We refer to this process as "hitting the snooze button."

Also, after a long period of comatosity this morning while we brunched with Bob, she's refused outright to nap this afternoon. Instead, she's been lobbying for gazing adoringly at our faces (cute), crankily alerting us to imperfections in her diaper (necessary, though hardly endearing) and acting as an impromptu carpenters' level by creaking whenever she lists sideways (this gets old quickly).

Earlier in the week, I took a trip up to Helen Hayes — at the request of the staff — to talk with a patient with GBS. Had a long and cheery conversation with her, with the strange double-vision of seeing the same halls and rooms I'd lived in through her eyes. She seemed to me to be in great shape, soon to return to school and very upbeat about her recovery. We talked about feeling constantly warm, foot pain, how friends react to odd and prolonged illness, and about the survivors' guilt of the recovering paralytic amidst slowly- or non-recovering people.

On the way out, however, I ran into the family of another patient there with GBS: a guy who's not nearly so sanguine. Found myself talking with him about how frustrating the relentless optimism of one's family is while having to fight back the reflexive urge to tell him that he'd certainly get better from where he is now. Also found myself thinking about how, when I'd been at HHH for one week, I'd practiced a sort of … "active acceptance" of where I was, right then. I couldn't sit up, it hurt to lie on my back, I was still sporting an active tracheostomy… and every single day I really tried not to look any farther ahead than that evening. Or lunch, some days. Had I looked any farther out, I'd have felt astoundingly helpless in the face of all that unknown.

And as to feeling helpless… Last night, on the way home from Queens, we had a very minor fender bender. We were stopped at a stoplight and a car tapped us from behind at probably 3 mph, no more. It was a solid jolt, though, and it startled the hell out of us and immediately woke Piper to squalling, dozing in her car seat. We made sure she was okay, got out, looked over the damage (nearly nothing on our car, and some nasty crunching on the grille of the ancient P.o.S. that had hit us), exchanged numbers with the driver, and weighed whether or not to call the cops and file an accident report, ultimately deciding not to. (The folks who hit us seemed eager, to say the least, not to have to involve the police or insurance, and since the damage to our fender looked minimal, we decided to take their offer of having our bumper fixed at their expense and not sit around waiting for police and paperwork. Naïve, maybe, but we'd had a long day and just wanted to go home and go to bed at that point.)

As we drove home, every other car on the road looked like a threat. All the vehicular motion around us was menacing, and the walls of our car felt paper thin. Piper was cranky and hungry, and her announcing this kept our nerves jangling. (I craned my arm around and volunteered my pinky finger as an impromptu pacifier, with which she happily calmed down, though my shoulder was not crazy about the angle of exertion required.) Got home, found a parking spot, and called the pediatrician just in case. They asked us some behavioral questions, wanted to make sure the latch on Piper's abdomen hadn't bruised her, wanted to make sure she wasn't concussed, and then confirmed what we already intuitively felt like: she was fine.

That ride home, however, where we realized just how helpless we were before whatever the world threw at us, has stayed with me today. We went out walking to brunch; I jumped when cars drove by. A bee flirted with Bob and Bob's breakfast at the table; I wondered where my long-expired epi-pen is living. It's a hard thing, recognizing and accepting the limits of one's power in the world, and it's clearly something that needs to be practiced often if one is to retain calm in the face of motion, whether too much or not enough.

For all we know it's plate tectonics she's objecting to for 3-4 minutes at a stretch, or gerrymandering, or Orly Taitz, but when we know she's well-fed, changed, not too warm and not too cool… at that point we pretty much resort to gentle mockery (at her) and going on with our lives (us). We've had to make some modifications — I ate my dinner standing up and bouncing with Piper wrapped to my chest and my dessert leaning back at a slight angle with Piper in full-on space heater mode, crisping all my chest hair with her mysterious heat emanations — but hey, tonight we managed to microwave leftovers for dinner and watch at least half of Harry Potter and the Even Longer Movie Than The Last One. Now we're shoving the piles of clutter out of our way and collapsing into bed. Go us.

