It’s that Saints-Colts game that’s happening today.  Yep, THAT one.  The one where the Saints shock all the pigskin pundits and give the City of New Orleans one big reason to celebrate – finally!

HollyCornblog sent me a report on the snowfall down Philly way.

Meanwhile our wovel languishes in our shed … and if we light the chinimea this afternoon we’ll be looking over a brownish expanse of winter-barren hillside.  A few patches of snow, still – where the shadows outstrip the sun.  But otherwise, we’ve got the Philly weather here, and they’ve got ours.

Dang!  I’d like to see more snow before letting winter go.

And I just added two new links under “Blogs We Like” – suddenly wondering why I said “We” – like there’s a group decision being made.  Let’s make that an “I.”

First, there’s Howling Hill – from a local blogger who writes about living life, striving to be more green … the vagaries of politics and weather and getting through school.  I look forward to touching base at Howling Hill as the weeks and months unfold.

Then there’s There from Here, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s blog.  I first heard of her via RPE, who heard her speak in a class a week or so ago.

Lo and behold, Professor Finney Boylan is HollyCornblog’s age and grew up near our old stomping grounds down in Pennsylvania.  Not only that … she is heading this year to teach as a visiting prof at Ursinus College – where ChristopherCornblog went, briefly.  Ursinus was a great rival of all of us field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse players throughout college.  (Ursinus pretty much always won – but unlike when we played West Chester, we sometimes thought that we had a chance against the Bears.)

Anyway, Jennifer Finney Boylan sounds like a fascinating person – and I am looking forward to reading her two memoirs (She’s Not There and I’m Looking Through You) — maybe a Bookeaters pick for down the road!

Here are some factoids from the “About” page on her blog:

Born in 1958 in Valley Forge, Boylan grew up in Newtown Square and Devon, Pennsylvania.

She graduated from Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) in 1980. From there she moved to New York, where she was the managing editor of American Bystander magazine, the short-lived “American Punch” founded by the first cast of “Saturday Night Live” and an ad- hoc group of New Yorker cartoonists and SCTV actors and writers. Upon the demise of American Bystander in 1982, Boylan became an editorial assistant at Viking/Penguin, working for the managing editor of the Viking Press. Boylan followed with a stint as the production editor of the fiction line at E.P. Dutton until 1985.

In late 1986, Boylan began a master’s program at the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she worked with John Barth, Edward Albee, Doris Grumbach and John Irwin. She taught at Johns Hopkins for several years after getting her degree, and then joined the faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she has been ever since.

Since 1988, Jenny Boylan has been a professor of creative writng and American literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. Boylan was a visiting professor at University College Cork, Ireland, in 1998-99. She was promoted to the rank of full Professor in May of 2001, and was chosen by students as the Charles Walker Bassett “Professor of the Year” in 2000. At Colby she has served as Co-chair of English (2002-4), Director of Creative Writing (2005-07) and Associate Chair of English (1996-98).

In 2010, Jenny is scheduled to begin an appointment at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, as the Hoyer-Updike Distinguished Visiting Creative Writer, named to honor the writers John Updike and his mother, Elizabeth Hoyer, for the contributions they made to American letters.  She will teach at Ursinus that fall and return to Colby for the spring 2011 semester.

She lives in rural Maine with her family.  Jenny has been married to Deirdre “Grace” Finney since 1988; their sons Zach and Sean turned 15 and 13 in 2009.  (The boys were instrumental in the creation of the Falcon Quinn series.)  The Boylans’ lives revolve around soccer, fiddle, the French horn,  big meals, two black labs named Indigo and Ranger, and, of course, each other.

So … while we wait for the Saints to pummel the Colts … check out Jenny Boylan … see … there’s lots to explore and think about.