below is a picture of a fresh newfallen snow here in our small southern illinois town; it came at night, looked quite beautiful in the morning and was gone by about noon. this was just how some people like it, but it left me a little wistful, especially since christmas had come and gone without a lick of it. fortunately it was break and the boys got outside immediately and made a small snowman; the snowman survived the morning melt and to my knowledge is still out there, albeit somewhat scraggly and full of the leaves that had been drawn up into him when he was first made. a survivor, he got a crooked shape but his stick arms remained firm and jutted out into the brown world. hopefully more snow will arrive with the new year.

what can i say about the holiday? unlike others, i don't enjoy telling others about the material changes in our humdrum life, to me that's no more than trappings for what is far more important, the spiritual side of life. and how does new video games, or new movies, change anything? there would be virtually nothing i could give them that would put a dent in their life as we now know it though we did walk a basketball down to a park and shoot a few hoops. it's a time i should be devoting to finding ways to be with them, what with my wife out of town on a grandchildren-mission, yet i find myself somewhat preoccupied with my own creative projects, unfulfilled dreams, and wiling to go down to the video store for yet another installment to keep them happy for but another half-hour or so. tonight a friend is over to help entertain the older one; tomorrow we take the little folks to see "chipwrecked," but, nothing much is new. days are short, there isn't much to them.

i work on garage band, and also imovie; i have projects; when i have time i devote myself to them. i put my dad's photography on a single site but it's one of those places where the outside world always sees it differently than i do, and i'm too lazy to go over to a friend's computer to see how it would look. i exercise; this is working out well. i have some projects outdoors if i get to them; my wife left the door to the storm shelter open, apparently, and it drew the snow right down in there to make cold dirty little pools of earthy mildewy water. a large pile of sticks to burn; hey, what about burning it right near the shelter, so as to draw all that moisture right up out of it, killing two birds with one stone so to speak? or burning down the shelter and the house with it, would be more likely. a few years back i had my roof accident on a day like this, post christmas, pre-new year, i'll celebrate that as a grim memorial since it got me to finally produce a little of myself, a kick in the pants as warning that time is running out.

speaking of which, i got all three books on the amazon kindle site, two stories and one poetry, got the e-mail address thing sorted out, they are all up there, all three available for 2.99 each but don't have exact addresses. i do know that if you google my name on amazon kindle you'll run across at least one of them which has been on there for about ten months, the other two just got on there tonight and may take a while to catch on. i've been a little obsessed with the poetry as i've given away a few books over the holidays and find myself somewhat embarassed to call myself a poet yet have been creating them left and right, here and there, trying to make a better collection. it needs a lot of updating and a makeover in its appearance but that's been coming along slowly, for one i'd like the season links to come to my own uploaded pictures but that alone may take a trip into the office.

gonna read to the littlest guy, since that's our campaign, that's one i'm proud of, and one he needs badly. i may do little else for him or them, but i'm there for that, and i cook and do the dishes, they eat ok, they are in good spirits, they stay up late and sleep in, and march to my quirky yelling or what passes for discipline. we don't venture far out of the house, except to the video store most days, the cats tear around at our feet, it's what passes for life in midwinter vacation. time for the back to the future trilogy soon, we try to do it every year, this year i think even the youngest will get into it. that is, when we finally are that desperate for something to do. the phone has died; it got between the cushions of the couch, where we couldn't see it, or figure out how to answer it, and it was so dead it could hardly complain, and we almost lost it for good down there in the underparts of the couch, the fourth dimension. but i solved the problem, there weren't all that many other possibilities, since we'd looked virtually everywhere else.

i'll show you all this other stuff, the movie, for example, that i make in my free time, the garage-band song, for which i had to drag out the lap dulcimer and the cello, the lap-dulcimer's tuning peg cracked from brittleness and had been put in wrong, the best i could figure, and the cello likewise was in pretty sorry shape, but i tried fitting them into my garage band production. hard work. what's hard, is keeping the kids quiet and away from the little studio i've made myself. they won't. which relegates me to facebook on the unused computer, while i'm making another pot of coffee.