A Warm Winter's Day

It's another grey, damp day in December, with temperatures not much lower than the forties or fifties and a veil of moisture in the air, dulling the line of the sky. Last year around this time, I remember walking out into the cold air, feeling it hit my skin and solidify my mind into these neat little crystals of thought. Last year, I remember walking around a cemetery in snow drifts, struggling just to breathe against the wind, and skies a permanent blue because the air wasn't warm enough to hold clouds. That's proper winter.

This year, it's just grey and moist. Good weather for a sinus infection. Yay, global warming.

Despite that, I've been very content over the past week, due in no small part to the fact that a friend I love very much is coming to stay with me soon. And because we've actually both taken a proper amount of time off to enjoy each other's company, so we're not rushing to cram a proper visit into a short period of time. Makes me smile every time I think about it.

Also, the benefit went well. We raised about a thousand dollars for Tantalus, and more just keeps coming in. If you haven't been able to donate or whatnot, please do. So we can do brilliant theatre.

Wandering Books
While tooling around on the Web today, I visited Jonathan Carroll's site and was happy to see that he has been updating it and even has a blog, which is, like most of what he writes, really good. On it, I found a link to bookcrossing.com, whose goal is, "to make the whole world a library. Book Crossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind." The idea is to leave a book that's moved you in a public place for someone else to pick up. That person does likewise and so on and so forth. You can track your book's progress via a sticker that the site provides. It's a brilliant idea; I think I'll start doing that, at once.

For those of you who don't know him, Jonathan Carroll is an author. His books are largely slipstream fantasies--dreamscapes glazed upon ordinary life. They're about the magic of true love and imagination, philosophy, talking dogs, and heroes/heroines who eat far more Sachertorte than is probably healthy for any human being to consume. I can't recommend him enough. Especially his book White Apples.