thank you for reading this, arya. in the future i will try harder to be in public places and report on those around me.

for now, i can report on jake or the cat. i try really hard not to be one of those people who talks about his or her cats on the internet, so i will stick to jake. it's freezing in our house, so we are watching jim lehrer and looking at the internet in front of the space heater. i think he's actually reading my blog as we speak. he didn't seem to be interested in any of the videos, nor did he seem to read very closely. that's fine, i like to tease him about not reading my blog, but i don't really care whether he does or not. my gums hurt from all of the cookies we just ate; i assume he feels the same way. wow, now he's using html to do something new to his blog. that's pretty impressive, and i have no idea where he learned how to do that. i feel like i've been taught that stuff about eight times and it just never sunk in.

today it snowed. i drove in snow for the first time, and it was pretty hairy. i have all-wheel-drive, so i was fine, but of course there were a bunch of yahoos on the road driving around like it was a regular morning, a bunch of buses with their ass ends swinging around when they tried to get up small inclines, and dozens of accidents on the radio. but i got to work just fine. in fact, i gave a ride to some individuals whose bus couldn't get up onto the bridge. they didn't look dressed for the winter; they looked cold and downtrodden at the prospect of a snowy walk across the river, no matter how MAGICAL everything looked (that is, totally magical). my new year's resolution was to try to do more nice things for strangers, like giving someone who is lost directions about what bus to take, what stop to get off at, and where to go from there (i did this on new year's day and it made me feel like a great person, so i resolved to do it). also, i have a pretty good idea of how much it sucks to walk in the snow in sneakers, having fallen on my ass on the way to the car. i also resolved, sort of seperately but kind of attached, not to lie to strangers so much. i lie to strangers a lot - sometimes because i feel uncomfortable sharing personal details, which is completely understandable and okay, sometimes because i want that person to think i'm a good person, which is understandable but it would be better if i was just honest, and sometimes just because, which is unacceptable. i did not tell any lies today.

at work i got really nervous that it would snow really hard, or warm up enough to rain but stay cold enough that the roads would freeze, and i wouldn't be able to drive home. so on my lunch, i went and got some boots so i could walk home if i had to. the boots i got are awesome, and were $5. i can't find a picture of them, but they are bright red and RAD. well, they're a little big so i scuffle around in them like a shy five-year-old with a runny nose, but when i'm standing still they're rad. as it turned out, i did not have to walk home, and then when i got home we went and played in the snow (which did NOT end with me pushed into the snowbank, crying, as jake predicted) and got some italian sodas. at the coffee shop, i read this book called "sole survivor", which is about the phenomenon of children murdering their parents for apparently no real reason and showing no real remorse but also not appearing insane. it made me want to have kids even less than i do now, which is not that much. i mean, i'm not going to lie, my body always wants me to stop and look in the window of baby gap at all the tiny little t-shirts, but my mind knows that a lot of cool stuff could still happen to me and doesn't want my body to ruin it. and now, i'm at home in front of the space heater watching bush bomb his interview with lehrer and the cat is snoring.