ABIDING BY THE BY AND BY

Well, here's an anniversary missed. I have been working on this blog for two years now (!) as of November 4th. This year has been terribly challenging, challenges which stumped and silenced me for weeks at a time. Yeah, those lines from Dante I quoted in my first post are still resonantly appropriate:

To tell

About those woods is hard —so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel

The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

Hah. Little did I know how much harder, in a physical world sense, things would get. I'm still at it though and have no thoughts or plans to discontinue.

I suppose it is a small victory, an upward increment, that, upon waking, my third or fourth thought is somewhere in the carpe diem vicinity: let's get up and ..... That I wake up at a reasonable hour in reasonable health and of reasonable pysche is a positive. Again, that early morning pre-wake (prehensile?) brain smelling M & J's morning coffee likely lifts the spirits.

My introspective skills are a bit rusty, as is my ability to communicate the results of rumination, but I trust they are not entirely gone. I am still adjusting, or readjusting to my upstate context. Things were near a groove when I went to Seattle; since I have been home, almost two weeks now, there has been a steady stream of rhythm disruptives from the small (kids home for M's birthday) to the gigantic (hurricanes).

And after years of living in wastefully and astonishingly hot apartments where I had to leave the windows open, I am now adjusting to an appropriately colder home. It's a big old house and to heat it all the time is to be wasteful of money and energy. I just have to figure out how to dress comfortably.

We may get snow this week. I am far enough upstate for this to have a bigger impact than it does living in the city. Other than my 6 weeks in Albertville, France during the 1992 Olympics, I've never actually lived and functioned in snow country. My biggest concern is driving and trying to get out of the sloped driveway of this house. I suppose it is time to head over to Home Depot and get some appropriate tools for my car.

And getting back to cooking, the pizzas Emily and I made last week were amazing, particularly the pomegrante balsmic soaked and roasted pears, bacon, carmelized onion, and mascarpone. Could have used a bit of fresh garlic and a discreet sprinkling of red pepper, but really quite good.

The sun is shining this morning. That argues against my heading down to the basement to sort clothes and such. But I can almost always come up with SOME argument to avoid that work, so I will stand at the kitchen sink and clean the breakfast dishes, while soaking up some of the rays. And then to the basement.

A reforming packrat's work is never done.