I'm so glad you had a great Christmas! Me too. I got a lot of really nice things for my kitchen, including a super nice frying pan and some sharp knives. I also got some great Legos and TV shows on DVD. Everyone loved the presents I gave them, which is actually my favorite part.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your break!

Glad you got to enjoy some hockey on your break! You really deserved a nice break so I am glad you got one. Well, hell, we all deserved a nice break didn't we?

I can't believe the testimonial you did for me. You made my day! Thanks!!

so far so good...
but things have been hectic!

happy to hear you had a great christmas

I'm so glad that the holiday now brings you joy! I had a wonderful Xmas myself---seeing friends & family back in New Jersey was terrific. We even were able to get a few pictures which included my parents, my brother and his fiance, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephews, my dog-in-law, and myself. Call it sappy if you will, but these rare instances of comprehensive family gathering (next expected to occur at my brother's wedding in November) are nothing but a joy.

Funny how when YOU say it, it seems soooooooooooo different than when the same idea comes from me.

Ooh, Canucks game, eh? I'd forgotten that you were a hockey fan!

I had a decent time. Faaaar away from home in Puerto Rico with the boy's family.

We're heading home today, and I'm wearing jeans for the first time in nearly two weeks

I love zoolander, it rocks my socks off. I'm so really, really, really, really, really, really, fantasticaly good looking.

I'm reading for fun mostly, but if I read a lot of history it will help me out at work anyway. I've been keeping up with it since Christmas, but once I start back at work I know it will be really difficult to do.

Running is a hard hobby to get used to. I was doing it for a while but it hurt my right leg after a while, it was just so much easier to sit around with a book I figure. You should knit and we'll have a throwdown, showdown showing everybody whose the best knitter around.

Or we could complare scarfs?

I stayed home and read on new years...
a true sign that i'm getting old!

i partied a bit the next day to make up for it though
i hope you feel better soon!

being sick is no way to start off the new years... take some zinc and vitamin c ...

and i'm sounding way too maternal there huh?

I'm glad you got spoiled this year. You work hard, you deserve it!

I know the Legos you're talking about. I can't afford them, but they're really cool. I have some of the smaller sets from that line though.

The first day of the new year was amazing, but it's all been downhill from there. I was on vacation for a week, but all that work was just right here waiting for me when I got back. Now I'm working late nights just to catch back up. I guess it was worth it though. It was nice to have some time off.

I hope you're enjoying your time off! You need to be nice and relaxed so when you go back to class, you can do so with gusto!

It was okay. There were more guests than hosts, which means it was a success!

Looking forward to the new year. Can't wait to see what happens tomorrow!

not yet but i will make sure to do some blue steel next time. I was doing blue steel and magnum in the bar on hogmany

Hi! Yeah, as a matter of fact it was the blueberry muffin scarf. Twinkie did an amazing job, and Sarah absolutely loves it. She wears it around all over the place. I'm really glad it went over so we'll, and that Twinkie was willing ot help me out.

I'm glad to hear your semester is going well (although not so glad to hear that your vacation is over ) . I'm really sorry to hear that you're sick though. That's the worst. I've been sick a lot this year, and it's tought to have to work, or learn, while sick. I even got sick (allergies) Christmas night and ended up sleep almost 19 hours straight!

I hope you feel better soon! Study hard, smarty!

Nothing in particular happens tomorrow! It's ... probably one of the strangest feelings of positivity I've felt in my life, if that makes any sense at all

Love and peace and boobies indeed

i havent made any resolutions so far...
i dont like putting that kind of pressure on myself!

maybe just the usual?
try to get rid of ten pounds... drink a little less?
maybe just try and enjoy life a little more..
how bout you?

Yes, I'm a hockey fan from way back. I'd try to go to a few Canucks game each year if it were a little easier for a lazy bum like myself. I *am* going to be going to the Canadian junior hockey championships in Vancouver in May (thanks to a friend of mine who has wanted to go to them for a while now). Am I droning? I think that I am.

One downside of living in the West is that I don't see my family as often as I'd like. Naturally, they should all move closer to me, but they haven't yet realised that it's all about me.

Why, it's a scarf to keep your blueberry muffins warm, of course!


Seriously though, if you check out Twinkie's journal a couple of entries back (or I suppose look in her pics), you can see the actual scarf. It's just a scarf made from a series of crocheted muffins. I was so psyched about it, and thankfully so was Sarah.

I hope you're at least starting to feel better. Take care of yourself!

Oh wow! I'm so glad you asked me this! I can think of a couple of poems that I really like that have to deal with health!

Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips" is about a stay in a psych ward. This is one of my absolute favorite poems, and one of the lines sparked the perfect idea for my eventual chestpiece. Can you tell which one?

Also Plath, "Fever 103 Degrees."

Ted Hughes, her husband, may also have some poems about hospital stays, somewhere in the book Birthday Letters.

Elizabeth Bishop has a very famous famous poem called "In the Waiting Room." It's brilliant.

Robert Lowell wrote "During Fever," which is mostly about his mother, but also "Myopia," "Eye and Tooth," "Waking in the Blue," again about a hospitalization after mental illness, and "Home after Three Months Away," about returning after hospitalization. These poems are in the double volume of Life Studies/For the Union Dead, and you might be able to find one or two online. Or, if you find one particularly compelling, I can transcribe it.

... A lot of my favorite poets were very very crazy. Love it.


Does that set you on a pretty good path? I had a lot of fun

There's a strange, inherent link between madness and creativity -- if I were smarter, I would have gone on to research it. Now that I'm stable, I worry that my work doesn't have the same spark ... but I know I couldn't live without it, so I keep writing That's what it comes down to, ultimately!

I completely missed the "aging" part of the assignment! Eeep! I was just so excited to talk about poetry for a while Lemme see if I can find something .... This site seems to have a lot of information .... then there's the famous "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," which Dylan Thomas wrote about his dying father. Here's a Yeats poem about aging, but watch out! It's on a Geocities site! (Popups galore!) Rilke has a poem, "Song of the Widow," which is particularly poignant in the opening lines ....

Sylvia Plath doesn't have many poems about aging, since she died so young! But she does have one about "Thalidomide."

Ah, poetry! (And the line was, "A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck." )

That one sounds perfect

Do you get to memorize and recite it? Because it's so bouncy and wonderful!

Thanks for the vote of confidence. It's going better than expected and I should be done with my first scarf rather soon. It's green, and oddly lopsided and it's also full of these weird holes. I'm not sure what that's called but for myself I'll call it "progress"

I liked "Project X" too..

and you may consider yourself a nerd,
but keep in mind..
your a hot nerd.
totally different ballgame

New Years Eve is to us Scots called Hogmany and is a massive drunken party. So much so that in Scotland not only do we get January first off work to recover but also the second.