Getting punched

Punch is what children drink at parties. Punch is something harmless, usually. Well there was that one time at the Jim Jones/People’s Temple theme party back in college where we added lots of vodka and spray painted cars and buildings on the way home and thought we’d dreamt it until we saw the building a couple days later and a car drove by and proved we hadn’t.

Here, though. Punch is part of winter. In the Christmas season, most town squares have little villages of little wooden huts before which you can stand around tables drinking mugs of mulled wine or punch. Charities sell the stuff. I had my first punch last night with Alpha and the girls. I ordered a Feuerengel Punch. “Fire Angel Punch”. Beta said it must be the best because it was the most expensive. I asked the guy what it was and he said, “a little stronger.” What he did when I paid was pour me a regular punch – which is hot – and then added another shot of rum to it.

You wouldn’t want to drive after even one of those punches. It’s quite a nice tradition. The square is decorated in Christmas fashion, with lights and boughs and things. Some of the stands sell ornaments or other crappy doo-dads and knick-knacks. And people in winter dress are standing around, their breath condensing around them, getting shitfaced on punch and mulled wine as their young children tug on them and pull on them and whine that they want to finally ride on the carousel finally you promised.

But we stopped at one (Alpha had a mulled wine, Beta a Kinderpunch, Gamma too I guess) and had Japanese food instead, at the local Japanese restaurant, which of course is run by a Chinese couple.

Move along, nothing to see here

Hello to everyone coming here from Blogdex today. Have some Christmas cookies, careful of the poinsettia. Feral Living relaunched a year ago today apparently, and so we’re on the Blogdex “A Year Ago Today” link list in the sidebar because of the design theft hoax back then. Go buy some shit at the store, how about that?

    The redesign hoax was mostly D’s idea, anyway, the clever bits at least. So if you want clever go to his site instead.

Caught in traffic

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.

The Zen of Neskafkafe

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.

There’s this field (correction)

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.

There’s this field see

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.