Rainy Street (night shot)

Originally uploaded by Ms.Snarky.

With a single sweep of the clock hands, a single flip of the calendar page, November is over, and December is here.

In my neighborhood, November ended with meteorological drama: 70+ degrees in the afternoon descending to a rainy 35 before midnight on the morning of the 30th, with snow – SNOW! – during the morning and early afternoon.

I usually wait til the first weekend in December to decorate my house, but I wanted to take advantage of Wednesday’s warm temperatures, and I also wanted the lights up so I could watch them shimmer in the mist. Lights seem to twinkle more when there’s rain or snow.

As the day progressed, the sky almost cleared, then grew blacker, though when I took the dogs out into the icy yard just a few moments ago, the moon was shining brightly, and the running lights from planes high above the trees were sparkling in the frosty air.

And now it’s December, and Christmas is coming bringing family with it, and somehow, somehow, after dreary November, everything seems bright and full of hope again.

Today is the last day of Holidailies, but am I writing something deep and meaningful about the discipline of having to write every day, and being accountable to someone if you don’t? No. Am I writing a sweet post-project wrap-up about all the new blogs that I’ve added to my blogroll? No. Or at least not tonight.

Tonight I’m going to write about eBooks.
Continue reading →

He’s dressed in green denim overalls, with a straw hat on his head, and a rake or hoe in one hand. On his back is a sack, not of presents, but of soil, or maybe seeds. He has a snowy white beard, and the stereotypical portly figure, and there’s a bird perched on his shoulder. He’s not a person, though, he’s a candle I bought at Big Lots a couple years ago, while adding to my ever-growing collection of Christmas accoutrements, because he reminded me of my grandfather.

My grandfather had the same portly figure, for all the time I knew him, but I never saw him with any more than day-old whiskers that felt like sandpaper against my cheek when I hugged him. He had the softest hair, though, that he washed, for all his life, with whatever sort of bath soap happened to be in the shower. Bar soap. I think his favorite was ivory.

His hands were strong and square when I was young, but by the time I was twenty-one – the year he died – they were cracked and gnarled, their strength much diminished. Where once he was accustomed to kneading bread, puttering with small electronics, or even braiding little girls’ hair, he lost all his dexterity, in the end, and tried to hide his embarrassment at being clumsy.

He used Old Spice. He wore cotton button-down shirts, khaki pants, and suspenders, and work shoes, every day. Even at the beach. If he was doing manual labor, and it was hot, he might concede to the removal of his shirt, to reveal the plain white t-shirt ever-present beneath it. He carried cloth handkerchiefs, that were my job to fold, when I was visiting.

He’s close to me tonight, the night before Epiphany, because I spent time looking at the still-trimmed tree, this evening, planning tomorrow’s adventure in Un-Decorating. I collect Santa Claus ornaments, and am partial to Victorian Santas in heavy robes of fur and velvet, but until tonight, I never realized that I’m drawn to them because they remind me of my grandfather.

He’s close to me, also, as I write this, because he was a geek at heart, the first on the block to have color television, a microwave, cable, a cd player, but he never had a computer. He died before my love of All Things Technological manifested itself, and I miss him whenever I play with a new toy, because I know he’d have gotten a kick out of whatever it is that I have.

He wrote me carefully printed letters once a week, the whole time I was in elementary school.

He taught me how to make the perfect loaf of raisin bread, the most scrumptious Thanksgiving turkey, the most soothing hot toddy. He taught me how to hammer a nail, the difference between phillips and flathead screwdrivers, and how to kill and clean a freshly caught bluefish (though I never enjoyed the cleaning part).

He taught me how to make a telephone out of tin cans and string and how a lever works. He wouldn’t even blink when I asked him to play with me, easing himself onto the floor to direct my adventures with blocks, legos,tinker toys or erector sets (though he required me to lay out an orderly ‘lumberyard’ first).

As much as my mother is responsible for my love of art, crafts, folk music, literature, and political activism, my grandfather is responsible for my love of gardening, baking, tool kits, model trains, and deep-sea fishing.

He never met my husband, but I know they’d have liked each other. And I think he and my father-in-law would have totally bonded.

