Yesterday was a baking day.

Not much cleaning, I fear, but my houseguests won’t start arriving till tomorrow, so I have today.

I need to do a bit of work today. Lot a lot, but a couple of hours’ worth. Therefore, the song for today is “Christmas for Cowboys,” a song about working on Christmas. Not that it’s Christmas, and not that I’m planning to work on Christmas, either. The song is by Steve Weisberg, and it has a really pretty tune. You can hear it here. Find the words and chords here.  This song is kind of stupid, I’ll admit, but it’s actually a really good one for my voice, so I think I may sing it around the house today. I would also recommend it for your violin, mandolin, or guitar.

And it matches the stupid book I’m reading. And, for the most part, enjoying. I may not get clear through it, but it was free.

The bells went better yesterday, from my point of view.

The explanation of how to count for the bells made a real difference. We were doing an easier piece, and there were actually a few measures when I didn’t play — this rarely happens, because I play the middle C, which is one of those highly popular notes.

I made no mistakes.

This isn’t really a good goal, musically, I usually take it as given that I won’t make mistakes. Not with bells, though. I was totally thrilled to be able to read the music and play the notes. I ask for nothing more.

Yesterday afternoon, while making cookies, I saw the concert of the Raleigh Ringers, a well-known bell choir, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron..

They are perfectly amazing. They played most of “The Nutcracker Suite.”

My cookies were not amazing, but they were nice. There were gingerbread animals, which may end up with coats of icing.

Then there were eggnog cookies, which got painted.

There were also dog biscuits

These were supposed to be divided amongst the favored dog owners at Saturday’s brunch, but there was a concatenation of circumstances that prevented it. Therefore, our own dogs may get to eat them all.

I gave them a taste — one biscuit shared among the three — and I can tell you that they will be totally okay with eating them all.

You mix 2 cups of whole-wheat flour, 1 1/4 c grated cheese, 2 cloves of garlic, and 1/4 c oil. Add enough broth to make a dough (treat this like pie crust), roll it out, cut them, and bake them.

I used the dog bone cookie cutter since I intended to give them away. For household use, though, I think you could just cut them into rectangles with a pizza cutter and the dogs would still love them.

You could also cut them with cookie cutters like cats or postmen.

Today I have a couple of hours of work and probably also a couple of hours of errands. I usually have all that sort of thing done before Advent begins, but there it is. I now face the consequences.

 

We made candy yesterday, turtles and Festive Cranberry Bark.

Today I’m thinking gingerbread. My old college chum sent me a box full of wondrous stuff, including some new animal cookie cutters, and I’m thinking that a bunch of gingerbread animals would be a good addition to the cookie boxes.

I also spent some time lying around reading. I think yesterday was the only day available fro that particular activity, because today, right after church, I need to get the house ready for guests.

Yesterday’s brunch was lovely. The Empress and That Man are going to be grandparents. I have no grandchildren, and The Poster Queen has a step-grandchild, with no others likely. This means that the others at the table asked after my kids’ romantic entanglements. My boys don’t have any, as far as I know, but my daughters do, and after I’d answered, we all had a moment of pensive silence.

“You can see the appeal of arranged marriages, can’t you?” said I.
“Sure,” said The Poster Queen, but then we’d all have chosen J. B.”

We nodded ruefully at the truth of this. There may be lots of disagreement about The Perfect Man or The Perfect Husband, but there is such widespread agreement on The Perfect Son in Law that we’d have to put the few candidates on top of a glass hill or something.

That Man said a lovely grace, reminding us all of the blessings we’ve seen since the store closed (the store being what brought us all together lo these many years ago). It was a good reminder.

This morning we sang “Heard About a Newborn King,”  Bigsax, The Baritone, Suwanda, and I. If you’re a little persistent at that link, you can hear a choir singing it. We went with the do-wop street corner finger-snapping approach, and I think it went well. That’ the song for the day, even if it does require a bit of extra effort to find it. Play it on your harmonica if you don’t have a quartet handy.

