In past years, Parsippany has always had a week-long “winter break” which gave the schools a chance to lower their heating bills while clearing out all the germs festering in them all winter long. But this year the superintendent of schools is obsessed with all the schools closing early in June, a need I don’t understand since we already have ten weeks’ vacation in the summer.

Anyway, I have a four-day weekend with few school chores needing to be done. This gives me time to accomplish some of the things I have been putting off during the crush of schoolwork in recent weeks:

> organizing my 2003 receipts and tax items for the accountant;
> collating and mailing VISIONS OF PARADISE to my non-FAPA readers
> editing several more chapters of Fei Fei’s Tibet book
> updating the boys’ financial information for college at the FAFSA website
> creating some salary guides for the teachers’ negotiations
> working on the first draft of a new story; I think I need to find a book about life in a circus troupe for this story. Last winter I wrote a story about Richard III, so I read two nonfiction books, one about his life and another about Yorkist England, and I enjoyed both of them, so even if this story is a failure, I hope to enjoy learning about life in a circus!