The “gardener Santa” candle looks nothing like my grandfather, but it stands for him, anyway, and when I see it tucked in a corner of my house each year (part of the family tradition of carrying Christmas throughout the house), I smile, and think that maybe he’s watching over me, after all.

I collect greeting cards. Not Hallmark cards, or American Greeting cards, but, the expensive wrapped-in-cellophane high-style cards that they sell in places like Papyrus and Barnes and Noble.

One of their lines from a few years back featured pithy quotations by famous authors. Among these was a card featuring a quotation from Mark Twain, “You say there is nothing to write about? Then write to me that there is nothing to write about.”

I’m feeling that way tonight – that I have nothing exciting to say, today, and that I need a night off, but that I can’t take one because I committed to doing a post a day til Epiphany, and I haven’t missed a day yet.

In Scrabble, there are these nifty blank tiles, which, once drawn, can represent ANY letter the player needs at the time. I need the journal-equivalent of a blank tile – a generic bit of text that I can paste into this box and call mine.

In my attempt to find something to write about, I even suggested that my husband be my guest-blogger tonight. When he vehemently declined my gracious offer (by shrieking NO! at the top of his lungs), I then tried to play word association with him, in a futile effort to generate blog-fodder. “What do you think of when I say ‘glitter’?” I asked. His response was to waggle his eyebrows, and kiss me, and offer a near-synonym. At least the kiss was nice.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the folks I’ve read through Holidailies are keeping digital Commonplace Books, and I’m drawn to the notion. I’ve done this with notebooks for as long as I can remember, without having a name for the habit (though the notebooks were generally titled ‘Melissa’s Magic Notebook’), and I think it would be useful to revert to this childhood habit, as it’s much neater than the vast array of post-its that I usually acquire when I start logging snippets for later expansion into entries.

But that’s for another time.
Right now, I’m going to go make tea, and fold clothes.

Because I have nothing to write about.

Today was the first fiscal day of the new year, the new work year, the month, and I was granted an auspicious beginning to all three. It came in the form of an email message responding to a virtual note in a bottle cast into the sea we know as the Net.

Specifically, I have an old, dear friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. Last night, in a fit of nostalgia, I googled his name and last known location, and found an email address. I shot of a message, expecting a server error.

Instead, I got a real message back. And not just “yes, this is me” but, actual sentences with real information. Groovous! Typical for me, I snapped off a reply, replete with long sentences and self-interruptions (and you thought I only wrote this way in my blog. Hah!).

The response to my reply was a phone call. Alas, I was chatting with a friend on the other side of the planet, at the time, and chose not to answer the call waiting. (I think call waiting is rude, but I get a cheaper phone bill for including it among the various options on our phone line, so I just ignore it.)

After that call was over, though, I called back, and we chatted for far too long than is really acceptable over the phone, but it was a nice conversation, full of laughter and catching up.

He mentioned that he’d read my 100 Things post, and went down the line mentally checking off the things he knew. And the scary thing is, he’s one of the few people who actually knew those things before I posted them. Even the bits about cello, and my penchant for micro-point pens.

It’d be wrong to say that he doesn’t know me as well as Fuzzy does, because in some ways he knows me better. It’s more accurate to say that he knows me differently.

While I admit that I once (in high school) had a pretty serious crush on him, in retrospect, I’m really glad our relationship never went in that direction, because ultimately, our personalties would have clashed violently, and too often. And truly, I value him as a friend more than he knows.

Our friendship hasn’t always been perfect. There’ve been gaps of months or years when we have completely lost touch, even before this most recent one. He missed my wedding, and I missed his. (I wanted to go, really, but it was a bad month money-wise, and then other stuff happened). I once blew up at him for treating me like a consolation prize, though I learned soon after that such behavior was unintentional and inadvertant.

And now?

Now we’re people in vastly different places in life, who’ve known each other twenty years. I have a husband whom I love and cherish, and who understands me better than anyone could hope to (and, more importantly, puts up with my moods, plans, schemes, and ideas). He has a fabulously funny, seriously sweet, beautiful and intelligent wife (someone I wish I knew better), and they’re expecting a baby very, very soon.

I’m adding a resolution, a specific one, to the vague list I cloaked in one of my posts last week: I will not lose touch with him again.

