News to the Minute

Just to keep updated on a few things:

• Tabitha and I continue to push our way through Middle Earth. The Riders of Rohan have survived Helm's Deep. Pippen and Merry are with the Ents at Isengard. Frodo and Sam are somewhere northwest of Mordor. It's a long book, but a good one.
• Lauren is back in school today, less than 24 hours after getting out of surgery. She's a tough little kid. Honestly, she seemed in better shape than Tabitha, who appears to be fighting some sort of crud.
• Seven of the eighteen windows are now on the house, including all but one of the second floor windows. Adam and I were going to do more today, but it is grey, raining and cold here in Baja Canada, so perhaps tomorrow.
• Zen remains a missing quantity in our house, in every conceivable sense of that phrase.
• The fact that the Phillies won the World Series has still not quite sunk in. In part this is my native pessimism - I'm still trying to figure out how they can lose it even now. And in part it is because of the deafening silence that their victory has produced outside of a 40-mile radius of Independence Hall. They weren't even on the cover of Sports Illustrated - not that you can find a copy of Sports Illustrated in our little town. If a title drought falls in Philadelphia and nobody is there to hear it, did it really happen?
• I am still psyched about Obama winning the election. Perhaps the best commentary I've seen on it was a cartoon that showed him sitting at the desk in the Oval Office, scotch-taping the Constitution back together. His first three years are going to be spent undoing the damage of the last eight.
• We are still inundated with sugar, with Thanksgiving, Christmas, our anniversary (lucky number 13!) and three birthdays to go before the end of the year. Somebody fetch me a bag of carrots.