Archive for December, 2014

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Letter From New York 12 20 14 Christmas is happening…

December 20, 2014

It’s been a pleasant day in Claverack.

I woke early and went down to the Farmer’s Market. I’ve developed a passion for the Sea Salt and Onion cashews offered by one of the vendors there. Last week they were already sold out of them by the time I arrived so I wanted to be sure I got my fair share today. The market is now closed until the first weekend of February. I was successful, nabbing three containers, enough to last until they reopen. I ordered pies for Christmas from David, the pie guy. He’ll deliver them on Christmas Eve morn.

After collecting my mail, I went down to the Red Dot for a bite to eat, visiting with Alana, who is the proprietress of the best joint in Hudson. Finishing that, I went home and met Nick, who keeps the house humming and we did our Saturday chores.

Returning to town, I met my friends Larry and Alicia at Ca’Mea for a Saturday lunch and we organized our Christmas plans.

As a cord cutter, I don’t have cable so I didn’t see the last episode of The Colbert Report. Larry did and it was nostalgic for him. He was President of Comedy Central when it launched. He suggested I look for it online as the best moments are immortalized there.

It appears I will be hosting Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and hosting a cocktail party on Boxing Day, December 26th. I will be cooking until I am cross-eyed.

But I love it. I love the hustle bustle of the Holidays and love having folks to the cottage. I am working on my menus right now. What I’ll have Christmas Eve and what I’ll have on Christmas Day and what will be the appetizers I serve on Boxing Day. I thrive on entertaining.

Tomorrow I will be grocery shopping for the annual Christmas Quiches I make as gifts for my neighbors. Monday will be devoted to making them and Tuesday to delivering them. It’s something I’ve done for the last ten years and is part of the Christmas tradition of Claverack Cottage.

The world is settling down for the Holidays. Obama has gone off to Hawaii. I’ve curled up at the cottage. The trains are packed with people beginning their Christmas Holidays and I’m glad I got here early on Friday. Every train going north on Friday was sold out with holiday revelers finding their way to where they were going.

Once upon a time I did research for a trio of Hollywood writers, way back in the days when I first arrived in Los Angeles. So a bit of Hollywood trivia: today is the anniversary of the premiere of “Flying Down to Rio” the first Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film. Who knew? Now you do.

It’s that kind of day, a day for fun facts and trivia. The world is a mess but let’s today focus on the fun things today. Christmas is a few days away.

The cafes and restaurants of Hudson were deserted today as I am sure every store and mall was jammed with folks doing their last minute, desperate Christmas shopping.

While the restaurants were empty, there wasn’t a parking spot available on Warren Street, the main drag of Hudson. I’m sure the shops were jammed. We’re in the countdown.

I have a couple of things to wrap but I’m done. It feels good.

It all feels good, this Christmas time. Let the world for a few days swirl away without my thinking too much about it.

Christmas is happening.

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Letter From New York 12 19 14 Tis the season for cyber warfare and hope…

December 19, 2014

Earlier today I returned from New York. I settled in and built a fire in my Franklin stove, put on Christmas Carols and, at this minute, can see the flames dancing in the stove and can look across the creek. All the snow has melted but there is still beauty in the land, the flowing water and the occasional squirrel that darts across the deck. There was a woodchuck that occasionally meandered across but he seems to have gone to ground for the winter.

The first day of winter is Monday and Christmas quickly follows. It looks like I will be doing a great deal of entertaining and I’ll spend part of the afternoon working on menus. It seems I’ll be having people on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, December 26th.

I’m looking forward to it. It always feels fun when the Cottage is full of people and there’s laughter and merriment. There is no need for me to go back to New York now until the second week in January so I have a long stretch of time here.

As I was riding the train up the east side of the Hudson River, the FBI declared North Korea the source of the Sony Pictures hacking disaster. Just before I sat down to write, President Obama held his end of year press conference and stated that pulling THE INTERVIEW was a mistake.

It is a hot topic. A few weeks ago, it actually seemed a little funny albeit sad. Now it is a full blown international incident. In my weekly phone call with my friends Medora and Meryl we had a spirited conversation about it. Medora thought it was the official end of the world as we know it. We all knew that what we surrender to the digital world is no longer ours but now we know it in a very visceral sense.

