Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Downhill Memories, Downhill Dreams

Saucer Sled, Hot Cocoa To Follow.

After letting me sleep until almost one, Darcie asked very nicely for a few hours off from baby this afternoon. After a quick trip to Mim's Market for coffee, I was happy to oblige; I love the little tyke, after all, even if she's starting her clingy stage and can't always go that long without Mama anymore. We played happily on the floor for a while, making cooing noises and giggling at each other; when that got stale, I put on a jazz CD by Bob Dorough (the guy who did all those Schoolhouse Rock songs, now sadly licensed to Disney), and we danced around the room to Wake Up Sally, It's Saturday and Marilyn, Queen of Lies.

Willow is still developing regular sleep patterns, and the two-week hiatus from our usual routine has thrown what little pattern she had already established out the window, but she had a nap earlier in the morning, and I knew she wouldn't sleep for me. Darcie had left breastmilk in the fridge to mix with the powdered rice cereal flakes, but I was saving that as a last resort. When crankiness began to set in around 2:15 , it was time for something different.

Luckily, I had a plan. Willow was a summer baby, so we've been cautious about bringing her outside for long in the cold; today, however, was a beautiful bright day with little wind, and I thought a stroll around the campus might be a nice treat. I zipped and velcroed her into her warm brown teddybear suit and added a hat underneath the hood for good measure; since the good stroller was and is still trapped in the trunk of the plowed-in-and-buried Grand Marquis, I strapped her into the cheap second-hand umbrella stroller we use as a second-string backup.

Her movement thus restricted, the baby fussed a little at first. But when we stepped out the door, her jaw dropped open and her eyes grew wide. I must admit, my own eyes went a bit wide too. The snow was everywhere, white and shiny and glorious, like someone had adjusted the monitor settings on the universe. The stroller skidded and hiccuped as I pushed it down the half-shoveled aisle in the driveway past her favorite tree, now dripping icicles where once fall leaves fell in browns, reds and golds.

Past the mailroom, up the hill and around the white striated pillars of the dining hall; down again and along cottage row, now barren of house directors and students; past red barbecue grills with sparkly white caps standing deep in the snow we went. At the top of the long sloping hill overlooking the football field we found a growing crowd of parents waving and smiling as their bright-colored eskimo children flew laughing down the hill on their saucers and toboggans and inflatable sno-doughnuts and then trudged back up dodging other sledders and sleds. Mothers turned away from their speeding children to gurgle and caw and push their cold faces at Willow while a few of the fathers and I, mostly holding dogs and thus not hurtling down the gentle slope with their youngest children, exchanged how's your holiday small talk and compared notes about the best kind of sled. In the background, childless strangers, relatives and friends of the nearby residents rushing through the last moments of their visits, packed bags into their cars in silence.

When I was in grade school the best sledding was on the hill at Claflin School, an old derelict elementary building which was much later remodelled into a series of bright shining artist studios where, one imagines, the faded spirits of long-grown kindergarteners inspired crayon drawings of big-headed dinosaurs and construction paper collages ultimately destined for well-lighted refrigerator door displays in kitschy NoHo galleries. Wake to dad in the kitchen waiting for the plow; pull on our snowpants and boots and meet up with the kinds of half-friends that snow days make; walk though the backyards of old people with grown children whose faces we had never seen, across a few slippery streets and, finally, emerge from a long trail flush with low pine branches bent down to the ground with snow into a wonderland of children laughing and flying and building ramps they'd invariably miss on the way down the slope.

Such older boys and girls were absent today; the big-kid sledding hills are always parentless. Today was for the smallest children, whom we left behind, I lost in my thoughts, Willow lost in the bright new world of snow and yelling rushing-by children. Finally past the student center and into the driveway again; nose aglow, cheeks pink, eyes bright, we returned home. Darcie was beginning to stir; a new diaper and an appetite-whetting bit of milk-and-flakes cereal and the mother-baby bond was physically enacted once again.

Sledding with the baby will wait until next year; even the one-year-old downstairs is still reluctant to sit alone in his sled while his daddy pulls him on a yellow plastic rope. But there's so much Willow and I can do together now, and however eager I am to teach her how to keep from spinning on her saucer, we've got plenty of other hills to ride down together before the snows fall next winter, more, surely, than we'll ever have time for. Until then, I have my own memories, and a future bright with faceplants and giggling and dashing through the snow and aftermaths of hot chocolate and marshmallows to keep me warm.

Don't Forget...

