This is what I look like straight off the track. Thirsty and with my tendrils curling

Reading: Silent to the Bone

Moving: 45', 4.57 miles

Listening: KBCO

Watching: "Sex and the City" to Nordic Track to. I'm not proud. Also the "Spin Room" on CNN, just because Tucker Carlson's hateful attitude is so good for my blood pressure and tolerance of the conservative viewpoint.

2 January 2001: Beat

I picked up the new Lowry and Konigsburg books today. Because I just read another by each of them over the weekend waiting, I'm confusing their styles. When Konigsburg's Connor describes Branwell's genuine pleasure in Connor's high marks, even though Branwell's schoolwork was better, Connor said there aren't many friends like that. Which is true, and makes Branwell as uncommon as Veronica and Rabble in Rabble Starkey, except that they're Lowry's.

I figure the confusion of "vain" and "vane" in A View from Saturday was poor copyediting, even if Konigsburg made the original error, and I don't understand people saying that the book didn't deserve the Newbery because of it. I still don't like to read "Not enjoying Branwell's advantage of being struck dumb, the kids expected me to speak" (134), but it's a good book.

Now I've started Gathering Blue, and I'm think of Cynthia Voigt's Elske beginning among the Wolfers, but this is, in the first pages, a far more primitive society even that the Wolfers'.

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Yesterday we continued our long-revered, or not very old but highly enjoyed in its young life, tradition of slacking on the holidays. I took down the tree, which is one of the most depressing of all possible tasks even though had it remained up it probably would have torched the house in another couple of hours, and RDC worked on the windows, but mostly we hung out with laptops and books and the "Twilight Zone" marathon on the SciFi channel. I love the Burgess Meredith episodes "All the Time I Need" and "The Obsolete Man," and it was good background noise for our laptops and books (The Wife of Martin Guerre and Essays of Warren Buffett for me and for RDC--respectively, in case that wasn't painfully obvious). The important discovery of the day was that the theme music makes Blake squeak. At the top and bottom of every half hour, Blake would bleek, at downscale bit ending the theme music (not the initial dee-di dee-di dee-di bit). He's a strange little boy, and it's probably all our fault.

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When I got home from work today, the table had arrived. RDC set it up while I was on the track and we ate supper at it. You can save one end for meals and have the whole other end to be the catch-all horizontal surface every home needs or to work on. The table in my study is occupied mostly by a monitor and otherwise by crap I never put away, like a box of magnetic poetry and a spool of tape and a pair of scissors and four pens and an egg of Silly Putty and a cd of webcam software and the box from my eyedrop prescription and the fake disk for the chip from my camera and old pages from my Dayrunner and the tacks that held up the ribbons I stapled the Christmas cards to and spare postcards from when I notified everyone of our change of address back in May and a Pottery Barn catalog and a travel clock and a roll of cherry Lifesavers and the wooden Santa who fell off the tree and has to be glued and Nisou's Christmas card that has her new address in it.

On the dining table, I plan to keep only paper and pencils and pens and books from discrete projects, like plotting and budgeting my garden.

The bowl JCC and ALN gave us as a wedding present has served us well as a fruit bowl these past 5.5 years. When Blake was allowed on the bar in the apartments, it was the high point of his clambering. It's a blue-green and kind of bronze-looking glaze and just a perfect Craftsman color that coordinates with the sage walls and the--get this--"distressed honey" stain of the wooden dining table and I wonder what will win the Battle for the Centerpiece, it or the pewter candelabra.

I love having stuff.

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Since the beneficence of RDC's aunt and uncle, I've talked to my mother. Exchanging news, I told her about our dining table. She asked what was going to happen to the gateleg table. It's folded up and in the sunroom. She is all offended. Does she forget that she gave me that table when she didn't wish to sell me her spare dining table? Does she not know that the gateleg, really an occasional table, seats only two persons? I do not know her reasons to have got all huffy, and I am trying to figure out if I am ungrateful. I appreciated the table when I couldn't afford to buy a new one, when we lived in apartments too small for a regular table. I wonder if she considers me ungrateful for now considering to be inadequate for a house the narrow oval drop-leaf table at which we cannot fit a single guest.

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After 45 minutes and fewer miles than I accomplished Thursday, I am beat. I was going to go grocery-shopping this evening but I put it off. I'm in bad shape.

In happier news, I haven't sworn all year.