Stay warm

T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month, and I trust his literary genius, but holy moly January should be considered a close and terrible second.  Those 31 days just kind of stretch out like the Iditarod, don't they?

This is the bleak midwinter, but we can't even play the beautiful Christmas song by the same name because the most wonderful season has left us, and left us in tatters...

I don't know what to say about the events in Arizona, as it has been greatly on my mind--when there's tragedy you feel like everything's been said, there's nothing to add, other than your thoughts and your prayers, and those always seem woefully inadequate.  Over the years I've come to imagine that in dark days like these there's a big pile of thoughts and prayers somewhere that keeps getting bigger still and stronger and more solid, until it's an everlasting entity all its own that can really make things better in a way.  So each day of worry and anxiety I feel about the whole thing I take a moment to add one more ounce of thought to the pile.

~

I have fallen in love with my Kindle!  This definitely detracts from my literary street cred, but I don't care!  It's just so cool!

But of course I am still an avid collector of the paper book and that will never change.  Here's my stack...

And so Christmas fades away...

...but it is still just January, so we can keep lighting candles.

Cheerier post soon.

All that's left of this year is the peel...

Happy New Year!!!!!!

I think this mug I got in New York at the best little store near where my cute in-laws live is supposed to imply just a simple, "Hey, have your morning coffee, look out the window, relax a bit."  But I'm taking it to a whole new level--the mug speaks to me during these hectic holiday times, he says, "Take a breath.  It's okay.  Take a coffee break.  Take some photos.  Read a book (on your new Kindle!).  Plop those worries down and don't pick them up till next week."

Big snow came to the mountains today.  My brother has been monitoring the storm system on his computer quite obsessively.

Oh winter!

Darling, the snow is falling...falling like forgiveness from the sky.  --Over the Rhine

Christmas is my favorite day of the year.  We all agree to hope for peace and we go nuts (sometimes to a fault) trying to make one another happy.

If only we could freeze the moment.

Merry Christmas to all.   

Love,

Alison

Cold outside, warm inside, candles burning, Christmas tree bright.  Life can seem like a tragic novel, but certain nights are from a storybook...

Hope you've got the same feeling wherever you are.

It's the holiday season!

And I think you know how I feel about that...ecstatic!  ebullient!  jaunty and jolly!  I can hardly concentrate on the details of daily life, knowing that Christmas music, Christmas movies, Christmas shopping, and Christmas baking are now socially acceptable!

Thanksgiving with cute husband turned out to be a very happy day--we cooked a whole meal by ourselves and I have to say we had a real sense of triumph at the end of the day knowing we could pull it off in such a tiny kitchen and with such meager major-meal-making experience. 

 

But.  The very best part of Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving morning when I awoke and what to my wondering eyes should appear as I walked oh so nervously into my kitchen dreading the drudgery ahead...

That's our elf Rufus.  He brought me 2 varieties of sea salt dark chocolate and a copy of Disney's A Christmas Carol. 

And now the season is in full swing...

Worms

I took out the ironing board two days ago and now I'm never putting it back.  Sometimes you just have to let go and allow yourself a free-standing junk shelf smack dab in the middle of your living room.  And if other people have a problem with that, they can just leave.  (People who stay without raising objection to either the junk shelf itself or the junk resting upon it get unlimited mugs of peppermint hot chocolate.)

This Thanksgiving it's just going to be cute husband and me.  As I was reading the Bon Appetit article about how to cook a perfect Thanksgiving turkey I realized, hey! that's never going to happen!  And so I read books instead and drank a sixth cup of coffee.

Sometimes life can seem a total unpredictable mess--that is, I have a post-graduate degree and I work in a bookstore, cute husband is searching like a mad man for a job that has something (anything!) to do with the legal profession--and it's very easy to let it all upset you.  Sometimes when I get home at night I tell cute husband that I want to crawl in a hole and eat worms.  It's my favorite saying left over from childhood.  Thing is, cute husband's response is always: "I'm not letting you do that!  There's no way!  If you insist on doing it, I'm coming down there with you, and we're both eating worms!  Do you want me eating worms?"  

And then you realize, life ain't really so bad.  At all.