Woeful Wednesday, sort of

Well, I've already broken my New Year's Resolution about blogging, but my excuse is that yesterday was Sisterknits' last full day with us before she headed back to City of Lakes today. We had a nice brunch with Brother #3 and The Photographer, and in the evening Shrimp Fettuccine Alfredo and then the laundry, packing, scurrying about the house looking for stuff, and sadness at our impending separation from our youngest. Rusty knew something was up, but not quite what, and stayed up past his bedtime with some misbehavior as consequence.

So far today, all her travel has gone smoothly, knock on wood! As she headed off in the taxi to the Clipper Mart (where the bus to Portland and then Boston takes off), Rusty jumped and barked rather angrily at the very nice taxi driver who had been his new friend only a few minutes earlier. He would really like to have someone in permanent residence who would run with him and have snowball "fights" (throwing snowballs that he catches in his mouth.) But, Winifred the cat is getting lonely back there with only visits from SonShineIn to break the monotony; Up the Hill UMC and House of Large Sizes for Small People miss Sisterknits' hard work; and classes in her filmmaking and child development programs start in a couple of weeks. So, our house is emptier now.

There's lots of snow outside and I'm going to make tourtiere for supper -- French-Canadian pork pie with potato, onion and allspice.

Unless I neglected to add one to my list, I read exactly 200 books in 2007. That was 6 fewer than 2006, but one of the books was David Halberstam's THE COLDEST WINTER, which was quite long. I'm embarking on a month or so of reading only books I already own, some of which will be "deaccessioned" as we used to say in the library biz, when I am done with them. Last book read in '07 was a Christmas gift, ROUGH CIDER by Peter Lovesey; first of '08 was THE DELICATE STORM by Giles Blunt. The former was set in England, partly in the 60's and partly in WWII; the latter was set in Ontario. Both were extremely good mysteries.