Thing that Tom and I never do: drive to a big-box store and purchase electronics. Thing that Tom and I did yesterday: drive to a big-box store and purchase electronics . . . all for the sake of a device that would allow T to watch the Criterion Channel on our out-of-date TV, and assuage my anxiety about having purchased him a Christmas gift that he could not actually use (a classic Dawn-error).

But success! Now he can watch brooding French movies to his heart's content.

And wait, there's more: at the aforementioned big-box store, I also purchased pillows to make the French-movie-watching couch actually comfortable enough for a person to sit on for the duration of a movie. My next mission: adequate lights in the living room so that the person who isn't interested in brooding French movies can sit on either end of the book-reading couch instead of huddling up under a single tepid spotlight. I tell you: big stuff is happening around here.

In other exciting news, Tom has starting working on the spice shelves for the kitchen. We had a beautiful spice cupboard in Harmony, built flush against the central chimney, and it was hard to give up that lovely and useful space. Here, at the Alcott House, all of our renovations have been stalled for close to a year, for reasons of money and time, but our little spice-blip forward will add considerably to the kitchen's storage efficiency. Two shallow cupboards will hold pesky little jars of spices, home-dried herbs and mushrooms, small baking supplies, etc. They will fit into a corner join between the existing cabinets, kind of like a secret compartment.

So what else is going on? I finished Parker's Magical Negro and Guy's Queen of Scots and have started rereading E. M. Forster's Howards End. I am fretting about weather, which looks like it might derail my teaching schedule and/or make my drive north a nightmare. I shared my poetry ms with a friend. I sat on our somewhat more comfortable TV couch and watched Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn. I talked to a son on the phone, who told me he's been billeted during his internship in a hippie round house in which the walls seem to be constructed of cement and pieces of firewood. I worried about war.