1. Download your Not All Who Wander Are Lost Christmas present!

2. Help me cover the world with flowers. Plant a flower in your backyard!

Useful things I can do

1. Proofread impeccably.
2. Launder.
3. Teach anything except math, science, and computer science.
4. Hand-code HTML.
5. Find my way back from anywhere.

Useless things I can do

1. Flip a lit cigarette into the air and catch it in my mouth.
2. Sing harmony.
3. Stick a wooden skewer all the way through a balloon without breaking it.
4. Stay up for three days while remaining mostly coherent.
5. Eat all twenty McNuggets and a cheeseburger in one sitting.

Useful things I wish I could do

1. Run/exercise for enjoyment and health.
2. Breastfeed.
3. Fix a car.
4. Hit consciousness in less than an hour.
5. Drive stick.

Useless things I wish I could do

1. Play guitar.
2. Trim my own damn beard.
3. Make anything out of anything, like MacGyver.
4. Draw or paint realistically.
5. Tan.

[note: by useless/useful, we're talking skills which have practical application for the average human being; I am fully aware that professional musicians find it useful to know how to play an instument, and that it is often considered socially and financially useful to be able to trim one's own damn beard. Thanks to Chris Nyffeler for the list idea.]

...or are you just really happy to see me?

pygmy monkey

Man Sentenced For Monkeys In Pants.

From CNN.com's Offbeat News. Quite possibly the funniest headline ever.

Hoorah For Phil Ringnalda!!

I hope my loyal readers will allow me one last tech note: Phil, blogmaster at Blogger Unofficial FAQ blog, noticed that someone had changed the comments text to "poseurs" on my enetation account as a Christmas crack, and left some of the code unfinished! Changing the settings back was painless once I knew where to look.

Thanks to Phil for a Christmas miracle. My faith in the world has been restored. I'm even happy to handcode archives forever if I must.

Conversation on the Beach

A supposedly-true conversation between an Israeli Holocaust survivor and a young Arab youth. Chilling. An excerpt:

"Isn't there a way our two nations could ever come to terms and make peace?"

Again he gave me that serious look. "Yes, there is a way. We are not like the Nazis who gave you no other choice but death. We give you the chance to convert to Islam, then you will become a part of us and our people will live in peace."

A current Israeli joke: What is a Pessimist? An Optimist with lots of experience.

Sadly, that says it all.

Broken

Breakfast of Champions

Woke up to a pain. Hard to walk upright. Hernia? Groin pull? Something nasty and rare? Maybe I just slept wrong on some sensitive part of my body? Whatever it is, it still hurts several hours later. Guess it's time to take an Aleve. Aleve does wonders for my back, at least; if the problem today is muscular, then the muscle relaxant should help oodles.

I think I'm a hypochondriac, and I think I know why. I'm too intellectual; I don't understand my body as well as I understand my brain, but I know that without the body the brain is nothing. It scares me some when something hurts. I don't like medicine, either, because I don't trust something I don't understand to help something else I don't understand. I have this vague sense that the body should be able to fix itself. I usually take half doses of over-the-counter meds instead of the whole pill.

But it hurts nonetheless.

Also broken: parts of the blog itself. Archives still "missing" so I handcoded them back in last night; now, the comments are giving me an "unterminated string constant" error, then not loading properly. Tried moving the code around a bit but nothing doing.

You Might Be A Blogger If...

Myself, I'm thinking you might be a blogger if you're permalinking to someone's blog because it has a "you might be a blogger if..." list on it which isn't even that funny.

1. Download your Not All Who Wander Are Lost Christmas present!
2. Plant a flower at the Not All Who Wander Are Lost Guestmap!

The Dog In The Hall

After finally giving up and handcoding the archives back into the site, we bundled the baby into the car for a yummy visit to Greenfield's newly remodeled China Gourmet, where a windowless sushi lounge has been added to what was already an excellent spot for fine greasy MSG-less dining. The combination of Sushi Bar and Chinese Food restaurant, first seen in Northampton a number of years ago, seems to be more the norm than the exception these days; I suspect an economic decision drives the combination of the two. I won't complain as long as I can still get a full menu from either style of food, but if they go the way of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut -- who, once combined into one megafastfood empire, basically dropped their menus to one or two items no one really likes anymore -- I'm looking for new ethnic food.