I also found “Gabriel’s Message” in E minor at  musicnotes.com, whom I recommend for those last minute transposition needs. It has a cooler accompaniment, too, and we have a terrific piano player, so that’s very nice.

Word among pro bloggers is that people like to read bad news. The readership of blogs detailing people’s misery is always higher, it seems, than those giving advice or information. Those telling about someone’s pleasant life are really unpopular. No mention has been made of those discussing philosophical issues, which I like. In fact, my own experience as a blog reader really doesn’t support the claim at all.

If it were true, and if I were trying to please my readers, I could tell you about the Horrible Job, which I finished yesterday. It was a fixed-price job at oDesk. I anticipated that it would take me just a few hours, and it actually took about ten, plus four hours that I delegated to #1 son so he could buy materials for the gifts he plans to make. When I got the information for the assignment, it seemed a bit shady. I couldn’t figure out what kind of scam it might be, so I asked The Computer Guy whether he’d ever run across it. He said the routine wasn’t familiar, but when it comes to shadiness, he figures that if he’s asking the question, he already has the answer.

I should have stopped right there. However, I had agreed and put it out on my calendar, so the client had gone several days already without having the work done. She’d agreed to that, but on the assumption that I would do the work on schedule. So, since I couldn’t see the harm, I went ahead. (You will recognize this as a Utilitarian decision, O students of ethics.) Unfortunately, she had sent me the wrong information, so I kept sending the work in and she kept sending it back for changes that contradicted the original instructions. When I realized that we’d had a basic miscommunication, I got in touch with her, but by then I was trying to do the changes she wanted while also doing stuff I’d put out on my calendar for other people. At the end, I was hunting down mentions of “packing materials” and trying to get rid of them, and it was like trying to get rid of mice.

I finally finished it yesterday, with my eyes dilated, which added to the nightmarish quality.

Because yesterday we went to the optometrist, #1 son and I. #2 son and his dad are going next week. #1 son’s eyes had improved. Mine had not changed at all. But I had to wear those funny shades for hours and then I still didn’t feel that I could see properly for another few hours. During all these hours I went with my husband to the unemployment office, where I spent five minutes on the computer, which I could have done at home, and then we sat for an hour waiting for the interview, which consisted of “Layoff? Which company? You know what to do, right? Okay, Merry Christmas!” And then home to exterminate the packing materials infesting the Horrible Job.

It was a relief to have it finished, I’ll tell you. Then I tidied up some remaining loose ends on the other projects, and along about 3:00, I had some breakfast and began to be able to see properly.

At that point, I did my GTD processing, which the “before” picture above will show you had gotten a bit behind.

 The “after” picture here may not say anything good about my housekeeping, but note the lack of piles of paper and the closed file box.

That’s because I’m through working. I intend to take the weekend off, barring any sudden urgent emails, and devote it to baking, cleaning in preparation for my houseguests, and other such frolicsome tasks.

 My marker board is transformed.

I moved all the ongoing things to the bottom, where they can stay quietly till after Christmas. There are only eight of them again, and that’s a number I can handle anyway.

The projects part of the list consists of holiday preparations, mostly, and stuff that I need to do after Christmas.

Life@Work is the exception. This is a book intended to be worked through in small groups. If any of you guys are working through it yourselves, I’d love to join you in a virtual small group. The one I’m doing now is on life/work balance, which I think you all know is a little bit of an issue for me, and Amazon is sending me the other one, Essentials. I plan to work through the two between now and New Year’s, by which time I should have some good plans and goals for 2009.

The book is written from a Christian perspective, so it might  not be useful to everyone, but I’m finding it very useful. It has things to read and places to write Next Steps, and it has already helped me clarify some things in my mind.

For example, I should never have taken the Horrible Job. As someone who is, as the book puts it, “called, not driven,” I have no business accepting jobs which — whether I am up to date enough on the online scams to figure out how they’re making money off it or not — clearly have nothing to do with my calling in this world.