There are sounds we hear every day, that are part of our lives, but that we never stop to notice. It’s easy to write fifty words about the sound of rain on a roof, because the very word conjurs up images of cozy evenings, or mad dashes between awnings, or brightly colored umbrellas on parade.

But what about those other sounds? Who waxes lyrical about the sound of attic turbines, the steady hum of the refrigerator, the soft whirring of a computer fan?

Tonight as I was making tea, I paused for a moment, entranced by the soft sizzling hiss of the sugar spilling into the mug. It’s a unique sound – sugar falling into coffee doesn’t hiss, and the sugar substitutes that come in pink or blue packets don’t either, even in tea. I smiled to myself, thinking that this was a cool sound, planning research on whether or not there was a chemical reason for it.

But I didn’t research it. Instead, I stirred the sugar into my drink watching as the white granules dissolved into the hot brown liquid. I added a splash of milk, and I watched as it formed cloudy shapes before turning the entire contents of the mug a tawny brown color.

Hot water. Dried Leaves. Milk. Sugar.
A moment of peace and possibility in a ceramic mug of tea.

I’m curled up in bed with two sleeping doggies and a stack of pillows, wearing my favorite ratty formerly-black-and-now-kinda-greyish sweatpants and an almost as ratty red t-shirt with a bow-sporting Scottish terrier on it. I look frightful, but I’m comfortable, and when I don’t feel well, comfort is key. (Actually, even when I DO feel well, comfort is key, which is why I don’t wear heels, or lace.)

We slept until about noon today, me because Nyquil is my best friend, just now, and Fuzzy because he was up til four playing with a server. While he was showering, I was outside stripping lights off the trees. About half the neighborhood still has their lights up, but once the calendar page turns, I find such things depressing. The tree will be tomorrow’s project, if I’m feeling well enough to climb up on the step-ladder and retrieve the smallest ornaments from the highest branches – when I have colds everything settles in my ears and my balance is nearly non-existant. This is bad enough, but worse in combination with tiny glass ornaments.

We ventured out to buy dogfood after that, but detoured to Barnes and Noble (in Cedar Hill), then Half Price Books, then lunch at Panera a frou-frou bakery/cafe we’d never heard of – it was cozy, with a fireplace and really good chai, as well as lots of gorgeous carb-laden artisan breads.

After lunch (I had a smoked turkey sandwich on sundried tomato and ale bread, and Fuzzy had roast beef on asiago baguette), we went to Arlington (because that’s where the dog food store is), and another Barnes and Noble – because I’d passed on a book at the first one, hoping to find it at Half Price Books.

Of course, we forgot that places close early on New Year’s Day, so the pet store was closed by the time we got there, but Fuzzy still insisted on a trip through Fry’s before coming home. I stayed in the car and read by streetlight. I just wasn’t in the mood for the sensory overload of Geek Mecca.

And so we are home, with no new toys, but a few books for me, including The South Beach Diet, because we’ve been eating too much crap lately, and we both need to be healthier, a ST:TNG novel, because I needed some brain candy, and A Faith for Skeptics, which was written by the Canon Theologian to the Bishop of Forth Worth, and highly recommended by Father Young, at St. Andrew’s here in Grand Prairie. He (the author) was one of the celebrants of the lessons & carol services, and it’s always cool to read a book by someone you actually know, even peripherally.

Many of my bibliophilic friends have been posting their reading lists, but most of mine was lost just before we moved, and then, I haven’t been keeping up with my bookblog at all, so I’ll try to be better about that this year.

I’ve already finished re-reading Memoirs of a Geisha, which is just phenomenal, even the second time around, and I’m about ten pages from the end of Star Trek The Next Generation: A Time to Be Born, the first in a nine-book TNG series that fills the gaps between Insurrection and Nemesis, and which I’m reading in eBook format, with the exception of book three, which is the one I picked up at HPB.

So, not a very exciting beginning of a new year, but a comfortable one, headcolds aside, and really, one could do worse than bread, books, and bedclothes.

