The morning began with comedy. I woke to find that I'd been sleeping all night on a narrow edge of the bed while T had been sprawled every which way, and thus I immediately cried out: "I'm in an Egyptian tomb!"

A laugh was had by all, but I tell you, I won't be shy with the elbow prodding if this keeps up . . .

We had a magnificent dinner at Miyake last night--a series of tiny, delicate, delicious dishes, not one of which I could have made at home . . . lots of seafood, both raw and grilled, but also some amazing kabocha squash dumplings. Then I drove home via a holiday-light-display route T hadn't yet seen, and we ended the evening on the couch watching a Peter Gunn episode set in some bizarre studio version of "Spain."

Today I'll be back in the class-planning saddle. I've made good progress with my narrative poetry class, but I've got lots more to do. Right now it looks like the class will be completely filled--actually overfilled--which is exciting but also means I need to fine-tune time management: there won't be much space for lollygagging and joke telling. But I'm excited about the poems we'll be discussing, and I'm also getting excited about the writing prompts I've worked out. It's a slow process--matching effective poems with discussion triggers and then creating linked prompts--but it's very satisfying when they come together.

Otherwise, what's new? The weekly housework chores are coming around on the gui-tar (in the words of Arlo Guthrie), meaning that I ought to deal with the bathrooms and the floors before long. The tree guys have not yet returned to finish removing the sad skeleton. I'll be taking T bowling for his birthday outing this weekend (not a great time of year for hikes, we went to the beach last week, ponds aren't frozen enough for skating, so bowling it is). I ought to start studying seed catalogs for my spring order, but I'm not in the mood yet. I've taken William Trevor's story collection After Rain off the shelf. I had a long talk with my kid about the books we're reading, which always makes me happy (granted, we also talked about football and the cat, but you know how these things go). Winter is going along swimmingly in the Alcott House: we have lots of dry firewood in the basement (with next year's batch curing in the new shed), nothing is leaking, the electrical system is well behaved, I have plenty to read, we are living the American dream, goddamn it.