What'd did I to do today?

Woke up this morning with no real plan for the day at all. I’d toyed with going snowboarding with Joachim, but a combination of Glen’s cold (currently plaguing Joachim) and Joachim’s habit of leaving his cellphone inaudibly sitting on his bed met the warm front of my inertia at doing a day of painful snowboard-learning alone. I started the no real plan at all.

Here, in no particular order, then, was my day:

• Woke up around 8 out of a dream about golfing. (?)

• Breakfasted on cold cereal (I’m out of yogurt, and oatmeal with no yogurt would be sad, indeed). Though I just realized I’ve got some leftover heavy cream which would go very nicely on oatmeal. Maybe tomorrow morning.

• Read the first third of Harold McGee’s The Curious Cook , which has some pretty cool stuff in it, including the tip to make hollandaise without a blender, in a pan, in 5 minutes of stirring.

• Ate boxed indian food for lunch. Not bad.

• Played our European audio diaries and field sound recordings off of several minidiscs and into my computer, preparatory to editting them and trying to get myself more conversant with Audacity .

• Discovered that postfix had wedged during our overnight backups and left an unkillable smtpd listener listening on port 25 which prevented postfix from starting. Exerted The Big Hammer Technique and rebooted eero, sigh. About once in 9 months it does this, and it annoys me.

• Had nice conversations with Luke, Brian, and my mother.

• Fought with and cursed at mail-merges, mysterious repaginations, clumsy layout tools, and other blemishes in Microsoft Word while buggering up the first two print runs of mailing labels for our save-the-date cards.

• Finally succeeded in printing out a correct run, continuing to fret about costs, invite lists, whether people will show up, whether everyone will show up, whether those people not invited will understand… bah. Enough. The list is set, as is our budget. I need to not worry at this any more.

• Went out walking to hand deliver the cards destined for our neighbors on Bean Road. Late, late afternoon, and the temperature outside was in the single digits. Cold enough that the snow that fell overnight has remained light and fluffy, rather than mushy and soggy. I missed my beard (in a fit of “what am I doing with my life, really?” the other day, I shaved my full beard back down to the VanDyke I usually have) as the sides of my face chapped in the wind, but once I got my blood moving, walking felt great. Hands and feet stayed warm, and there was enough reflected sunlight to keep the road lit. Dropped the Nodas’ card off in Mayme’s hands and managed to leave after only 5 minutes in her mudroom – a new record! – to go drop off Marc and Jill’s. Talked with them for another 5 minutes, and by the time I went back outside, the sunlight had gone and the half-moon we’ve got now sprayed the road with light like Pollack. Easy walk back, the moonlight on the sanded, snowy road creating the illusion that I was walking on top of an endless surface of cappucino-foamed milk, on cinnamon sprinkles. But colder.

• Managed (albeit barely) to hold to my goal of not playing Halo2 until my play-date with Luke, later tonight.

Now I’m just waiting for Kate to call and say she’s leaving the hospital (last night she didn’t get home until 9:15, so I’m not starting dinner until she calls, sigh.