No matter the curious nature or origin of the pan-asian restaurant, the result makes my tummy and taste buds very, very happy. We ate far more than we should have while the waiters cooed over Willow: egg drop soup, raw salmon over rice balls, dragon rolls (cucumber and crabmeat rolls wrapped in cold cooked eel and avocado), chicken tempura, and other sundries found their way all too easily down the gullet, leaving me ultimately full but guilty. Sigh. I'm thinking about trying the Atkins Diet once school starts up again; it just isn't funny anymore to say that I'm still carrying my sympathy weight from the pregnancy, especially when my weight keeps creeping up the scale.

Guess You Had To Be There Moment: One of the giggly teenage girls across the partition between our booth and theirs managed to lose track of half her fortune cookie when she tried to break it open; it fell out of the sky to land between our spareribs and dumplings with an audible crack. The girls turned bright red, both from embarrassment and from laughing so hard they couln't speak; as the cookie half still contained the fortune, we tried to be nonchalant about handing it back, but it was just too funny, and I'm sure our laughter only made them more self-conscious. Wonder what the fortune said?

We returned to find...no dog. Zellie has a habit of escaping; she's a big dog in a little body, a Jack Russel Terrier, so she can fit through the cat door we've set in the window above our bed. But an escape would be an especially terrifying thing this time of year, as it's cold cold cold outside, there really are wolves, and the white snow comes up to the shoulders of the mostly-white dog, hiding her from passing motorists. She didn't answer to our calls; we began to get nervous...and then Darcie called me from the kitchen.

Luckily, it turns out we had just left the kitchen door, which goes into the dorm hallway, ajar. Sure enough, when we peeked hopefully around the corner, there was Zellie, lying patiently next to her tennis ball, waiting for someone to come throw it down the hallway for her to chase. Darn dog can stay there for hours, she has so much faith that eventually someone will come play with her. The faith is admirable, I guess, but waiting for something that isn't going to happen loses its charm eventually. There's a point at which faith in the face of building evidence to the contrary becomes...well, stupid. I love my dog...but if she joins the Flat Earth Society, I'm sending her to a cult deprogrammer.

A Belated Christmas Gift For All

I know many of my readers love Guster, so I thought I'd offer this gift: Guster's cover of I've Got To Be Clean , a song originally sung by Bert on Sesame Street, burned fresh for your listening pleasure from For The Kids, my favorite new CD for kids of all ages.

Click and Save to download your gift to your hard drive. Merry Christmas!

Give Back! Sign In!

Looking for new tools and add-ons for your blog? Bravenet makes a very cool guestbook alternative called a guestmap. I saw one on snowcat's blog and loved the idea so much I've added one to my own.

All I want for Christmas is for you to plant a flower in your backyard on my guestmap. Won't you?

What can I say; I'm a cheap date.

Absolutely The Last Tech Note

[If you don't care about the technical aspects of blogger, feel free to skip to Boyhowdy's most recent non-technical blog entry.]

Someone on the Blogger Unofficial FAQ blog had a good suggestion: hand code your archive publishing and turn the auto-archiving function to "no archives" in blogger. As an added bonus, this solution would allow you to be fully flexible with how you refer to past week's archives.

Luckily, this solution is implemented easier early in the life of a blog. Stay tuned for a test of the hand-coding solution later tonight or tomorrow.

Listening: Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem, Cocktail Swing

Status Report: blogger.argh

At snowcat's excellent suggestion, looked up my problem on Phil Ringnalda's Blogger Unofficial FAQ blog. The site seems immensely useful, and I've added a permalink to it in the blogresources section to the right.

Unfortunately, from what I can extrapolate from the conversations in the site's comments about archive loss, it looks like my problem is endemic to blogger, an occasional but annoying server kludge, with timing on a fix subject to blogger's maintenance. Oh well. As long as there's a workaround, I'm still happy.

Status Report: Archives Are There; Links Remain Missing

Still working on archives. Blogger.com's suggested fix for the archive problem seemed useful but didn't help. My archives index still shows only the first and last weeks of the blog; republishing does not make the other weeks appear. Is anybody out there with an idea?

Until someone comes up with one, or one of the nice folks at blogger gets back to me with a solution, see previous entry for a workaround that will get you access to blogsite archives.

I'm loving the slight cheesiness of Echoes of Pink. Seriously, some of the songs are excellent, inspired covers of Pink Floyd's finest. I'll be doing the dishes with the headphones on, so don't call.

Archives Error

Just a tech FYI: I am working with the friendly folks at blogger.com to figure out where my archives have gone. Until then, click on the links to Poems of the Week and then scroll up and down those pages to access weekly archives.

Although there was no poem of the week for the week of December 8th, if you want, you can see those archives, too.

