One excellent side-effect of this New Year's holiday has been sleeping. Under usual conditions I'm up at 5 a.m. day in and day out; but with these dark mornings and T off the clock, my body has been happy to burrow. Chuck, of course, can only put up with so much of this. By 6:15 he is patting my cheek with a paw, pouncing on my feet, chirping his breakfast song. Still, despite his pesty antics, I've snagged more than an hour of extra sleep for four days in a row, and that's felt great.

Already dawn is yawning over the maples and the air is pale enough to reveal the frost shards glittering on my neighbor's car. I don't know what the day has in store.

Yesterday we toted a load of giveaway stuff to the Goodwill and I came home with three new-to-me books: Colm Toibin's The Magician, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and Larry McMurtry's The Last Kind Words Saloon. And in the mailbox I found another book, one I'd ordered: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the tenth-century jottings of a Japanese lady-in-waiting. It is the new year and my reading pile runneth over.

It is the new year and the government's disgusting antics escalate. How humiliating it is, to be an American.

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Here's my essay about Baron in Vox Populi.