New Year, &C.

Well, if any of you wrote anything interesting between the 20th and the 26th or so of December I'm not going to be reading it. I keep going back fifty entries at a time and I've been stuck on the 26th for the last several pages -- it's like some kind of time barrier -- and I really lack the heart to keep going, especially as I need to trim a thousand words a day from my prospectus between now and Monday morning.

My New Year's Eve was spent at the home of pyrric and spriggan, and it was a lovely time. I was especially pleased that the MBTA ran trains late enough that we could stay until just after 1 AM and still get back to Salem for bedtime.

Yesterday J. and I woke at a leisurely pace. As we spend Christmas with our respective families, we have made it a habit to make a grand brunch on New Year's Day and to open our presents to one another thereafter. Yesterday's brunch: a souffle with gruyere and other assorted hard cheeses we needed to use up (to make room for the bounty of cheese J.'s parents gave her, having bought four wheels of varying cheeses at discount prices in the vicinity of Burlington, VT), croissants that J. spent most of Tuesday making, and a fruit salad of pears, blueberries, mango, and pomegranate, accompanied by cafe au lait and kir royale.

Then -- presents! Our main shared present was buying an iBook just before Thanksgiving, but there were still plenty of things to open. Chief among her gifts to me is a large canvas floorcloth which she is painting as a mosaic patterned after Roman mosaics of sea critters. It is quite splendid. When she has finished it, it will go under my desk chair to prevent more damage to the painted hardwood floor. It will also continue the vaguely Roman theme to this room inspired by the walls, painted by our landlords in the way that the landlady's eccentric artist uncle had painted it, in a blue-green fresco-ish way very similar to the sky in this picture, a poster of which I already had when we moved here.

And I got an Edward Gorey "Dracula" toy theatre.

We lazed about the rest of the day, watching shows taped during our holiday absence. Instead of "Angel" there was a one-hour special on the WB with a look behind the scenes of "The Two Towers," which was generally fine and interesting except for the narration. Somehow it all sounds quite stupid when the plot is summarized at the lowest-common-denominator level. And I do wish the narrator had refrained from referring to the Rohirrim as "the Rohans." I mean, really.

/

Shovels and cinnamon toast

I had been avoiding going outside to shovel the sidewalks (plural: we live on the corner, and have a cement walk on one side and a horrible, in a shoveling context anyway, brick sidewalk on the other). For good reason; it was no fun at all, and more akin to chipping ice off a windshield with a scraper than to more satisfying snow-moving shoveling action.

I was outside in time for the parade of home-traveling middle school students (or was it high school? I'm getting too old to tell the difference) who kept getting in my way. Bastards. They made me feel all curmugeonly. Among them was a kid who walked by singing some love ballad -- the sort of soft-hits pop song that could date to any time in the last twenty years -- in a loud voice with rather more enthusiasm than talent.

Another pair walked by. One was saying, "Dude! You shoulda went...." "*Gone*," I muttered, but they gave no sign of hearing.

I told you I was feeling curmodgeonly.


There's something -- well, something rather obvious, but still odd -- about sprinkling sand and salt on the sidewalks that makes me hungry for cinnamon toast. I came in and failed to satisfy it despite trying. While ordinarily I much prefer our homemade sourdough (so homemade that the yeast came from grapes grown in our back yard) to supermarket-purchased prepackaged and sliced encriched bread, as a vehicle for the cinnamon toast of childhood memory it fell short.