There at the light on the way to Beta’s school this morning, still dark out, car windows crusty and filmed with road filth, window-washer-squirter fluid all used up, there, in the car next to me, going the other way, also stopped at a different light: a smile! Just at the edge of peripheral vision, nearly missed. Takes a second to realize what it is. Look back: there it is again, and sweet blue eyes too. So I gave it back.

A man here in the office was highly amused yesterday at the way I make coffee: take the lid off the jar of instant coffee, dump crystals into “SOMEONE WENT TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MUG” mug, add water.

“It is the right amount of coffee?” he asked.

“Just over two spoons,” I said.

Because it is. I don’t have to measure anymore. I don need no steenkin spoon. Do something a dozen times a day for over ten years and it acquires a certain automaticism. Precisely like those Zen guys doing archery with those long bows of theirs and baggy pants. I am one with the mug and the crystals.

In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you that I was dismayed to notice this morning on my way to work that the field I described in the post below was not the field I meant. That is, the field I was imagining as I wrote that post comes about half a mile before the field I’ve been observing all this time. Sorry for any inconvenience this mix-up may have caused.

On the way to work. Maybe you have one like it. Today it was snowy, wet under an inch of melting wet snow, more coming down steadily. Monday it was bare, first snow falling, bare and cold. Before, it was in a field of fog and mysterious and it has been many things. Flooded for one, earlier in the year. Covered in fresh wheat sprouts in spring, tall green stalks of wheat in the breeze later on, morning sun glittering on dew. Ripe tawny wheat, then busy with the thresher and the guy driving the tractor beside it. Stubble. During the flooding there was a deer that stood in the field every morning. Every day the field is different. It doesn’t ask you what have you done with your life either. It’s just different every day.

If hackers ruled the world.

Some neat Photoshop contest results if you are bored.

Life reminds me of Fight Club the way it beats you up. Sometimes you just have to take it, you have no other option. When it became inevitable for me to attend training sessions for the old guys’ rowing team I accepted my fate, packed my athletic bag with a towel and extra tee shirt and went to the session. No, wait, first I had my cello lesson, where my instructor told me not to be so impatient with myself and not to get so mad at myself so fast.

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Got an inch or so last night of the wet stuff, good for snowballs and tiny snowmen. Not so hot for driving, so the ride to work took longer but that was okay because I had just that much longer to listen to Austrian radio, which is as scintillating as you could imagine. At one point an announcer, she does the traffic news and celebrity gossip, sang a Christmas carol. The DJ joined in. One of them played the guitar as well. Someone once said he imagined me here, doing a lot of singing with the family, due to the Sound of Music image thing. And we do sing quite a bit, especially around Christmas, but not in harmony and not lined up and not in uniforms. We sit down around the table and light the advent wreath – the candles on the wreath that is, between one and four depending on which week of advent it is – and sing. Except yesterday evening, we’d been sitting around the woodstove all day warming up and were so relaxed by the time we lit the candles that we blew them out again after fifteen minutes or so, too lazy to sing anything.