It is almost midnight. Monday is about to segue into Tuesday, and I have had just enough red wine to the point where the warm itchy glow is radiating through me, a hug of inflammation, a Cabernet cardigan. Today was a banner day. If every day were like today, I may very well have transcended this mortal coil and graduated to nirvana. The peace and happiness I’m feeling right now can’t even be completely attributed to the wine, although that certainly helps. A quick catch-up,

All quiet. The sun peeks through the blinds like a tentative visitor. It woke me from my ravenous slumber and I stumbled downstairs to put on the kettle, eyes swollen with sleep, body practically levitating from the happiness that is ten hours of shut-eye and an obligation-free weekend. Yesterday as the snow fell I morphed into a pajama-clad creature of productivity, vacuuming, dusting, cooking, practicing, quietly gulping pot after pot of tea with "Making a Murderer" as inte

Faithful readers (all two and a half of them) of this word receptacle will recall how I tend to wax romantic about snow days. That proclivity has not diminished; if anything, it's grown even stronger, inversely proportional to my aversion of late to all other things romantic. The snow day is the mistress of the status quo--an affair with one's regularly scheduled life, deliciously clandestine, like cheating time itself. Stolen solitude. The snow hasn't yet begun, but the air

Lazy days in Richmond filled with beer and Malaysian ramen and tater tots and excellent friends gave way to stunning alpine vistas and playing music under tents, in the open air, mornings spent traipsing around the Blue Ridge Mountains, maybe a rehearsal or two in the afternoon, some reading by the pool, then retreating in the gray crepuscule to your sprawling log cabin in the woods (built ca. 1837) for simmering mugs of spiced tea and an immodest dose of HGTV. Returning to B

Ah, the return of the summer schedule. That harried, underfed me in my last post is but a distant unrecognizable memory, dethroned by a lazy, hedonistic thrill-seeker with summer fever and boatloads of free time. (Thrill-seeker is perhaps a bit of a rhetorical stretch, since my idea of thrilling is baking pies while top-lung-jamming out to Stevie Wonder, and having enough time in my day to read multiple New Yorker articles.) Catching up with old friends, making new ones, eati

Snow days are magical time-stopping devices that halt all social and work obligations, forcing one to hunker down in one's cozy home with a steaming mug of tea and a pile of work and chores that now miraculously have time to get done. One rejoices in one's mandatory hermitude. (Am I the only one who finds the pronoun form of "one" awkward and antiquated?) Now let's hope I don't spend this frozen moment in time (pun only partially intended) going down the rabbit hole of bad TV