I woke at some deep point of the night to the sound of shattering glass. Tom, who'd fallen asleep on the couch, roused himself and I heard him sweeping up something fragile. When he finally wandered up to bed, I asked what had happened, and he said Chuck had jumped onto the kitchen counter, and then onto a shelf of glassware above the counter, and pushed two crystal glasses that T had inherited from his grandfather onto the floor.

So Young Charles is in the doghouse this morning . . . theoretically, of course, because he has the brain of a goldfish and has no idea he's done anything wrong.

Well, it's only stuff, and we have more of that than we need. I ran the vacuum cleaner in the kitchen at 5 a.m., and for Chuck that counted as the most horrible of punishments, so I guess we're all eye-for-an-eye now.

The temperature's not much warmer here in the south than it was in the north: 6 degrees this morning, and forecast to drop to zero over the next couple of days. I do hope I'll get out into the Arctic for a few walks, but mostly I'll be back at my desk for the rest of the week, straining away at a giant editing project, trying to catch up on writing and reading. I'm glad to say that yesterday's class went really well: the kids jumped into revision in the way geese splash down onto a flooded golf course--much metaphorical honking and wing flapping and mud kicking. It was a pleasure to watch.