I guess that my hiatus from blogging is proving hard to overcome. I have so little time and now that the habit is broken I have to wonder if I’ll ever get it back anytime soon.

It’s Sunday afternoon and Jes is off at a build-a-ginger-bread-house party. Ostensibly I am grading, actually I am watching Al Jolson in Wonder Bar and typing at you.

We’ve had a good weekend. Friday night we caught the new Bond movie with Derek and Lloyd. They were not having such a good weekend as they we supposed to have flow to a philosophy and religion conference in D.C., but unfortunately the St. Louis airport caught on fire. Actually, the power generators are what burned. For some reason American Airlines’ reservation system was not hooked up to the back up power system so no one could check in, even though the planes were still able to fly out.

Jes stepfather works at the airport – his office is one hundred yards from where the fire was – and he said that because of early Thanksgiving traffic the airport was running close to a one hundred percent booking of available flights. Talk about a bad time for any delays.

Saturday we went to the New Ireland show at the St. Louis Art Museum. I am more and more convinced that I need to write the New Guinea book about my family’s experiences there in the sixties and seventies. When we are next up in Wisconsin I am going to take a preliminary look at all of our old Kodak slides.

In the afternoon on Saturday we went by UMSL and fired the kiln. Jes let me punch in the numbers and I feel all cool about that. I am looking forward to eventually learning both ceramics and glasswork from Jes. Someday we’ll have our own studio.

Saturday night we had an impromptu visitation from Kim and her friend Gretel (Greta?). We yuppied-out with cocktails and games. While playing Clue and Scategories we discovered that Jes likes Cosmopolitans.

Today we had her mom and step dad over for Belgian waffle brunch and in the afternoon we met Kat out for fish purchases. Kat gave us early Christmas presents: Christmas stockings that she knit for us to hang on our faux fireplace. They are quite nice. We picked up another Pleco for the Cichlid tank – which is getting overgrown with algae – and we got three large Rosy Barbs for the death tank. We’ve started calling it the death tank because it has a high body count. I keep trying to get schooling fish and the existing fish in that tank treat them like buffet items. The current theory is that by not adding anything other than full grown fish we can achieve diversity of species without having to consider one of the species as a meal for the others.

I only have two days of work next week and it is all tests and presentations for the students. I can’t wait for the break. I’ve earned it.