Snow Day!

After breakfasting heartily on eggs and bacon and english muffins and extra-strong coffee with whipped cream we bundled Willow up in her bear suit and Zellie in her dogsweater (once a human sleeve) and went out to the softball field behind the house to sully the newfallen snow. Cat and dog chased each other through our tracks, the dog doggy-paddling around him when he stopped to suck at his snow-encrusted paws. Darcie tried to write Willow's name in footprints across the third base line; Zellie kept swimming across the letters and messing them up.

Once Willow's nose and cheeks began to glow the family went inside to nap while I stayed outside to dig out the Camry. Snow was heavy but we have one of those ergonomic shovels with the bend in the handle, which helps. A few years ago I hurt myself pretty badly shoveling snow on Percoset; I had no idea what kind of damage I was doing to myself until the next day when it finally wore off. I don't recommend shoveling on painkillers.

Just now realized that the Alleve I took first thing this morning to help the back already weakened from carrying presents to the car on the ice yesterday morning might cause the same problem. Hmm. *probes lower back* I don't think I threw out my back again this year, but time will tell.

It's hard to tell how much snow fell last night; I'd guess at least a foot of perfect snowball powder. The drifts over the top of the Grand Marquis make it look like a buried hatchback.

And So This Is Christmas

It's A Wonderful Blog

Let's see now. We last saw our intrepid hero Monday night after midnight.

Once the tree was up, we had to rethink the overall feng shui of the small apartment. Too much stuff coming up too short. In the interests of making the house a cozy place for visitors, Darcie and I agreed to put the laptops away and unplug ourselves for two days while we celebrated Christmas. I didn't even cheat last night at her parent's house when I had a chance. Today, right now, marks my triumphant addicted little return to the computer, and the backlog -- backblog -- of events is overwhelming. Hang on to your brand-new fleece Christmas hats.

Day One: Monday. Slept a bit late Monday morning, until 10 or so. Up to spot-clean with Darcie and Willow; Matt and Alicia arrived just after noon and we took 'em right over to the guesthouse on the Northfield campus, a fine and giant old home once built for the musical director of the Northfield School for Girls, now a bed-and-breakfasty inn with no breakfast and a phone nook in a closet under the old oak-bannistered staircase. Agreed to meet at 3:00 at the Manders house in Brattleboro for homemade french onion soup and a light family check-in.

After stopping with Ginny for bread, light and merry supper at the in-laws. Even Josh and Clay, late on their way from Boston to Clay's home in Newfane, VT, stopped in to finalize plans for the next day. Matt had brought some of the good red wine he makes with his father and uncle each year; we drank it while we listened to carols on the radio and perused Alicia's excellent scrapbook of the winemaking process.

Darcie and Willow, Ginny, Alicia, Matt and I made it back to the apartment here by seven. Foosball and beer until nine, when Matt wanted to watch the Steelers/Buccaneers game; Darcie got out cheese and fruit, popcorn bags and nuts and chocolate dips and we chatted while we watched the game. Alicia and Matt left for the guesthouse and Ginny stayed over in the baby's room.

Interlude, Wednesday, 3:00 p.m. Just glanced up from the screen, where the snow is coming down thick and sideways out the big picture windows. Heavy. A blanket in the air; a fog; a watercolor whitewash. A Goddamn White Christmas. Buh buh buh boom...and now back to A Very Boyhowdy Christmas, day two.

Day Two: Tuesday. Tuesday found us rising early as promised; Ginny, Darcie, Willow and I out on the road by 9:00. While Ginny snuck behind the counter on her day off from Mocha Joes to make my vanilla latte and her double espresso, Darcie made me stop to get bagels, which later turned out to be presents from Patty (Darcie's mother) to her own mother; I erroneously assumed they were for eating (silly me) and bought unnecessary cream cheeses. By 10:30, the cast of characters -- Darcie, Willow, and myself; Darcie's parents Neil and Patty, Darcie sister Alicia and her fiancee Matt, Darcie's brother Josh and his girlfriend Clay, Clay's brother Justin, Darcie's sister Virginia -- were arranged on rope beds and piano benches around the tree in the living room, while three cats, our jack russell Zellie, Alicia and Matt's pug Bruno, Patty and Neil's drooling beast St. Bernard Matty lolled around on the floor.