It’s one of those moments when something changes and everyone is aware of it, a tectonic shift in the way we see the world. Cyber warfare is here and here to stay. It has been here, we’ve known about it but now it has come to our backyard. It is a sobering thought.

There are lots of things to be sober about. The planet itself is beautiful but dangerous place with storms and earthquakes and other natural disasters. And we humans inhabit it and we have a cruel tendency to violence, a fact born witness to every time we open the newspaper or watch a newscast. We humans do terrible things to one another.

But we also do amazing things for one another. An unidentified man walked into a Walmart and plopped down $50,000 to pay off layaway purchases for people he’d never met. In times of crisis we line up to help one another.

It is these things I am going to focus on these last few days before Christmas. Not the other things. Tis the season of hope and that is what I am focusing on, hope. Hope for our world, hope for myself, hope for everything.

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Letter From New York 12 18 14 Things groundbreaking and things not so funny…

December 18, 2014

When I was in high school, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA was required reading in one of my English classes. I was an adolescent fan of Hemingway though I preferred THE SUN ALSO RISES to THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. But it did cause me to think of Cuba, the Cuba of Hemingway, before Castro. I wanted to visit but I couldn’t because travel to Cuba was prohibited.

After a pleasant evening at the Red Dot with a varied group of friends, I retreated home to sleep, waking this morning to the news that President Obama was moving to normalize relations with Cuba, which has lived under draconian sanctions from the United States. As far as I have been able to tell, fifty plus years of this policy has resulted in almost no effect. A Castro still rules in Cuba and the island limps along. It is a treasure trove of ancient, classic American cars.

The decision to normalize will be hotly debated. Some of Cuban descent feel this is a betrayal; some welcome the change. GOP lawmakers threaten to make it as difficult as possible to accomplish.

It will be interesting to watch this change. My friends, Larry and Alicia, have just returned from Cuba where they were on a government-approved excursion. They will be among the last that will have seen the “old” Cuba – the Cuba before this pronouncement. It will all begin to change now, slowly but surely and, in my opinion, in a change that is long overdue.

The Pope facilitated the long overdue change; he wrote letters to both Obama and Raul Castro encouraging normalization. And they listened. A prisoner exchanged helped.

Fifty years of sanctions hasn’t done much good. It’s about time to try a new policy, don’t you think?

There were other items in the news that caught my morning coffee attention.

New York, to my surprise, has banned fracking, the controversial process by which natural gas can be extracted from the earth. A group that opposed fracking had a spontaneous celebration in Manhattan this morning outside some state offices.

The news was full of chatter about the scrubbed release of THE INTERVIEW. One reviewer who saw it back in October felt that Rogen/Franco could become the Hope/Crosby team for Millennials.   We might never know now.

The trail of evidence for the Sony hacking caper leads right back to North Korea having ordered it.

While I have found some aspects of the Sony hack story amusing, much of it is deadly serious. And not very funny. It has called into question the sensibility of the executives who agreed to make the film. More than one person in Hollywood is asking: what did they expect from making a movie about assassinating a real life dictator who has a known reputation for unpredictable actions of a nasty kind? And who has nuclear weapons.

Kim Jong-Un said it was an act of war to release the movie and he has attacked.

Now the question is: what do we do about it? Do we start the first cyber war? Probably not. Whatever it is thinking, the Obama Administration is holding its cards close to the vest right now. And probably keeping its options open. There have been daily briefings at the White House on the affair.

The reports out of Hollywood that I have been reading have been scathing toward Sony and its actions from start to finish.

I wish I could find some amusing turn of phrase to end today but whatever it might be, it is eluding me. North Korea has, apparently through proxies, attacked a major business and brought it to its knees. It is unprecedented.

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Letter From New York 12 17 14 Up to ourselves…

December 17, 2014

It is dark and drear here in the Hudson Valley. The temperature is relatively mild but seems much colder due to the damp. Across the creek, wisps of fog play through the barren tree branches. Almost all the snow has been wiped away by the steady days of rain.

