely fly on a plane from cold to warm. As I put it to a friend recently, I never really *understood* daffodils until I moved here.
That said, winter does have its moments of hilarity.
I moved offices, too, out of my lonely little abandoned office on my lonely little abandoned floor to a corner office with *two* windows where I don't have to go so far to see people. I may still spend days trying to prove things that are not true, but at least I'll be happier about doing so.