There's nothing quite like having friends with a one-year-old come and stay for the weekend to really bring home the fact that we've invited a tasmanian devil crossed with a whirlwind into our lives. Tim, Rachel, and Adi Diego were marvelous houseguests, and my early morning walks with Adi utterly awesome. I'm really psyched to do this with our own creature.

I'm thankful for my wife, my family both distant and close, the bounty that New York provides, and for having a few days where I'm neither stressed nor procrastinating about writing assignments. (Both reactions still all too common, I'm afraid.)

Oh, and there'll be six of us: me, Kate, my mom and Gil, a friend from the J-school and her visiting mother. Unless my friend doesn't show, in which case there'll only be the four of us. Lordy, the leftovers.

In the meantime, it may (or may not) say something about my mental state that this provided a much needed morning guffaw, alongside my daily cup of Irish Breakfast tea.

Christmas was small this year, with my mother, stepfather, uncle Ed, cousin Graham, and uncle's fiancee Pam — we had Christmas Eve in Norwich at my uncle's house, and Christmas Day here at our place. We cooked enough food for an army despite there being only seven of us; it's a Piper family trait to make sure there's enough food for three times the gathering size. My mom brought one of the turkeys she'd raised (19 pounds!) and despite some concerns about it fitting in the Gaggeneau oven, we managed to fit it in, slow-cook it, and have it for dinner, along with: shredded brussels sprouts with poppyseeds, white wine, and lemon juice; garlic mashed potatoes; pan gravy; spicy oven-roasted green beans; "Multicultural stuffing"; broccoli, and my mom's passionfruit hollandaise. We used our wedding china for the first time and argued about whether the label "dishwasher safe" (which appears on the bottom of every piece) actually meant it would be okay to put the dishes in the dishwasher set on the "Light/China" setting and using only a teaspoon of detergent. After some minutes of debate, Graham finally settled things by insisting on doing the dishes himself, by hand, if it would make us shut up about the dishwasher.

New Year's in New Orleans will require another post, since I've got pictures to upload.

Twelfth Night conveniently fell on a Friday night this year, but we had a fairly small turnout. The benefit of this meant we managed to lever the party out of the kitchen and into the living room, where we lit a fire despite the 50-degree weather outside. Stayed up talking about tax policies and local gossip; an excellent year's party.

Marzi's memorial service was this past weekend. My family asked me to introduce the chanty singers with whom my grandmother sang for years, stand and explain how a Quaker memorial service works, help assemble the slideshow with which we ended the service, and deal with the technical requirements. Busy weekend, but ultimately a fine ceremony, complete with the tears and laughter I think of as a hallmark of honest memorial services.

Last night, on Kesaya's recommendation, Kate, Chris, Lafayette and I went to dinner and to see "this journalist who was embedded in Iraq." "This journalist" turned out to be Jerry Quickley: performance poet, hip-hop artist, Pacifica Radio reporter, and serious social activist. "Live from the Front" documented his first trip to Bagdhad, which culminated in a nightmarish near-death deportation two days after the US started bombing. As I said to Kate in the car, coming home: "I don't think I'll ever be a war correspondent, but his obvious commitment to social change and his willingness to work outside of major media channels are both absolutely attitudes I agree with." Some truly awesome poems in the show. No Q&A afterwards, though.

3 of my 4 applications for journalism school are away, and the last one is just waiting on the printed-on-paper recommendations, which I'll collect from my recommenders next week and mail into BU. Then I'll be taking a weekend's trip to NYC to take Columbia's proctored writing test and check out NYU in person, and after that, waiting for acceptance/rejection letters and for inspiration about which school is my first choice. The more I look at any single program, the more I like it; unless I only get into one school, though, I'm going to need to prioritize them.

Glaze ice over a scanty, uneven, half-inch of snow. That's what's passing for winter right now.

I'm about to drive down to Boston, this morning. It wasn't a surprise, exactly; she's been more fragile than usual for about a year. It wasn't expected, though, either, since we were making plans to have her up here for Christmas.

