This is the first time I have ever looked at a picture and thought that my hair is long.

Reading: The Watcher, Witch Child, The Red Tent

Moving: a lot of eyebrow twitching; none else this week

Watching: "Kundun"

Cooking: Cookies

House: the fat lady (me) is singing even though the living room needs a touch or two more

15 December 2001: Stress

This is the first year I have allowed myself holiday stress. I don't know how people with regularly actual lives manage, because I slept badly, ate poorly, and became twitchy over the past ten days. So. The living room is scrubbed, patched, sanded, repaired, scrubbed again, rinsed, primed, painted: ceiling, walls, trim, mantel, windows. A murdered tree has been found, erected, lit, and decorated. I am inordinately proud of it. I might be using the word "inordinate" because I just read The Miserable Mill. I have baked cookies. I have had two gatherings and been to a third. In glasses, because I'm having a anti-contact-lens flare-up.

Usually when my eyes don't want lenses, I wear glasses for a fortnight or so until they're thoroughly calm and not bloodshot, but this time my eyebrow was twitchily contracting and my tear glands producing a lot of goop, so I found a doctor yesterday. She turned my eyelids inside out, a sensation I don't recommend, and said I had only minor pustules and not the savage cobblestones that a severe case of GPC usually displays, and declared the oil glands blocked. There's oil in tears? Who knew? But of course: it keeps the tears from evaporating quite so fast. My eye's not going to explode from my skull, despite how it felt, which is really all I ask of it.

Thursday I mailed packages to my mother, father and notstepmother, and sister, and to RDC's mother, nephew, and aunt and uncle. I gave the house a thorough drubbing--friends are one thing but coworkers I had inflicted on myself. I even cleaned the downstairs bathroom, which really needed it: its main purpose is painting clean-up. I still need to shop for RDC, but I have a week to do that.

Also Thursday I had my department over for cider and cookies, cheese and crackers, before the main Dot Org party at the zoo. CoolBoss has wanted to see the house since I bought it, and this was a good time since everyone was conveniently headed City Park-ward anyway. Minne liked Blake; Lou and CoolBoss did not; everyone admired my tree.

I refuse to be falsely modest about my tree. It is not only the best one I have ever had, it is also one of the best I have ever seen. It's a Canaan fir, a species I'd never heard of, and was slaughtered in British Columbia. We have nine-foot ceilings, and I think the tree's about eight feet tall.

(Why does "nine-foot ceiling" sound right but "eight foot tall" sound colloquial? Because "nine foot" is an adjectival phrase modifying a noun and "eight feet" a noun phrase serving as an adjective modifying another adjective thus making it an adverb? I know that because of a twitch in English to do with numbers, the name of which phenomenon I forget, "three-hour tour" and "two-mile hike" are correct even though logically the phrases would be have "hours" and "miles". )

So, lacking a Bumble, I used a ladder to decorate a tree for the first time. When I was short in my mother's house, the tree would be beside the half-open staircase. I still haven't found a tree-topper, and this tree doesn't have a spire anyway. So I used red twisties to secure lights to the top of the several near-spires that round the top and tucked the wire down between. I had just bought another string of lights, so I figured we'd have enough of those, but I wondered about ornaments. After Christmas last year I bought a few, and CLH usually gives me some every year, but still. I think it turned out fine.

I bailed on the Dot Org party to go to Barbie and Sabrina's all-girls soirée. I brought a disco ball and a pedicure set for the gift swap and came away with a party in a box--hats and noisemakers and so on for New Year's Eve. The most successful present--the one most often stolen by anyone who had drawn a successively higher number--was a purse. Eventually, the latest-comer, who was therefore assigned the new highest number, claimed it.

