You look smashing in your John Wayne pajama pants...

I haven’t had time yet to indulge in the post-holiday blahs. Semester grades were due last night at midnight, and I finished my 48-hour grading marathon at 10 p.m. It’s pure procrastination, of which I am the reigning Queen.

So this morning, in order to work out the “teacher’s neck” from hunching over my pile of portfolios for two days, I went out and wandered the yard. Ray had alerted me early this morning to a downed peacock on the road. It was one of the ABBA quads, a male. He had gone to that Great Roost in the Ether. I didn’t see any obvious signs of trauma, so I’m assuming this is the boy who’s been moping around since Christmas, apparently ill. I scooped him off the road, said good-bye, and left him as a tribute meal for the coyote Ray saw dart across the mile road last Friday. Corn-fed peacock. I noticed this morning that the other ABBA boy is lame, one foot curled under, forcing him to limp along on the back of the foot. Frostbite? Varmint bite? Battle wound? Two decades of inbreeding? Whatever the problem, injury, disease, or tired genes, he managed to make his way into the yard for corn and bird seed this morning, and the rest of the flock seems very patient with him.

The baby possum Ray found hunkered down in the loafing shed yesterday morning is gone, although I saw Shadow, the black barn cat, working intently on something near the shed yesterday afternoon. I haven’t seen Snowball, the white cat, for days, but the cat food in the pyramid shed keeps disappearing.

Jack Blizzard can drive even the most passive among us to hunt, I guess. Which reminds me, I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s (No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses) The Road. It reminded me of my favorite American novelist, my buddy Bill Faulkner—the writer we love to hate—in terms of intensity and poetic rhythm of language. It occurs to me that the current and future generations not only won’t CHOOSE to read Faulkner, they won’t have the vocabulary for it. Sad. The Road is a beautifully written post-apocalyptic survival (or not) story, which I recommend without reservation, but don’t read it before bed if you’re hoping for fluffy, happy dreams.

Christmas was wonderful. After a flurry of last-minute arranging, Ray’s family was able to come for dinner on Christmas Eve. His oldest son was here from the Cities, so it was a warm surprise to have the family together (and his niece gave me the highly-coveted Kopi Luwak coffee beans). On Christmas Day, we had a smallish gathering at Mom’s, just Mom, Ray, the kids, and the dogs. There was no Jell-O salad (although Mom snuck her ubiquitous redhot candies onto the otherwise perfect sugar cookies), Mom made every kind of comfort food imaginable, and we played Catch Phrase, men against women. The women rocked. Mom has a tradition of getting all the men in the family identical gifts, and this year it was flannel John Wayne cowboy pajama pants. I suggested they all model the pants for a holiday picture, but no dice. Ray got me the perfect present--a Nintendo DS--my new procrastination tool.

Today, the sun is shining, it’s 30+ degrees, and Mom and I are going to ward off the blahs (and my urge to weep over the dead pea-boy) with shoe shopping in the City. There’s nothing like a new pair of shoes to shuffle out from under Jack’s heavy hand.