I was going to call this entry ‘tea and sympathy’ but the reality is that it’s actually pizza, coca cola, and Nyquil. It’s new year’s eve, and instead of going out, or cooking a sumptuous dinner, I’m sittng in bed, pumped full of cold meds, and in a kind of drug-induced Otherspace where everthing seems a bit warped and reality and I aren’t quite connected.

I posted about resolutions last night, so nothing to cover there, and yet, there’s something about this date screams for an overview of the past year, and a plan for the future.

The thing is, I’m just not a goal oriented person. People ask me where I want to be in five years, in ten, and I can come up with socially acceptable answers, but they’re as vague as my resolutions were.

I’m not sure whether this is good or bad.

And just to be clear, it’s not that I’m without ambition, it’s just that naming goals means you have to stick to them, and what I want now might be very different from what I want five years from now, which would mean that I spent five years working towards something useless, or at least unsatisfying.

Anyway, I’m sitting here with a small dog keeping me company (Zorro, because Cleo flees in terror if I sneeze) watching cheesy Disney movies because I don’t have to use my brain to keep up, and trying to come up with something coherent to write about.

Except that I’m not coherent at all.

Cuz I’m in Otherspace.

I looked up from my desk about an hour ago, and saw the most fabulous evening sky. The main part of it was all grey and wintry, looking colder than it actually is, with feathered clouds above the trees, and then, from the west (which, because my office window faces south is the right), streaks of vibrant pink and orange appeared. Alas, the camera was downstairs, and even if it hadn’t been, the angle was wrong to attempt a picture.

Just as it’s evening, as I write this, so today is the evening, nay, the night, of this year. I’ve thought a lot about resolutions, and such, but I’m not going to post a whole list of them, or anything. I have this theory, you see, that the reason most of us don’t make good on our resolutions is that we try to change everything, all at once, and it gets overwhelming, and so we give up. So, just as I’ve tried to make it a rule that I do at least one productive thing every day, I’m going to resolve in very vague forms: to learn something new, to make a new friend, to help someone, and to do something to improve myself. Is this cheating? I don’t think so.

Despite what I posted yesterday, I did not take down the Christmas stuff. I’m going to enjoy it all for another day or so, and then take it down on Sunday, and as a reward, I will change the calendar page – it was always something I looked forward to doing as a child, and I still find a small bubble of delight in doing so as an adult.

Sometimes, at least, I’m easily pleased.

We woke before dawn so that Fuzzy could take my parents to the airport. I didn’t go along because they had two more bags than they arrived with (due to their nearly incessant shopping), and because Fuzzy was going directly to work after leaving them off. The plan had been that I was going back to bed, but did that happen? Of course not.

I’m pathetic. As soon as everyone was gone, I made a cup of tea and sat staring at the Christmas tree. Honestly, I’m thirty-four years old, and should not miss my mother five minutes after she’s out of the door. It’s not as if we don’t email daily, and talk almost as often, by phone. But it’s not the same. On a visit, emotions are heightened, and we’re both far more mushy, snarky, and sensistive than we would be if we still lived in the same neighborhood.

I finally went back to bed around seven, after watching a couple episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television, more for noise than because I really wanted to watch it. I mean, they were episodes I have on DVD (my collection, thus far, only goes through season four – must fix that.)

In my family, we generally leave Christmas decorations up until at least New Year’s Day (and sometimes Epiphany), using that day to clean up mentally as well as physically, but suddenly the tree seems dejected without extra people here to enjoy it, and so I’m considering tearing everything down tomorrow rather than waiting for Saturday. It’s only two days, but it makes a difference.

While I don’t generally get depressed during the holidays, the post-Christmas blahs hit me hard. I think it’s because the lights and pine-scented happiness hide the dinginess of winter, and make the cold, bleak weather seem cozy, rather than confining.

Added to my sudden blah-mood is that Fuzzy’s got to go on a trip to Virginia in a couple weeks – far too soon – and while we’d talked about me going, I really don’t want to spend the money when we’re just getting into the flow of things here, and while I WANT to see Virginia – I don’t particularly like to travel in January.

In any case, I’m sure by morning I’ll feel better – a good night’s sleep and the realization that my house is MINE again tend to do wonders. Meanwhile, I’m mulling over the concept of New Year’s resolutions, but that’s a separate entry.