The snow stopped on May 1, as it turns out, and so we're at nearly four weeks of weather that looks much like what you see here: sunny, clear, green and mountainous. The red-winged blackbirds burble and squawk to each other when I take my evening walk around the lake. Every time I look more closely, I find another grassland plant I don't recognize. The snow up the mountains must be melting, because despite the drought, Boulder Creek was high this week.

I read and read and read, all day and every day. Pedagogical material. John Green. Orhan Pamuk. Keith Sawyer on creativity. You know. You can see the list. My head feels as though it's fizzing, in a good way, much of the time.

Last weekend, I flew back to Ohio for my students' graduation. I was about to board my flight home to Colorado when news of the tornado in Oklahoma broke. The whole way from Chicago Midway to Denver, I kept looking south and wondering if we were seeing clouds connected to that monster.

I have come to love the red edge of the Flatirons when the sun gets to their west. It's a different world out here now that we have green in our palette.

And now I find myself on the brink of buying yet another transatlantic airplane ticket. "Whoa," a friend of mine chatted to me this morning. "Hard to ever stop the planning, eh?" At this point in my life, that feels so true when I'm not careful.