After my morning coffee, I built a fire and put on jazzy Christmas music and sat down and wrote out my Christmas cards, taking them to the post office and sending them off on their way. It feels like a night to curl up with a good book but I won’t be doing that until later; I am off to the Red Dot tonight with friends for a mid-week get together.

While grey and drear in the Hudson Valley, it is peaceful in Claverack. I feel far from the madding crowd and am grateful that I am. I have one more trip into the city tomorrow for a Holiday party and then I’m here until the New Year begins. I’m looking forward to that.

It will be another extended respite from the world.

And that will be appreciated. It’s not all quiet out there in the world.

The Sony hacking situation seems to get worse, with violence threatened against theaters that show THE INTERVIEW. Most large theater chains are “suspending” their showings of the comedy. Warnings were given to stay away from theaters because there might be 9/11 style attacks.

JUST in from CNN is the news that Sony is canceling the December 25th release of the film due to the threats.

Current and former employees are suing the studio over the damage while they are scrambling to protect accounts by changing passwords as fast as their little fingers can type.

Other studios seemingly aren’t pleased with Sony and aren’t rushing to its defense. Is it every man for himself?

Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships. Sony has the picture that seems to be sinking a studio.

There are other exciting things happening that I will delighted to explore from the comfort of Claverack Cottage. The Rover has detected methane on Mars, one of the building blocks of life. What will Rover find next? I’m hoping that it is a Christmas discovery.

And I will bow my head today and say prayers for the children who were murdered in Pakistan. The country has declared three days of mourning post massacre and has called meetings of all political sides to deal with the Taliban threat. In the last decade, the Taliban, driven on by their absolute belief that they alone are right, have killed 50,000 Pakistanis.

Absolutism is hard to contradict and elusive to defeat.

Before leaving for the Red Dot, I will turn on my Christmas lights. North America burns brighter in December and January with all the Christmas decorations and the difference can be seen from space.

We are perhaps combating the psychological darkness with Holiday lights, defying the literal and figurative night with joyful decorations. I would like to think so; it has been a hard year for many and I know lots of people who would like to see 2014 disappear in the wake of their lives.

It’s not easy though. The end of the year is a marker but doesn’t magically change anything.

That we have to do ourselves.

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Letter From New York 12 16 14 Life goes on…

December 16, 2014

My life has a certain rhythm these days. I wake. I have coffee. I read the NY Times headlines on my phone. Today, I woke up in the city and did the same.

Last night was a pleasant evening, dinner with my friend Robert at one of our favorite haunts, Thai Market at 107 and Amsterdam. We exchanged Christmas presents. And talked about what was happening in the world.

All day Robert had been wrestling with new computer systems at his office and had not really kept up with what was happening in the world. He knew there was a hostage situation in Sydney but did not know the details and wanted to so I filled him in on what I knew from following events during the day.

We laughed and joked with Cathy, the bartender, who usually only works on Saturday nights now that she is a full time teacher. She is off to Christmas in the Turks and Caicos.

Life goes on, despite any terrible events around us, near at home or far away, we keep on living our lives. As were the people in the Lindt Café in Sydney, just living their lives when Man Haron Morsi came in with a shotgun and held them hostage.

As Robert said last night, you don’t know when something will happen. Life is fragile and tenuous and we are surrounded by a myriad of things that could go fatally wrong on any given day. But we go on living our lives.

While tragedies happened, the State Legislature in New York, made yogurt the “Official State Snack.” I missed that until this morning; it was one of the items in the daily New York briefing that is digitally delivered by the Times. Apparently, it made the State the butt of jokes by David Letterman and others.

Apparently there was a ban on ferrets in New York City. Mayor DeBlasio has taken care of that one.

We have now a law prohibiting people from having their picture taken with big cats. What defines a big cat I wonder?

And I’m delighted to know that sparklers have been legalized in New York State though not in New York City.

While world events were taking place, important laws were being passed here in New York State, including a prohibition on piercing or tattooing your pet. Didn’t even occur to me that anyone would do it but apparently there are those who did. They are now banned.

And while I am sipping my morning coffee in Manhattan, the Taliban has killed over a hundred people, mostly young children, in a raid on a school in Pakistan. The ruble continues to fall, the market is making a bit of a recovery from its swoon over tumbling oil prices, traffic continues to roll through the streets of Manhattan and we’ll have rain this afternoon with temperatures scrapping 50 degrees.

