I have, indeed, survived the winter holidays, not without a slight case of the blues resulting from the end of my ten-day vacation from having to think much about anything important. I could relate all that happened in that time, but it risks being tedious. Suffice to say I helped to make sure the sun would come back, and had a lovely Christmas with family and friends, and a rollicking good New Year's Eve, and saw LORD OF THE RINGS three times. I couldn't have asked for better.

I did get the rather odd (but good) experience of running into my high-school ex-girlfriend in a Chinese restaurant in Parkersburg, WV just before returning home, and only a handful of hours after thinking, "Gosh, I wonder what Becky's up to these days." She's doing quite well, as it turns out, having graduated law school and gotten married (and now a fellow member of the Hyphenate Club, I was pleased to see). And she seems happy, which has been a back-of-my-mind concern for a while, though she was certainly on the way there by the time she threw my bachelor party nearly four (!!) years ago. So we exchanged all the important info and I got a very nice, very touching email from her telling me how much she's always valued my friendship, which made my morning. We had such a strange, angsty relationship when we were teenagers, not that most people don't. I'm terribly glad to see that she's become even more the kind of person I want to hang around with than ever, and I'm glad we're in touch now. Sometimes people don't take up their right place in your life until you quit trying to be in love with them. So it goes.

And I'm back in the grind of things now, trying to get my mind right for getting some writing done, which I don't quite feel up for yet. I'm still . . . drained a bit from this post-holiday melancholy, and the brutal cold, and fending off what seems to be a sinus headache with copious and varied pain medicine. AND figuring out why I can't seem to turn off the closed-captioning on my new DVD player. Oh, the frustrations of these miraculous toys!