Today I will slip off to the grocery store at dawn to avoid the crowds while replenishing our stores of rice and beans and cream and butter and chocolate and stuff, bake some Orange Cranberry Bread to take to brunch with The Empress, That Man, The Princess, and The Poster Queen, attend said brunch, make candy, and work on my Christmas knitting.

The song for today is “Angels From the Realms of Glory,” a beautiful Victorian Christmas Carol. The tune, “Regent Square,” was written by Henry Thomas Smart. Lots of hymn tunes are named after places; I don’t know why. I also don’t know anything about Regent Square, but I always imagine it as a nice square of Georgian houses with a little pocket handkerchief of a park in the middle, and I think of Mr. Smart coming away from a holiday dinner party there, feeling contented with the world, and suddenly finding the main motif of this fine tune in his mind as he walks home, possibly with spats and an elegant ebony walking stick.

It would be possible for me to do some research and find out whether there could be any truth to this story, but I like the story too well to give it up. If you know, however, then you could correct me, in the spirit of truth, and that could also be a good thing.

My elephant looks nothing like the picture in the instructions. Sigh.

Yesterday was all work and almost no play, but it was good anyway.

I got my grades turned in, had an email from a student registered in one of my classes for next term, and had a look at the WebCT page. Scarcely more than a look, but I have to get on that. I hear that it’s 30 hours to set up a course.

The book proposal that Chanthaboune and I turned in a million years ago last summer got a response — a request for “another pass.” I was astonished, but we’re up for it. We just have to figure out how to get back into the file, since our free trial of the software expired.

I had what certainly appears to be an offer of a steady contract. Steady enough, in fact, that between it and my classes and my other ongoing contracts, I would be feeling very relaxed. No signatures yet, so I’m not counting my chickens, but it’s good to think about.

I got to the Amazon Vine page fast enough to request a very cool electronic gadget. At the forun, someone else was exulting about the same thing, saying, “Please, Amazon, don’t cancel it!” That’s what happened to me last time, so I’m once again not my counting my chickens, but it would make a nice Christmas present for me.

By noon today the rest of my household will all be through with school and work. We have a group optometrist’s appointment this morning. I’ve done most of the work I can do until people get back to me, and maybe they won’t. I am, in short, moving into holiday mode.

The song for the day is “A Virgin Unspotted,” which you probably haven’t been hearing on the radio a whole lot. Click on the title to hear the tune and see the sheet music. Here are the words. When you sing this, you need to sing the verse in a slower, softer way, and then when it gets to “Then let us be merry, put sorrow away!” you speed up a bit and get loud. The contrast as you got back and forth through all the verses is fun. It’s a nice, lilting tune, and would be pretty on your violin or harp.

We have presents under our tree. This is a new thing for us. We have had the custom of “Santa presents” unwrapped under the tree as if by magic on Christmas morning. For the past few years, I’ve been proposing that we could wrap the presents and put them under the tree so that I didn’t have to stay up till all hours on Christmas Eve.

#2 son has been adamantly opposed. This year, he agreed. Reluctantly, but still.

He got word yesterday that he has been accepted to the college of his choice. He is very excited about that. It makes up for any lingering sadness about having wrapped presents.

Yesterday was a morning of blogging punctuated by a very cold walk through the cemetery, then a tutoring appointment, then a meeting with The Computer Guy and the big game hunter. The hunter said he was very nervous about the meeting, and I suppose meeting with a couple of information workers could be pretty terrifying to someone who is only accustomed to hanging out with grizzly bears and wildebeests. I think his website is going to be fun to write.

After we saw him off, we had a bit of a discussion on Design and Life, I checked out the upcoming new assignment (a website that needs translating from Hong Kong English into American English and then — for a really exciting surprise right at the end — there’s a page in Spanish to translate into American English, but at least it doesn’t have the intermediate step of Hong Kong English), and I came home briefly and celebrated with #2 son. #1 son quickly pointed out that his school has a better football team.