Life moves on.

Rather than hide out in the apartment, I am going to tempt the fates and mosey over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an afternoon in their galleries. Then I will have dinner with my old friend, Mona Tropeano, before rumbling back north to the little cottage on the creek to finish my Christmas cards.

Life goes on.

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Letter From New York 12 15 14 Terrorists or madmen…

December 15, 2014

Last night, my friends Lionel and Pierre came over for dinner – asparagus soup, mashed sweet potatoes, baked squash and a sirloin fresh from the farmer’s market. We were just into the soup course when his phone made a noise; a news alert was coming in.

The alert was that hostages had been taken in Sydney, a drama that would be played out into the morning today. Lionel is from Sydney originally and he excused himself to phone his family to make sure none were involved. All were accounted for and far from the scene.

I arrived in New York this morning and went into the Acela Club at Penn Station as I had a bit of time before I was to meet my friend Mary Dickey for lunch. My arrival at the Acela Club coincided with the moment that the Sydney police stormed the café and I watched events unfold, live and in real time.

It seemed a bit surreal, to be seated in the Acela Club, sipping a coffee, while half a world away this drama was being acted out, in a city I once knew fairly well and which I loved.

Little was known at the time and much is yet to be revealed, even though the crisis is over. There are two dead plus the gunman, an individual who identified himself as a Muslim cleric. He had some of the hostages hold up what appeared to be a black and white Islamic flag in the windows of the Lindt Chocolate Café, an unlikely seeming place for a hostage crisis.

Turns out he was quite the fellow, this Man Haron Monis. He had served community service time for pleading guilty to sending threatening letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers, calling the deceased “child killers.” He called himself a spiritual healer and had allegedly sexually abused some of those he was supposed to be healing and it seems that he was being linked to the murder of an ex-wife. He apparently had no religious training.

A website by Monis or his supporters claim that all the allegations were trumped up.

Some believe he was committing suicide by police, a thing not unheard of. He certainly seemed to have gotten the attention he wanted. From what I can gather, it’s believed in Sydney that he wasn’t really a terrorist but a deranged man.

Whatever the truth, two innocent people are dead.

In a gesture that was affecting, citizens of Sydney began a twitter campaign to combat a potential Muslim backlash. #illridewithyou was the campaign’s hashtag, offering to ride with Muslims needing to get around Sydney on public transportation. It has since gone viral. It seems very Australian.

My eyes watered up when I read the story.

Australia is an “open and generous” country said Prime Minister Tony Abbott and that is how it has struck me and it has struck me as a place removed from the violence of our terror stained world. But it is not. No place is safe from terrorists or madmen, whatever Man Haron Monis turns out to be.

In Pennsylvania, as I write this, a manhunt is ongoing for an individual who apparently killed six members of his family in a domestic dispute. That was happening as I was sitting in the café above the Fairview Market on Broadway, having a delightful lunch, chatting with Mary about the fallout from the Sony hacking scandal.

It is on days like this that I treasure the peace of the countryside and am grateful for the respite it provides from the terrors of the world in which we live, counterbalanced by the incredible human generosity of those who took the #Illridewithyou viral.

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Letter From New York 12 14 14 A grey and gloomy day on the road to Christmas

December 14, 2014

The light is beginning to fade here in the Hudson Valley; it has been a painfully grey day. Not once has been there a burst of sunlight to shatter the exterior bleakness. Christmas carols are playing and they sound dirge-like against this shadowy day. It has been a day to cuddle inside and to read, reflect and do interior things.

I am having friends for dinner so started the day making fresh asparagus soup and prepping things for dinner. When I finish writing this, I will move on to the kitchen and start the meal.

Today, I also started doing Christmas cards, a few, adding personal notes to folks I have not seen for a long time and for who Christmas is seemingly our sole touch point.

A Climate Treaty has been signed in Lima though it seems that while all agree few are enthused. Scientists, I read, feel it falls far short of the actions needed to curtail climate change while some nations feel it costs them too much.

