Reading: Bar Sinister. It was inevitable, wasn't it?

Moving: turning over my compost pile. Twice.

Listening: Vitalogy

Watching: "Gladiator"

Mourning: the lapse of separation of church and state, the reversal of environmental protections, the endangerment of personal freedoms, and the next four years

20 January 2001: Head in the sand

I just checked to see whether the mayor in "Chocolat" was a husband in "Enchanted April," as I thought. It's been eight years since I saw that movie, and yes, he was. In 1992, it had been less than eight years since I last saw "Letter to Breshnev," and I've seen "Letter" since, but did I recognize him as Sergei? No. Perhaps because Sergei was nice and the husband and mayor were not and I, as usual, reacted to expression more than physiognomy.

Age of Innocence begins well. I dismissed The Magnificent Ambersons as tedious and Lord Jim as unable to hold my attention. So I'm going with the society novel. Gossip is always a good thing.

My current fiction is that if I don't bring The Bar Sinister out of the house with me I'm not really reading it. Therefore I read it over breakfast this morning. I have thus far refrained from complaining about spelling complete "compleat" (which Austen does not do) but to claim Mr. Collins's first name is Thaddeus is Wrong, more Wrong than misunderstanding the amount of Georgianna's fortune.

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I can't remember any of the amusing conversations Haitch, her roomie HPS, and I had last night. We shopped. We dished. We ate chocolate bars from Godiva (dark chocolate with raspberry for me, milk with dark chocolate truffle for her, and some profanity with almonds for HPS). We ate cheese. We went to "O Brother Where Art Thou?" A good night.

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Today we worked on windows. I plotted the garden and turned the compost heap twice. We didn't snowshoe. I am considering writing in sentences more complex than the previous ones, but not today. Today I honor our esteemed, clever, honorable, tolerant, near-president by writing sentences that won't strain his third-grade reading level.