I met a lot of fun women. I couldn't come up with a funner alias for the woman second from the left than her own nickname. This she earned while driving a two-ton Suburban around a hairpin curve in the Black Hills, nearly but not quite tipping it and its contents (herself, some coworkers, and I don't know, a bunch of dinosaur bones) over. Someone said "Good save there, Danger Kitty." She works at the Museum of Nature and Science. When Barbie went behind the scenes at the museum with her, she got to hurl a spear with an atl-atl. Danger Kitty began to explain it to me, and about two phrases into it I said "Got it. Valley of Horses." I'm not proud. At least she got that cheesy reference, because Sabrina recently discovered she had never read Flowers in the Attic and rectified that.

Friday, Haitch and McCarthy came over between Amélie and going out to dinner. I gave her a collection of David Sedaris Christmas short stories that I had just spotted in Tower Records where RDC and I met after my doctor's appointment, so I gave her that fresh in the bag. Also Aqua Erotica and a set of spreaders (for dip or something) that I chose only because their handles were penguins. As I told her, I will continue to buy her cheesy penguin stuff until there is no more cheesy penguin stuff to be had.

She gave me a pastry scraper so I can make her a Wynell's pie and also a bag of Ghiradelli's double-chocolate chips, because I guess I only buy semi-sweet ones myself. I suppose the double-chocolate ones have twice as much cocoa in them, but also they're twice as big as regular ones, so they should be quadruple-chocolate.

The Sedaris she already had and would re-gift to her sister. Aqua Erotica, as a bathtub book, immediately intrigued her. I knew she would mock me, but that's my raison d'être, so I told her to guess how I know the editor. She rolled her eyes: "She keeps an on-line journal?"

This phenomenon was a revelation to McCarthy. Haitch gave him the two-minute synopsis from the perspective of a not particularly sympathetic outsider but he remained intrigued. And can I just say, I adore McCarthy? Enduring the house tour, he called the bedroom "heliotrope." He liked Blake. He had never seen the initial "South Park" short with Jesus and Santa fighting and my favorite SP line ever, "Don't you oppress me, fat boy!" so he watched that appreciatively.

---

Wednesday when I went to the TC for Haitch's presents (Amazon wishlist in hand, but TC, true to reputation, didn't have any of the academic books on it), I kind of slipped. I bought The Miserable Mill, the fourth Lemony Snickett, which are so fun. And The Watcher, which is newish from James Howe and a big departure from Bunnicula's style. And Witch Child, which I hadn't heard of but whose cover compelled me.

The Watcher was okay. You knew from the start what the "heart-stopping conclusion" would be. Child abuse has been reduced to a stylistic cliché. The title character fantasizes being from a better family, and she knows she has found them when they have the other half of the broken coin she carries as the only remnant of her real family.

Witch Child was something else. It had a good premise--what if one of those Puritan witches really was a witch?--but used a hackneyed device--the 300-year-old manuscript recently unearthed--such that the author only modernized the spelling and punctuation of a genuine diary. Suuure. So that whenever the syntax or culture or anything else was obviously contemporary--every other sentence--my disbelief would fall and go splat. A 17th-century girl in a settlement far removed from the Massachusetts Bay Colony wouldn't have to explain why her dwelling was poorly lit with only daylight through greased paper because they couldn't afford glass. And no one who had just emigrated from England with the requisite tortuous ocean journey and then had to hire native guides and pack animals to get himself from Salem deep into a forest settlement would have spare specialty carpentry tools with him, let alone enough to trade for a cow, particularly a milch cow, which would be even more expensive than tools. Of course I thought of the Brandon chapter in Swiftly Tilting Planet and the author did have to trot out The Crucible cliché too (it might not be possible to write about that time and place without evoking Crucible). But I liked it. The title character befriends a sailor during the crossing, and when they bid each other farewell once in harbor, he cracks the coin he won for being the first to sight land down the middle and gives her half.

And I had just finished The Watcher during my lunch hour when I read that completely original plot point.

Today I started The Red Tent. I still have to finish my Yule cards and scrape the paint off the windows and make cookies--Trey is coming over tomorrow and we are going to make baklava, or so goes the plan--and oh yeah I was going to make soup today and shop for RDC, so I'm off.