And then, as Dylan Thomas would say, the presents. We picked numbers to see which hand-knit scarf we got, then Patty led us through a game in which presents are passed leftandright willy-nilly, like musical chairs or hot potato; I got a sink scrub brush when the accompanying story ended. The next two hours involved mass wrappingpaper chaos, with presents distributed and opened and thanks given across a crowded room. A very partial list of things received:

Echoes of Pink: A Pink Floyd Tribute. Acoustic covers, female singer-songwriters I've never heard of; I had seen this on amazon.com and put it on my wish list after hearing only a few 30 second samples. Great covers.

A bendable and poseable set of Simpsons figurines.
Two ties: One red and gold vintage, one Pierre Cardin greenandpurple paisley thing.
A video of Mystery Science Theater 3000 shorts. Mostly old classroom instructional videos and newsreels.
Books: A two-fer box of Stephen Jay Gould's musings on the natural order of things: The Panda's Thumb and The Mismeasure of Man; Rushkoff's Media Virus; a comprehensive and interesting-looking tome called The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug.
A subscription to the New Yorker...finally
The usual stocking stuffers: Godiva chocolates, motorized bulldozers, pens and tangerines, a pewter candle-snuffer.
Many, many books to read to Willow. I'm especially enamored of Good Dog, Carl.

Gift exchange followed by lazing around the house eating pancakes and cutting munchies from a huge ham for several hours, during which Virginia and I, feeling claustrophobic, had to volunteer to walk the dog to get out of the house for a few minutes.

Dinner at The Putney Inn, a somewhat-yearly treat hosted by Darcie's Aunt Barbara, her husband Richard, and their late adolescent son Matthew. Small salad bar but warm rustic atmosphere and slightly overpriced mixed lamb grill special -- two tiny shanks, a single sausage and two bites of lamb stew over lentils and couscous. Overall a nice dinner but hectic, with all who had been there that morning, minus Justin but plus the hosts, Darcie's other aunt Vivian, and Darcie's Grandmother Edith. They only served beer in 22 oz. bottles, from McNeill's in Brattleboro, and of course it was Barbara and Richard's first time seeing the baby, so most of what I remember is being slightly tipsy and watching others play with the baby.

Back to the house for MORE presents, this time with Barbara and Richard and Matthew and Edith and Vivian, all of whom (except Matthew) had asked for no presents this year but seemed to have plenty to give. Got: six double-episode tapes of The Simpsons, our yearly calendar and a check from Edith; Willow got lots of stuff including one of those Mozart Magic Cubes that plays music when you hit the buttons on its sides, each button adding to or subtracting from the mix a different instrument.

By the time the only ones in the house were those who live there (Patty, Neil, and Virginia) plus me and the wifeandkid, it was 11:00, long past the usual bedtime of all but Virginia and myself. So Ginny and I, still awake at the end of our Christmas, went out into the eve of Christmas for the rest of the world, looking for light displays on the back dirt roads. By the way, can I just say how impressed I am with The River, our favorite local radio station out of Northampton? Who knew there was so many non-cheesy, folk/jazz/blues/acoustic/bluegrass Christmas songs? Ginny and I listened, and did not speak, as we drove around the deserted street of downtown Brattleboro looking at the decorations. Home late; bed.

Day Three: Wednesday

Woke up to impending snowstorm; see interlude above, as it is still coming down in sheets now at 4:07 p.m. and the plow has just come through. Coffee and rush rush rush and out of Brattleboro by 10:00 and home, where we found places for all our new things and then, finally, gave Willow her Christmas present from us: Her first real food. Breast milk pumped into a few spoonfuls of powdered rice cereal made for a white paste that she mouthed and then went ape over. Merry Christmas, kid. By next year, she'll know enough to ask for what she wants, so it's all downhill from here.

Pictures, they say, are worth a thousand words; what follows is truly what we did on Christmas itself.

Merry Christmas to all.

And to all, a Good Night.

Gerunds

The gerund is my favorite example of why wisdom is more important than rote knowledge. Who cares what the figure of speech is called? I use verbs ending in -ing in the place of nouns all the time; why, just the other day I said I hate shopping several times with perfect inflection and tonality.

Some signs, all nouns ending in -ing, and their current signifiers.

Eating: Right now, Pepperidge Farm Dark Chocolate Covered Milano Cookies; milk. Probably a bug; I heard somewhere once that the average person eats one bug, whole or in parts, every week. French onion soup at the in-law's tomorrow, followed by hosting the sibs at the apartment that evening with beer, salami, olives, cheese and fondue, the purchase of which necessitated the shopping expedition tonight. Impending Christmas Eve dinner at highbrow Putney Inn with Darcie's whole family.

