Last weekend I was at Jubilee, conducting two workshops, meeting with people, and generally having an awesome time. We flew in Friday morning quite early because I had an editorial meeting for Comment, which, as it turns out, was a great time to meet – for me, at least. We solved all our problems and then proceeded to solve a bunch of others throughout the weekend.

After the meeting, Tom and I slipped out of the hotel to drop by the Andy Warhol Museum. It feels a bit weird to be reading all about Warhol – who defined a large part of New York’s culture scene in his time, and continues to do so – while not actually in New York, but the museum was quite interesting. It’s not laid out strictly by chronology or by medium, leaving you to draw some conclusions about the work as you work your way from the seventh floor down.

The conference itself started Friday night. The speakers were fabulous, as always – Don Opitz, the inconceivably awesome Bob Goff, John Perkins! and I won’t even try to name the rest. My workshops were fairly successful, and Tom’s was a smash bang-up success – so full that you couldn’t get your head in the door.

But the best part of these weekends is always the connections you make with others, and Jubilee is starting to feel like one giant reunion party with a lot of college students attending on the side. Besides giving workshops, I spent most of the weekend with my colleagues from Cardus (and thereby, most of them, from Comment), who drove down from Ontario, and are some of my favorite people in the world that I never get to see (though I did spent five hours on the “phone” aka Skype in a meeting with them yesterday, which, given the generally dismal state of five-hour conference calls, was pretty pleasant). We spent a lot of time laughing and drinking a variety of substances and talking with various interesting people about the future of the world at large. It was, quite frankly, splendid.

All good things come to an end, of course, and we got back Sunday night. This week has been, well, bumpy. Early mornings and too much work, and some really nasty weather. I feel like the avalanche is accelerating, since the IAM Encounter starts a week from today (good, but oy). I’m having a trickier time staying on top of grading this semester, which I attribute to the fact that while last semester I had one essay to grade each week, this semester they’re all kinds of different essays, spread gratuitously all over the semester. It’s okay. By the time I get the hang of it, the semester will be over.

It could just be February slump, though. I’m a New England girl through and through. I like winter, I really do. I like sweaters and scarves and boots, and bundling up, and I like how pretty snow is, especially since I don’t have to drive in it. I like hot drinks. Hockey is far and away my favorite sport.

But by late February, I always am feeling the SAD a bit. It always takes me by surprise, because I don’t consciously feel like I’m tired of it. I’m not even watching the Olympics (and in fact, the entirety of my Olympic watching this year was restricted to some background ice shuffleboard curling while hanging out with with crazy people Canadians). But I guess I could be ready to go running outside without being so bundled up. And I do get excited for toe ring season.

(Am I too old for toe rings? Every year I wonder if my inner hippie will sneak up on my outer chic New Yorker facade and I’ll be suddenly clad in toe rings and flared jeans or broomstick skirts.)