Cheney, to no one’s great surprise, is highly critical of the Senate “Torture” Report. Jeb Bush is giving some indications he is considering a 2016 run for the Presidency. Certainly Rick Perry is prepping for the race. He’s getting some coaching and has declared that the run for the Presidency is NOT an IQ test.

The good news/bad news story of oil continues. It slipped beneath $60.00 a barrel, which caused prices up here to drop to under $3.00 a gallon but which also shaved 350 points off the Dow on Friday, making for a scary Wall Street ride.

Some folks are saying it could go down to $40.00 a barrel, which would be very bad for the shale oil industry in North Dakota. It only makes money at about $60.00 a barrel. There are those who speculate that the Saudis are letting the price of a barrel of oil fall so as to get rid of the pesky shale oil producers here in America. After years of declining crude production in the US, the shale oil boom has made us something like the third largest oil producer in the world.

It’s certainly causing some hurt for Mr. Putin; Russia depends on its oil sales. The ruble has been crashing. Must seem like a grey day to him as well. Put Venezuela in that camp as well, hurting badly with the fall in prices. Same with Nigeria. Same with a few other countries, too.

Regardless of what is happening in the oil realm, all over the world we are moving toward Christmas.

It seems some Americans are eschewing an expensive Christmas and moving back toward simpler times with less extravagant celebrations of the Holiday. It will be interesting to see how this holiday shopping season works out in the end. Up? Down? We’ll know the figures right after Christmas.

On this grey day, Newtown is marking the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings with a private ceremony and quiet reflection. It is a town where the wounds have yet to heal and may never heal.

In another gruesome story, hundreds attended the funeral of Jessica Chambers, a Mississippi teenager who was doused with an accelerant and burned alive on the side of a road.

The mind boggles at the act while the heart revolts at the cruelty.

A reward fund has risen to $11,000 for information leading to her killer.

It is stories like that which darken my day and make me feel as grey and gloomy as the weather.

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Letter From New York 12/13/14 Not for another 89 years…

December 13, 2014

It is 12/13/14 if you do dates the American way. That won’t happen again until 01/02/03 in the next century, 89 years from now. I can’t even imagine what the world will be like 89 years from now. Certainly I won’t be here to see it but children born today will probably be around. Life expectancy is on the rise in most countries and in the 22nd Century, 90 may be the new sixty. Who knows?

I went to a screening of the first episode of Downton Abbey last week in New York. It was set in 1924. The Earl and Countess of Grantham are celebrating their 34th wedding anniversary. One of the characters remarked that if she got married right then, she would be celebrating her 34th wedding anniversary in 1958.

It was a jarring thought because the world of 1958 was radically different from the world of 1924. In between there had been the Great Depression and World War II, forever changing the world. The atom bomb had been dropped; half of Europe was shut up behind the Iron Curtain. Germany had been pared down and cut apart into East and West. The Soviets had pierced space with Sputnik. We were off on the race to the moon.

What a difference a few decades can make.

Lunching today at the Red Dot in Hudson, I was asked by someone if I knew where the Mimosa had come from? So I did what we all do today when faced with a question for which we don’t have an immediate answer – I googled it. The Mimosa apparently was the invention of the bartender Frank Meier at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1925. Thank you, Google. Thank you, Wikipedia.

As I was finishing my omelet, I decided that I would serve asparagus soup tomorrow for dinner. Not knowing what was needed, I googled asparagus soup, found a recipe that I liked and then made a list of ingredients on the notes section of my iPhone and went off to the Price Chopper for the ingredients.

Amazing. Having been the first boy on my block to have a car phone and one of the first to have a cell phone and one of the first to upgrade to a smart phone, I am dazzled by how far we have come since that big black box was installed in the trunk of my car.

I don’t take it completely for granted but I am sure anyone under twenty can’t imagine a world before these devices. If they really thought about it, I am sure I would seem quaint, an antique from another world. Could someone actually have lived at a time when you couldn’t put the world in your pocket?

There’s far more computing power in my little iPhone than there was on the first space shuttle. It’s boggling for me to think about.

And that’s only in thirty years, it having been early 1984 when I got both my first Mac and my car phone. It’ll be interesting to see what the next thirty years will bring, not to mention the next 89 when, if we’re still using the American style of dating, it will be 01/02/03.

