Everything outside is beautiful and cold. The trees are covered in rime ice and the cloudy weather has meant that's stuck around longer. Days and days of this. One of the few nice things about the weather in a place covered with snow six months of the year.
I don't have any plans or designs for the New Year. Just some basic hopes: personal healing; ceasefires, in many senses. Keep doing things. Keep moving. May this year be better than the last.
I'm working on the last movement of a long guitar piece. I'm learning real repertoire on viola. I finished a long novel I started a month ago, just read a collection of poems, and have started one of those dreadful "macroeconomics for regular people" books put out by former central bank chairs, the sort of thing in which the chaotic world is pinned and examined under economic principles. I'd never buy for myself and I think I was given it on my birthday. I abandon very few books. I felt compelled to try it. My backlog is hovering around a hundred books. I figured I should probably get started.
I've now got a mini-fridge in the basement and can have milk in my tea. For almost three years, since being sent to work from home in the pandemic, I've made myself black coffee, which I prefer, and black tea, which I don't. I have a little basement kitchen. Really it's a kettle and some supplies by a sink. I could go upstairs to make my tea but I try to stay downstairs, and quiet, to let my younger dog sleep.
Several people have told me: _it's the small things, right?_ It's cold but I'm warm. I've got notebooks and pens. Rosin and time. Poems are starting to come again. These are my favourite hours of the year.