Left for work early again today, drove Beta to the train station. Light was good, days are getting longer, it was nice to be able to see things on the way to the office again, like fields covered in snow, patches of fog, a sky freezing cold and nearly white, tail end of a sunrise fading from purple to orange, icicles a meter long (that’s about 39 inches for those of you etc etc) hanging from the freeway overpasses.

Yes, it’s been good icicle weather. Damn, icicle is one of those words, the more you look at it, the more it looks like a spelling error.

Icicle, icicle, icicle, icicle. Icicleicicleicicleicicleicicleicicle.

It’s fasting season, so everyone is eating herring here today, except me. My sweetie is out of town for a week, it’s just me and the kids, and the grandparents. Oh and the cats. Mother-in-law emphasized last night, then emphatically reiterated, the importance, the essential necessity, that I not pack the kids any meat products or by-products in their school lunches this morning. So they got bread-and-butter, and strawberries (you’d think strawberries out of season would be more luxurious and non-fasting than bologna) and carrot sticks, because they always get carrot sticks. Gamma feeds them to her friends in school, or trades them for sweets. Not sure what Beta now does with hers. In grade school she also distributed them. I kept her entire class in carrot sticks.

Kids who distribute carrot sticks are high up in the pecking order in Austrian schools, or something. They also buy friends with the chocolate chip cookies I sometimes bake.

So anyway, no bologna so God is happy. Or at least my mother-in-law. Is there a difference?