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Letter From New York 12 12 14 Not all storms come from nature…

December 12, 2014

In the background I am listening to Christmas Carols playing softly on Pandora. I have three Christmas stations bookmarked there and I rotate between them and before the Holidays are over, will probably add one or two more to keep me company as we count down to Christmas.

The tree is up, the crèche is set and almost all the Christmas presents are taken care of…

This afternoon I will go out and purchase the last couple of things I intend to give and probably will go on to do Christmas cards tomorrow and wrap the few presents that remain to be done.

I am in pretty good shape this year.

Outside it is a winter wonderland. White, crisp and clean. A family of deer just ran by my window. All is tranquil.

It isn’t tranquil in Los Angeles. They had heavy rains there last night and northern California was pummeled. 200,000 people are without power and there are fears of mudslides due to all the land that was burned clear during the summer fires sliding away.

On the front page of the L.A. Times, there are stories about the storm but there are also headlines about the hacked emails of Amy Pascal of Sony Entertainment and Scott Rudin, the producer. There is open speculation that she may not be able to keep her job post the “racially insensitive” emails about President Obama the flowed between her and Rudin.

Both have come out and apologized but apologies may not be enough. Shonda Rimes, she of the golden fingers who created Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy and owns Thursday nights on ABC, tweeted something almost unquotable about the situation. It was something like: you can put a cherry on a pile of s*it but it don’t make it a sundae.

Wow.

Lots of unpleasant things were said about talent, including Angelina Jolie. And Kevin Hart. And Mark Ruffalo. And and and…

Apparently a lot of executives are spending time on the phone with agents and managers apologizing while also letting them know there might be more to come.

Ouch.

I think the group claiming responsibility for this hacking mess is something called Guardians of the Peace. They object to a comedy coming out on Christmas Day called The Interview, which is about an attempt to assassinate the leader of North Korea. Just how assassination attempts become a comedy I’m not sure but it stars James Franco and Seth Rogen so I am sure there is some bumbling involved.

North Korea denies responsibility for the hack while at the same time praising whoever did it. Good on you, they say.

So it is storming in California and not all the storms are of the natural kind.

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Letter From New York 12 11 2014 Feeling a bit like a country gentleman…

December 11, 2014

It is a winter wonderland outside the cottage today; three or four inches of snow fell overnight and once again transformed the landscape into a perfect winter scene. I am finding delight in the beauty.

Feeling quite like the country gentleman this morning, I lingered over coffee and the NY Times. The steady din of noise since the release of the Senate Report on torture has diminished a bit.

Obama is in an uncomfortable position; some Democrats are accusing him of a cover-up of a program he ended. Abroad, some international bodies and certain countries are howling for prosecution. At home, we seem to be saying let bygones be bygones with a Get Out Of Jail card being handed to those involved.

Jihadists are swearing revenge for our “torture” which seems to me to be a case of the kettle calling the pot black.

Down in Washington there is brinksmanship over passing a $1.1 trillion budget. Democrats are howling because of some late night insertions of rules that would relieve Wall Street of some regulation. Petitions are being circulated. Denouncements are being made.

A deal will probably happen.

Out in California, the north part of the state is preparing for potential flooding from heavy storms that are potentially going to break the worst drought in the state’s history. I think I read that this drought was the worst in 1200 years!

Falling oil prices are a blessing and a curse. There was an almost three hundred point dive on Wall Street yesterday as a result. The common motorist is a bit relieved to find gas for under $3.00 a gallon in most places – but not here in my little town. Still up around $3.25 in Claverack.

It is also, despite the constant rattle of depressing news, the Holiday season and I spent a frustrating half hour on the 800flowers.com website attempting [and finally succeeding] in ordering a gourmet basket. Either the site was slow or my connection was lousy but it was a painful enterprise. But still, it was one of the last things to do on my Christmas list.

We’re down to fourteen days until Christmas and I feel remarkably ready; usually at this time of year I’m feeling a bit of panic! I guess that is the upside of being a country gentleman for a period.

Sometimes I love this inactivity and other times I chafe and feel jealous of my friends who are off doing things with great purpose. I am lounging my way toward Christmas and now am about to leave to have a Holiday lunch with a friend.

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