Next was a lesson in how to count the notes in bell music.

I am now going to talk about music theory. The song of the day will be down at the bottom of the page if you want to skip along down.

Here’s the thing: music, as a general rule, is sort of mathematical. See the number 4 on the page of sheet music here?  When you see that, you can figure that there will be four counts in the measure (that’s the bit of music in between the vertical lines, like “Angels we have” right at the beginning).

You can have four 1-count notes, or you can have more shorter notes as in the “gloria” bits, or fewer longer notes as in the “deus” part, but it adds up to four. Note that in the last line there, the notes for “De-” are open, not filled in. That means they each get two counts. That will be important later in the story.

This is a simple piece of music, and it can definitely get way more complex, but there is that basic rule that there’s a limit to the number of counts you can get in a measure.

Bell music is different. See how at the top there you have those open, two-count notes right before all the shorter ones? If I were going to play the shorter ones, I would think that I should wait until after those long notes to play mine.

I would be wrong.

And down at the bottom, there’s an open note with no stem on it. That gets four counts, and yet it’s sitting there with all those other notes. Sometimes this happens when it’s the same note, too — like, there’ll be a four-count F and then after a bit there’ll be three one-count Fs, all in the same measure.

So Matt’s mom showed me yesterday how to disentangle the counts in bell music and guess what your particular bells’ counts are. Sometimes you have to count over from the right, but still, I can do that ahead of time and write it in. She also explained how to tell from the key signature whether I should play the B or the B flat.

This could make all the difference to my bell playing experience.

After that, we went caroling. There were a dozen of us, from the choir. If you want some really effectively musical caroling, a dozen people from a choir is quite a good recipe for success. I think we made everybody cry. It was fun, too.

Today’s song is “Come Ye Lofty, Come Ye Lowly,” a very effective song for caroling. There are several tunes, but the one you want — and the one you can hear at that link — is the very sprightly one arranged from an old Breton carol by our old friend Gustav Holst, a guy who knew how to have fun with a tune.

The link has usable sheet music, but you might enjoy this old piece here, showing children out caroling or possibly being very very quiet for fear that the wolves will come and eat them or something. I don’t know. I just think that they look pretty grim, and the boy in the back appears to be watching the landscape with some trepidation.

It doesn’t really fit with the song.

Yesterday I drove on the freeway to give my final exam, passing the rotting hulks of cars abandoned beside the road –

Possibly they were not rotting hulks, but there were three cars abandoned by the side of the road. There were also those little wisps of snow blowing around — does it do that where you live? Wraithlike bits of snow being blown across the road? That and people driving unusually fast because they’d heard that there was an enormous ice storm coming –

Possibly that also wasn’t true. However, I suffer from a slight and fairly well controlled case of agoraphobia. In order to understand this, it helps to use the terminology #2 son learned in AP Psych class: the dumb-dumb brain, the dumb-smart brain, and the smart-smart brain. You may normally use words like “hippocampus” or “hindbrain,” but go with me here, okay?

The dumb-dumb brain, in a phobic reaction, decides that there is horrible danger. Mine gets this idea when there are things like vague rumors that it might snow, or a lack of vertical elements in sight, or a curving overpass. The dumb-dumb brain begins shrieking about danger, like that robot in the old TV show which waved its arms and lumbered around croaking, “Danger! Danger!” Blood rushes to the muscles most needed for running away from saber-toothed cats or fighting off aggressive mastodons or whatever, adrenaline rushes around causing rapid heart beat and nausea — all that stuff.

Once the body is properly prepared for the old fight-or-flight, the dumb-smart brain begins looking around for the source of the danger, in order to know which direction to run in.

Of course, there is no danger. The dumb-dumb brain is perceiving danger where the dumb-smart brain and the smart-smart brain know there isn’t any.

