Today is one of those days when I have a thousand things to do at once. I'm trying to get a copyediting project out of my hair before Christmas while also hopelessly vacuuming sawdust out of the living room rug and making stacks of orange butter cookies to mail to my relatives and meet school Christmas-party quotas. Last night was the elementary school concert, which is always hard for me since I used to be the school music teacher and now I'm not. However, it's over now, and my son played Pachelbel's Canon beautifully on the piano (though he had "dressed up" by plastering his curly hair flat with copious amounts of gel so that he looked very odd, like he'd fallen headfirst into grape jelly), and one girl sang "Away in a Manger" like a very small, very breathless angel; so those performances made up somewhat for "Deck the Halls" played weakly on plastic recorders by a dozen disaffected 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, accompanied by a badly recorded dance-mix backbeat and reaching, as my husband noted, a whole new level of un-cool.

For more than a week, I have not written a thing that belongs to me except for this blog, which, as my son used to shout when he was an overbearing 3-year-old in quest of world domination, IS NOT MAKING ME HAPPIER. But I exaggerate: I've written letters, too, and received them, and they count on the good side.