So - what am I? A sheep, already?
Friends and colleagues are blogging, so here I go, too.  I suspect that this is a device to facilitate procrastination - as if I needed help to procrastinate.  As long as I am doing this, I AM writing - and I can always work on the novel tomorrow - or grade the papers - or crunch the numbers - or wash the dishes - or walk the dog - or ...

Five days a week I get in my car and drive about twenty miles south down HW70 to work.  It isn't a particularly spectacular drive, but it is my drive and my time.  Sometimes it is the only genuinely private time I have in the course of a day.  There are others who make this daily commute, but we are each enclosed in our metal cocoons essentially alone.  I can sing along with the classic rock on the radio, or talk to students in terms that I would never use to their faces.  I can plan the day, the coming evening, the future, or my next "project."  Or I can just watch and note the daily differences and seasonal changes on "my" piece of highway. 

There are seven traffic lights on my drive - one in the town where I live and six in the town where I work.  There are more traffic signals in the town where I live, but I don't have to go through those intersections on my way of a morning.  Sometimes I think that I can gauge the day by the number of reds that I hit.  If I get all the way to the parking lot on green, surely the omens are good.  On the other hand, if I have to stop for every single one of them, not only does it make me concerned about the dangers of the remainder of the day, it adds a good five to ten minutes to my commute. 
This was a 5 out of 7 red light day.  By the time I pulled in, my preferred parking spot was occupied and three on beyond it.  I try to leave the house around 7 am for a reason - and it is not to park half-way down the lot from the nearest door into the building.  Although, I really don't mind the walk in the morning so much - until it gets cold - I am a total wimp about cold weather - but I really hate trudging out and out and farther out at the end of the day.  Sure enough, perversity was the order of the day.  I'm not sure why I am starting this on a 5/7 day, maybe my own perversity is in operation here.