Agoraphobia is characterized by the smart-smart brain’s jumping in and making stuff up. Or maybe it’s the dumb-smart brain that does this. Here’s how the discussion among the parts of the brain probably goes:

“Danger! Danger! Flee!”
“Huh? What? Where?”
“Fleee! Fleeee!”
“What’s going on over there? What’s with the nausea and icy hands and stuff?”
“Dunno. There’s obviously some horrible danger, but I can’t tell what it is.”
“Flee! Flee! Danger!”
“Well, we can’t just stand around doing nothing. There’s clearly some horrible danger.”
“Hmmm…. maybe all the other people are driving really fast because they’ve just heard on their radios that a dreadful ice storm is fast approaching and they want to get off the freeway before it hits.”
“Yeah, or maybe the wheels are falling off the car. Look, there’s another abandoned vehicle. Maybe it would be best to just stop right here.”
“Fleeee! Danger! Flee!”

You are welcome to use this scene in your next Mental Health Pageant.

Since I have Overcome Agoraphobia, I have my smart-smart brain announce to the others that there is no danger.

“Get a grip!” it says. “I understand that you’re scared, but we’ve already established that your being scared is meaningless.”
“Flee! Danger!”
“Dumb-smart brain, your job is to continue driving. Ignore the dumb-dumb brain entirely.”
“Hmmm… but what if this time, unlike all other times, it’s true that there is a terrible danger…”
“Drive. Do not slow down to 40 on the freeway. Stop thinking. I’ll do that part. Just keep the foot on the gas pedal.”
“Flee! Flee!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. We heard that.”

Of course, this is just a rough approximation. I think all communication among parts of the body is done with electrical impulses and chemicals and stuff, but that wouldn’t make very good dialogue.

Anyway, I got to the college, and stopped shaking and holding on to the railings by the time I reached the office where I signed my contract for the spring, and then I went on to the classroom to give the final. I got online once the students had begun, and did some work. I was checking a clients’ search results –

Now, I should explain that this is the classroom computer. There is a projector hooked up to it, and normally when I use it, I bring stuff up on the screen and project it on the wall for the class. We’ve used it to do group editing of papers in Word, and also to see ways of using search. In this case, the projector was not on.

This is good, because I was there at Google.com, and one of the top search results was Amazon.com. My client is #1, of course, but then comes Amazon. My client suspects that people choose to buy her  books at Amazon because they’re cheaper there, so I clicked on Amazon.com’s link to check the price and see.

Immediately, a video popped up. In the moments before I closed it, I saw that it was a porn video featuring a Sarah Palin impersonator.

“Impersonator” may be the wrong word. An actress dressed up as Sarah Palin? “Actress” may be the wrong word.

Anyway, I was struck by the oddness of pornography featuring a political candidate, and the cleverness of rigging the computer up to redirect in that way. I was also really grateful that the projector wasn’t on.

After the exam, I dashed off to a meeting. I endured the drive on the freeway, got back onto the surface roads, and was about to make my meeting exactly on time when I ran into a fire. I had to call and explain that there was a fire, I was having to go around it, sorry. Since I was on the only reasonable road, I and also everyone else had to go around through tiny little alleyways, and there was much creative driving going on as we all sought alternate routes. This, too, was mildly exciting, what with all the sirens.

Nothing else surprising happened for the whole rest of the day. This is good, because up to that point it felt as though I were having some kind of workout for the limbic system or something.

I don’t know what a limbic system is. Those who do will already have realized that.

The meeting went well, I added a couple of new jobs to my list, I went to the last Tuesday night class of the year with Partygirl, watched “The Bucket List” with my boys.

Now I have to grade those papers.

The song of the day is “How Great Our Joy,” a nice little German carol with the refrain “Joy! Joy! Joy!” which is much better than “Flee! Flee! Flee!”

Today I’m going up to the Next County to give my final exam and sign my Employee Memo, and that with any luck will be the last time I make that drive this year.