I just feel … quiet, right now.

We both fell into our bed as exhausted as corpses. Friday night we'd gone to dinner in Boston with my aunt and uncle at Excelsior. The dinners I've had in the past with them have usually lasted 3 hours at a minimum, and involve staggering amounts of bombastic conversation, attention to the both the finicky minutiae of each dish along with just how unbelievably sexy it is, and of course, bottles and bottles of wine (Terry befriends every sommelier everywhere, invariably finding the gems in their cellar) which magically don't make us drunk, since we're inevitably talking and eating away some good part of the alcohol.

I started with pan-seared scallops over a little arugula drizzled with red-pepper puree and what the restaurant called "liquid corn on the cob." Pepper on the scallops, peppery arugula, a small amount of heat with the sweet, flame-red pepper puree… it was hands down the highlight of the meal for me. Kate's caesar salad with duck prosciutto and green-peppercorn anchovy dressing came in a snowdrift of microplaned parmesan, and married crunchy with creamy, vegetal with salt — utterly delicious. Both Karen and Terry had bacon-wrapped softshell crabs, with a little corn flan next to them; I tried the flan, which had just the right texture, smack in the middle between creamy and firm. Then some little demitasse cups of truffled asparagus vichyssoise while Terry tucked into lobster schnitzel. (Gruner Veltliner to go with the asparagus, some gorgeous straw-colored riesling to go with the starters — I didn't take notes on the wines. In hindsight, dumb.)

For mains, I had wild chinook salmon with broccolini, crab raviolis, and an awesome seafood broth called "nage", which was a new term to me. Salmon was tasty but nothing radical; the raviolis and broth, though, were rich and excellent. Kate had NZ lamb and pearl barley risotto with one of the prettiest platings I've seen in quite a while: a half-circle of syrah reduction completed with a brilliant green pepper sauce and a verticla ring of light, almost-crepe-like flatbread. The plate was full of circles.

Then desserts (german chocolate cake and a trio of pot de cremes: brown sugar, grainy chocolate, and silky lemon) and hugs by the car, and … the drive home. Kate and I left the restaurant at 9:30, talked our way up to the intersection of 93/95, and then Kate dropped her seat back and tried to sleep, since she knew she had to get up at 5:30 the next morning. I sat, my belly full of food, wine, and coffee, and mused on the week in Boston, the week in the world, the silence and stillness of the highway at 75 mph, how long it'd be until we got home… and then, out of nowhere, BEEEP. My car has a squealing warning for when one is running low on either of two critical fluids: gas, about which I understand some urgency, and windshield washer fluid, which I don't. Guess which one I was low on! Kate stirs, mumbles, and I hope that the hill I'm on will be the last one which will move the windshield washer fluid this much. No such luck. 10 minutes later, BEEEEP. So I stop in Contoocook to slosh some blue fluid into my car and some yellow fluid out of me, and then proceed home without incident.

Saturday morning, though, was hard. Kate had to get up to go to work, and I mostly got up with her, both of us still feeling full, me feeling the aftereffects of the caffeinated drive home, and Kate feeling the aftereffects of having drunk a lot more wine than usual. I didn't feel at all like eating until close to dinner time; late sushi Thursday night and late dinner Friday night makes Jack's stomach decide to go on strike and raise picket signs.

Went to bed at 10:30 last night and completely forgot that I had work to do at midnight. Thankfully Regis called the house and Kate, who doesn't sleep with earplugs, woke up enough to wake me up enough to stumble downstairs and do it. Except then I couldn't get back to sleep, and had weird half-dozing dreams about Red-Dawn scenarios where the North Koreans and Russians were invading my home town, and I was a high school student who had to get out before the invaders did. Bizarre.

Now I've showered, eaten, done my morning pages, and am considering what to do with the day. Pick blueberries? Go for a long bike ride? Put on socks, since my toes are cold? Continue learning Photoshop by tuning up the awesomest picture of Kate? The world is my oyster, today. I just wish the first idea which kept coming to mind wasn't "Nap."