What I found:

when I was cleaning out a repository of unknown papers and magazines and notebooks and other detritus whence I know not. In addition to birthday cards, letters, a torn-out profile of Alec Baldwin, photographs, tarot cards, little notebooks, I found these:

a notebook with the menu of what we ate at the Mermaid Cafe
 on Dame Street in Dublin. 

a letter sent to me from The Dominican Republic

a graduation announcement from my daughter-in-law

the flyer I made for my son's farewell open house--
right before he went to Singapore

a sweet letter that made me cry, written
by my daughter when she was organizing and cleaning
my kitchen as a Mother's Day present

Happy Thanksgiving! Love, William

Ticket stub from when Dr. Write and I
were in New York at AWP, and we went to see
Stoppard, and we both cried

'the Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage
over which we have had an opportunity to forget
the old world and its institutions.' from 'Walking,'
H.D. Thoreau. I saw this manuscript, written
in Thoreau's hand, in the Concord Public Library.

a merit badge that never found its way to a sash.

My study is again a ruin.

Today I washed the holiday tablecloth. I lit the Christmas tree for what I hope will be the last time, although I really can't say for sure. I still have a little gift bag that has three bottles of glitter and a glue pen, which I used again today to inscribe a birthday card for a one year old boy.

However, the truest measure of whether the holidays are over is my study, which is a disaster. Just as it is every January.

That's because when it was December, time to get the rest of the house all gussied up and sparkly, it happened also to be Old Semester Season, when all sorts of mad Old Semester work needs to be accomplished. Uncoincidentally, that means that there's a massive and ever-increasing accumulation of life-stuff, like bills and magazines and papers and books, occupying surfaces such as the kitchen table and the living room, which have to be moved somewhere to make space for the sparkly. Do these things have actual places? Where they, you know, belong? Probably, sure. But to put them in those places requires thinking, and--at least as I remember it--we were in a big hurry to get that damn sparkle on.

I've been reading--well, at least it's on my bedside table--The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have in mind a life-changing bout of getting rid of things, and then after that, a life-changing bout of organizing. Life-changing, you see, not just figuring out where three bottles of glitter and a glue pen go. In the matter of resolving the ruin that is my study, I will settle for nothing less than total transformation!

Which is why I will be working on my syllabus and an educational comic and a re-narration of a screencast and another syllabus in squalor tomorrow. Because total transformation takes time, and January is New Semesterville. New Semesterville will be here in a red hot minute, so total transformation will just have to wait.

My priorities may be out of whack.

For the past three weeks, we've had some weird electrical action at our house--I'd turn on the microwave, the lights all along the back wall of the house, but only upstairs, would go out. Plug my laptop into a powerstrip, turn on the kitchen light, bathroom light, whatever. The lights would go out, always along the back wall of the house. They'd usually come back on in a minute, maybe, or with a little sleight of hand with the breakers. A little light cursing, perhaps. Anyway, it was clear that we needed a wizard, or an electrician.

So we called the guy who had replaced four breakers a few months back, a fine young man, but he wasn't going to be able to pencil us in until next week. He did have a referral for another electrician, though, a young man with the same surname as the people from whom we bought our house. So we gave him a call. Sure, he could come, and where did we live? When we told him the address, he said, "You're kidding." Indeed, the young electrician was one of the four sons of the family who once owned our house.
Today, which was the appointed day, I came home after an emergency trip to Target (it's positively shocking how many such emergencies there are!) with a new and more handsome throw to cover some of Bruiser's finest furniture-nibbling, as well as a lovely throw pillow that went with it. Also, two new poinsettias. It's gorgeous. Then, I went through the entire upstairs and picked stuff up, put clean dishes away, cleaned off the dining room table (aka, the repository of everything) and put down the new holiday table runner, straightened, wiped, emptied. And all of this? was so the young electrician wouldn't go home and tell his mom that their once pristine home had turned into a sty, inhabited by those inveterate slobs to whom they sold it.

In other news: The cheap cookie press I bought did not stand up to the pressure of my probably too-stiff cookie dough. Alas. Ever resourceful, I turned the dough into slice-and-bake rolls, with colored sugar on the outside. Spritz cookies will have to wait for another day, a softer dough, or a sturdier cookie press.

My manuscript was a "strong semifinalist" in a big contest. That's got to be a good thing, right?

The Utah Jazz are imploding.

(That's our new couch above, with the draperies pulled modestly to the side; this removal will only occur for parties and special events. Also, photo opportunities. The draperies are, of course, a precaution against more furniture nibbling.)