I’m also meeting with a web designer. We’re meeting at the public library, which may be all the rage among the Young Folk, for all I know. He suggested it. I told my daughter, my line of work would be a good one for meeting men, were I young and single. She suggested that her line of work is a good one for meeting men, but of course they’re all a) impoverished musicians, b) neurotic, or c) both. Computer guys, on the other hand, are nearly all young men in their twenties with no girlfriends, and yet they are a) solvent and indeed often prosperous or potentially so, and b) sane. I rather think the one I’m meeting today is handsome, but I have reached the age at which all young people look alike, so this may not be true. I’m just hoping that I have enough of a recollection of how this guy looks that I won’t have to approach lots of young men in the public library.

Though, if I were a young single girl, I could go up to all the handsome men there and say, “I’m meeting a guy here and I just remember that he’s handsome — is it you?” and perhaps collect phone numbers from a bunch of handsome literate men. And now I’m thinking that possibly eligible young men do not in fact hang out in the library much on weekday afternoons, so my notion of the library serving as a smorgasbord of cute guys may not be realistic. Scriveling would know.

In fact, as I recall, young single women don’t have any trouble meeting men anyway, but rather have trouble avoiding them, so I guess I have to take back the whole concept. If I come up with a good way for young single men to meet women without having to hang out in the public library on the off-chance, I’ll let you know.

I have an article on selling crafts online up at my marketing blog, and a lot of you helped me with it, for which many thanks. I thought about listing and linking all the people who helped me, but the list had gotten so long that it seemed impossible. It also is just a bare beginning of writing about all the topics that arose. If you care to go over and ask questions, then I’ll know what to write next from the enormous fund of info on the subject that I now have. If you want a link, let me know and I’ll use you as an example.

There is also over there an image I made with my Corel photo software. I have a couple of assignments requiring these skills, so I figure I should learn how to use it properly. Not that the image in question represents using it properly. I just did random stuff till I thought it looked kind of cool. Next I’ll do tutorials or read the book or something surprising like that. It would be easier if it were Adobe, since I’ve edited a bunch of tutorials on that, but who said things should be easy? The skilled among you can go over and laugh at it. My feelings won’t be hurt.

The song for today is “Gabriel’s Message,” which I’ll be singing in church on Christmas Eve. This was recorded by Sting, so it’s more well-known than your average Basque carol, but the tune is old and the words were written by Sabine Baring-Gould, whom you may remember as an expert on werewolves. You can hear a choir singing it here. It’s a good song. You could play it with a string quartet, or sing it with percussion, which is I think what I’m doing. I haven’t seen the music yet, though.

I’m seriously thinking about going back to bed. This never really works, of course. It is now only a few minutes till time to get up, after all, and if I go back to sleep now I’ll just oversleep and be groggy anyway.

“Love Came Down at Chistmas” is the song of the day. Here’s Jars of Clay doing it, complete with gratuitous knitting. You can send that to people as an ecard here. Here it is for guitar.

I learned that song at church yesterday. I’d never heard it before, but I really like it. It’s a very simple little thing, with words by 19th century poet Christina Rossetti. I think it would make a good round, so I would recommend that you sing it that way today, as you finish up your holiday preparations, if that’s what you’re doing.

Yesterday’s music was fun, apart of course from the bells. The bells could definitely have been worse, though, so I won’t complain. I’m up again at 4:19, but I’m trying really hard not to be bad-tempered this week. I’m getting up at this ungodly hour because my husband has been going in to work at 5:00 and I get up to make his coffee. Since he was expecting to be laid off from Thanksgiving on, I’m grateful. I think I did catch up on my sleep a bit this weekend.

I also did a bit of knitting. I’ve got the elephant done except for his hat, which is still being knitted.

It isn’t turning out to look like the picture. This isn’t the fault of the pattern, I’m sure.

My menfolks are being pretty scornful about this elephant. My husband pointed out that elephants have four legs and don’t stand upright, which seems unnecessarily pedantic. #1 son said it looks like an anteater, and then my husband suggested that it looked like an armadillo.