Feeling: Fat. Dirty -- I need a shower. Chocolaty. Mmmm. Warm and happy.

Reading: Three older Robert Heinlein books Darcie bought me for Christmas, bringing the total collection to about 30. The D'oh! of Homer: The Simpsons and Philosophy, also from Darcie. Still working my way through Seabrook's Nobrow and Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up.

Listening: For The Kids. Cassandra Wilson; Bela Fleck; Norah Jones. WRSI 93.9, The River. Les Claypool's Frog Brigade's cover of Jethro Tull classic Locomotive Breath from Live From Bonnaroo has been thumping in my head for weeks. Christmas samplers, including the Roches We Three Kings and the oft-mentioned Putmayo and Signature Sounds samplers, lent to Ginny to play at work.

Wearing: Um...grey Old Navy knit pullover sweatshirt; Lee jeans; white socks with black shoes; belt; boxers. Stretched-out ponytail elastic. Wedding ring. No watch.

Dreading: Washing diaper wraps. But they're not going to wash themselves.

Peekaboo!

I See You

The digital camera was full, and none of the Christmas pictures Darcie took last week came out very well, so we took pictures of Willow with a disposable camera and rushed them to the CVS today to get just the right picture for the picture frames that will be Willows present to all her aunts and cousins. The pace, for just an hour or so, while we tried to do shopping and errands and beat the clock for the one hour developing, seemed like that sentence -- too long and too rushed. Luckily, we got a few good pix. Dinner at Friendly's, where the booth seats are just far enough away from the table to wedge the baby's carseat up against us. Home.

Cleaning the camera's drive this evening meant going through a slideshow of the last few months with Willow. I found the picture at the top of today's entry and am considering it for a permanent spot in the blog template. Most of the pix were of equivalent quality; many were blurry. But there were a few accidental gems from way back in August.

Daddy's Little Girl

Mother and Child

Sleeping Beauty

She's so much older today than she was yesterday. And so much more alive. Sigh.

Drunk Poem of the Week

In honor of last night's drunken debauchery, this week's poem is one of my more recent. As such, the title and form are tentative; I have offered two versions that I might look at 'em next to each other for a while, and let 'em duke it out on their own. Comments are welcome.

version one:
Smoking Poetry

When we are high on our own words
And, also, on contraband beer,
And the hall telephone rings in the dark
Four and a half times, we do not answer
Because we may have been seen

Smoking poetry in the yard again.
Everything we do here is about language;
It’s smoking it that makes the difference.
Here the things which in the right light
We might call silences are merely

Notes held, our secret lives
Burning our faces and freezing our palms
Not so much in fear of being caught,
But at the thought of speaking of them
To others reluctant to listen.

version two:
Drinking Poetry

When we are drunk on our own words
And, also, on contraband beer,
And the hall telephone rings in the dark
Four and a half times, we do not answer
Because we may have been seen
Drinking poetry in the yard again.
Everything we do then is about language;

Here the things which in the right light
We might call silences are merely
Notes held, our secret lives
Burning our faces and freezing our palms
Not so much in fear of being caught,
But at the thought of speaking of them
To others too drunk to listen.

Like one more than the other? Comment below or let me know by email.

Sleeping In; Chores

We used to be able to literally do whatever we wanted for days at a time on vacations: sleep late, have an adventure, walk in the woods and carefully out onto the iced-over pond. What with the baby and family, it's nice to have a day off at the beginning of vacation.

Finally, after three months of baby-times awkening and morning commitments, this morning Darcie gave me the gift of sleep and let me be until after 11. Of course, I had to sleep on the futon in the baby's room to make this work, while Darcie and Willow got the bed, but the old futon is still surprisingly firm and resilient, and I slept better than average. I think maybe the residual fear of rolling over on Willow has been lightening my sleep.

Woke to a list of chores and responsibilties from Darcie: reinstall Iomega zip driver on Darcie's laptop; wash diaper wraps and dishes; take out trash and mop up the purple stain it leaves; put Christmas boxes in our storage room down the student hallway. A list light enough to ensure a relaxed day puttering around between work, town, and home. Darcie was already back in bed with Willow, bringing her new puppet critters to life, introducing Willow with amazement to the new monkey in the house.

Alicia and Matt will be here tomorrow, and then Monday evening we're hosting the Christmas siblings in their entirety -- Clay and Josh, Alicia and Matt, Ginny and us -- for a little casual cheer and beer before the parent generations join us more formally on Tuesday. Seems promising, all of it; it's not sleep, but it'll do just fine.