The weather is supposed to be balmy this weekend--mid-40s and sunny--which means, I hope, that the wretched ice-covered driveways and roadways and sidewalks will dissolve into passable thoroughfares. Even with crampons on my boots, I've almost fallen numerous times. And then, after stupidly spending an hour beating at the ice with a shovel, I manage to aggravate the old carpal tunnel injury in my wrist, so now I am on an ibuprofen diet and I'm afraid to carry anything breakable in my weak right hand and I had to sit meekly through the talking-to that Tom gave me about being careless with my well-known nerve problems.

Ah well. At least I don't have a violin gig this weekend. That would have been unfortunate.

I have been reading Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne and Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. I have been listening to Sly and the Family Stone, and Otis Redding, and the Jam. I have been frying haddock and roasting Brussels sprouts. I have been studying curtain and blind patterns and trying to get up the courage to sew.

This weekend we'll get a bathroom door: a very exciting advance. And it's a lovely door, with an old-fashioned panel of pebbled glass, which Tom resuscitated and repaired and I painted. He thinks it was probably the original bathroom door in this house, but previous owners had replaced it with a cheesy narrow pocket door and had then hacked off its top and bottom and crammed it into the dining room doorway to serve as the back side of a faux closet for an emergency bedroom in a house that had way, way too many people and cats living in it.

And it's possible we may also finish getting all of our possessions out of storage, which means we might get bedroom dressers--another exciting advance.

Tonight's dinner: fish tacos, with last night's leftover haddock, along with the neighborhood-made corn tortillas sent as a Christmas gift from our Chicago children and some combination of tomatoes, greens, cilantro, and avocado; possibly also a golden-beet or roasted rutabaga salad. And ibuprofen, of course.