He then shared with us the best recipes for cooking armadillos. My husband is incapable of thinking of an animal without considering the best way to cook it, so we let that pass.

I also made more Chrismas cookies. These are Cherry Cordial Cookies, and they’re supposed to be made with the cookie press, in which case they’d look like flowers with the cherry in the center.

The cookie press wouldn’t behave itself. However, the dough, when I gave up and pushed it out of the press, was in a nice compact log, so I sliced it up like refrigerator cookies and had tidy half-moons.

Then I addressed Christmas cards.

Really, I think I have just about all my preparations completed. Except that I still haven’t thought of anything for my sister and her family. Since she lives in New Zealand, it may be too late for me to send her anything for Christmas and it may just have to be a New Year’s gift when at last I come up with something. Though I suppose I could send music electronically or something like that. Maybe Amazon ships to NZ.

#2 son cleaned the kitchen (it’s his job, but he doesn’t always do it, so that was good) and #1 son accepted a delegated job from me and did all the tedious parts of the 252 paragraphs assignment, so I can jump in this morning and finish that up. I have a tutoring gig this afternoon.

I’m determined to get to the gym today, and I may take a nap in there somewhere.

I’ve been reading The Unseen by T.L Hines. This is the story of Lucas, who lives in uninhabited areas of public buildings and spends most of his time watching people. You will be surprised to hear that he is a sympathetic character.

Lucas encounters others like him, and gets caught up in a major crime wave, plus high-level international spying, and if you’re a fan of thrillers and spy novels, you’ll like this book for the action and the cleverly twisted plot that supports that action. But there’s more to it than that. There’s also a science fiction component, as we learn about grotesque experiments performed on children who are sequestered and brain-washed for nefarious purposes at which we can only guess.

Until the end, of course. I really liked the ending, and I was impressed (even surprised) that Hines was able to pull everything together to create a satisfying ending from such a disparate collection of threads.

The characters are three dimensional and the technology is convincing (okay, right up to the pheremones research, which was a bit sketchy and “at this point a miracle occurs”).This isn’t a book for savoring beautfiul language, but it’s a good, gripping story.

I’m “reading” a book comprised of photos of every single thing the author ate for an entire year.

This book is limited as to plot.

However, I was wondering what it would be like. It seems like a monumental task, to remember to photograph everything you eat for a year.

So I did it for a day, yesterday. Here you go.

4:30 a.m., cinnamon pecan waffles with blueberries and tea, at home.

9:30 a.m, ham and cheese roll at home, with the boys.

12:30, quiche florentine, potatoes, sausage, bacon, melon, blueberry muffin, and coffee at the American Association of University Women brunch.

3:00 chocolate and tea, at home.

6:00 peanut butter sandwich, lettuce, and chips, at home.

9:00 Cheerios, raisins, and skim milk, at home.

It is true that I ate breakfast four times yesterday, lunch at dinner time, and no recognizable dinner. It wasn’t a normal day. On the other hand, when is it a normal day?

I think I might have been inflenced to eat cereal at the end of the day because the author of the book did so nearly every day.

This morning I’m singing the stunning “All My Heart This Night Rejoices” in church at the early service, and then Lessons and Carols at the late service. I’m looking forward to this very much. I’ve already told you about all the songs we’re singing today, I think, so today’s song will be “Quelle est cette odeur agreable,” a song I wish we were singing. It’s a truly gorgeous tune. Here’s the sheet music, in case you want to play it on your euphonium with the local brass quintet.

One of my clients is having a bit of a contretemps with a newsletter, and of course I have a project that I underestimated, so I did some work yesterday. I also did some reading and knitting and wrapping of presents. I went to a brunch, at which there was lots of conversation and an interesting presentation about schooling in Pakistan. I had phone conversations with my daughters and bought groceries and worked in a nap as well. There will have to be housework done, and it may have to be done today. But music first.