We got a little snow last night--those fat slow flakes that look like scraps of paper fluttering down through the darkness. I watched them bumbling against the window as I worked in the kitchen: making skillet cornbread, and chicken with lemon and capers, and guacamole. I miss the oven, of course, but we're doing fine without it. Downstairs Tom was moving his tools onto his new workshop shelves. Upstairs I was listening to the Flaming Lips, and the Jam, and Burning Spear on my stylish new Spotify account. The night before I was all Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald, but I like a change. Paul and I are considering co-rewriting a scene from Romeo and Juliet in which all of the characters are from an imaginary California and the soundtrack is 2010s girl pop: Katie Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen, and such. So we've been having silly hilarious kitchen dance parties with "Teenage Dream" and "Call Me Maybe." We pretend we're studying for work.

Yesterday was busy, in a make-no-money kind of way. James phoned at the crack of dawn because it was his day off but his brain has been trained to start work at 6 a.m. so he thought he'd call his mother instead. We emoted about the election for a while, and wondered about Biden's long-term Canadian pipeline plans, and agreed about how pleasant it feels to mistrust a policy while being confident that the president isn't hellbent on destroying the republic. Then I did yoga for an hour, and then I hung out with Paul, and then I spent the rest of the morning in a poet-painter collaboration meeting, and then Paul and I went for a walk and talked about his grad-school plans, and then I cleaned the basement and Paul went to work and Tom came home and I already told you about the snow and the songs.