Decembrrrrr

The weather seems to have finally changed for the cold, which is both calming (I am in New England, after all) and annoying (the heat in campus buildings is approx. 9000 degrees, so these days I have to begin all my classes by dashing to the bathroom and removing my copious underthings, necessary for the 2-mile bike ride.) But, it's coinciding very well with my newly found free time, and encouraging much burrowing behavior. I filled two big jars with homemade Haitian relish yesterday and am planning to start on the season of soups tomorrow, with a Cook's Illustrated version of Thai chicken and mushroom soup.

Also, in nesting news, I had a completely inactive Thanksgiving. Really. I barely moved. I stayed in town, watched 21 hours of television, and mostly slept. It was great, and, after a fall with 4 tech weeks in a 7-week period, I was ready for oblivion and mind-rot. It was so successful, I actually found myself wondering whatever happened to ol' Anna Karenina (whom I abandoned on pg. 450 back in September). I'm still a good 300 pages from the end, but it was exciting to have the physical time and emotional energy for recreational fiction. To be filed under "duh", it's also a really good book, yo.

All this rest and recuperation will be pretty shortlived, alas. I start a big ushering assignment, which will likely see me all the way up to Winter Break, but I had a good hunker-downy kind of weekend, in which non-work outweighed work for a change and there was precious little travel. In preparation for a class on Tuesday, I also reread my favorite play ever (we have to bring in a selected scene), Escape from Happiness. This is a play I have seen, directed, and read more times than I can count. It still brought hyperventilating, neighbor-alarming laughter and genuine tears . . . I think because a) it's a fantastic play and b) it's pretty much completely and totally about my family.