{{hugs B-5 reference}}

It seemed appropriate.

t also decided to tag it at the moment he posted

Whee! Thank you, Hil. I am at home with a sick day and it was a lovely surprise to get a gift! (Especially since 90% of the time the doorbell rings it is careless friends of my downstairs neighbours who are apparently incapable of reading labels.)

The puzzle looks like lots of fun and is beautiful - nicely combining my interest in puzzles and in early music (the lute). The swirly pencils are also very nice.

I am no longer in karmic balance though and must get going with sending a gift to my Santee. But not, I think, today. t crawls back into bed

I'm glad you like it, Ouise! (The pencils, btw, are from this teeny store in Florence that makes hand-marbled paper. At one of the museums in Florence, I saw similar paper on a telescope from the 1600s or 1700s.)

Hope you feel better soon.

The final piece of my santee's gift finally arrived last night. I will mail it tomorrow!

So. 2006. It was not, on the whole, a complete waste, by any stretch. There was much love, happiness, joy, and other pleasant words, had in 2006, but I still can't say I was sorry to see it go.

There was also a lot of pain, scary stuff, stress and sadness, both for myself and people I love. Pain and scariness nobody should have to go through. I certainly went through things that placed enormous strain on my relationship, and I and other loved ones were tested hard by events in the world and in their lives.

The world, which seemed to be spiraling out of control, maybe took a tiny step toward sanity, though the spiraling is still going.

I still live with the woman I love, and I coninue to be surrounded by beautiful friends and family. I am still managing to scrape out a living in a (vaguely defined) career I love, in a city that I love (one that can be capricious to people in my line of work).

2007 has already started to show some teeth, so it may have it's own ups and down, but I continue to hope it will treat us all better than 2006 did, in the balance of things.

(The pencils, btw, are from this teeny store in Florence that makes hand-marbled paper. At one of the museums in Florence, I saw similar paper on a telescope from the 1600s or 1700s.)

Wow! That's so cool! That makes an excellent story for showing them off.

I just slept all afternoon and am moving to the lying-on-the-couch-with-tea-watching-dvds portion of my day. Thanks again!

My santee's gift went out yesterday, at long last. I'm going to India tomorrow (er, make that today) and won't be back until the 31st, so, to my secret santa: no rush!

Woot! Picked up my secret santa gift at the post office yesterday, where they'd been holding it as a suspicious, possibly explosive delivery from Canadian terrorists. Sue sent me a hockey trivia game, a hockey day calendar, Bruins stickers, some yummy Canadian candy, wonderfully fragrant puck-shaped soap (I love the On Shanti scent!), and a scary-ass boxing Santa pen whose evil red eyes haven't stopped glowing since yesterday.

Thanks very much Sue, it's all great!

Oh, Matt, I meant to post earlier about this: I went to Ottawa over the holidays to spend Xmas with the in-laws, and who was on our 40-seater commuter jet from Boston but Zdeno Chára! I has no idea who he was, but at 6' 9" he's hard to miss. While waiting in line at Canadian customs, I saw a couple take a photo with him and so I later asked them who he was and they told me. One of the in-laws thought that his girlfriend still lived in Ottawa.