Playing for Time

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It’s a rain-ish day here after a steady overnight soaking, good for window-gazing, watching car and foot traffic, waiting for inspiration to overcome ennui. With a couple of things in progress in the lower right corner of my monitor, excellent coffee at hand, and nothing dragging on the guilt chain, this is feeling like a sweet little ordinary Friday. It helps that we’re Christmas heathens, indeed name a holiday and we’ll most likely have a ho-hum take on it. We’re careless like that, except that any excuse to make and eat amazing food suffices, secular or otherwise. Also, of course, any opportunity to be with loved ones. Both will happen on Monday, blessed be.

Because you’re so good about dropping in here, I’ll share a tiny Christmas gift with you. My inspiration comes from a multi-talented friend who knows many things, not least among them how to create the ultimate bowl of ice cream, highly addicting, of course. That isn’t the gift, though, because the recipe isn’t mine to share and the True Christmas Spirit has yet to visit me in the middle of the night, delivering guilt enough to last well into 2024. So… anyway, try not to think of this as a consolation prize, but Kim showed me a coffee trick this morning that will no doubt prove as habit-forming as the ice cream. It’s… Ta-DA!! … several heaping teaspoons of … wait for it… Chocolate Malt Ovaltine in a mug!! Fill with steaming coffee and enjoy the simplest possible nice addition to your day. Not too sweet, just enough to feel the love, which is what I wanted to say in the first place because I love the gift of your presence here. Merry Christmas, Happy Year to you, sincerely.

If you find yourself in a quandary this morning, wondering what you could possibly get for that one person on your list, a cool thing to give is something from the heart…

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A simple wish: That 2024 will somehow be kinder, more benevolent, than the preceding decade has been. That we’ll be increasingly conscious of what it means to be human living on a rock hurtling through the universe with not one ounce of actual power to our name. Seems like it wouldn’t hurt to give kindness and benevolence a real shot, maybe for just a year, maybe the one directly ahead of us. Who’s in?