the philosophy club is the bane of my existence, because while i was messing with the poets, choosing wednesday over thursday and making sure everything was cool with everyone, the philosophy club apparently slipped in and reserved the back room for wednesday, for who knows what, and we're out in the cold, out a hundred posters and wondering when the heck we could have this alleged poetry reading benefit. our remaining choice would be the day after valentine's day, which would carry a bit of irony, or possibly to change venues, but it's hard to get three poets to agree on anything and i'm still as a result somewhat hanging in the wind here.

now the jigsaw puzzle you see below was finally completed, except for a single piece, which i could say is the bane of my existence, but in fact i've more or less let it go and now just look at that gap as you would look at say the mouth of a kid who's just lost his first tooth. it's a long way down from here, you might say to the kid, or the puzzle; the puzzle is going into the box, one piece short or not, and those darn reindeer (100?) took me months to get their horns straightened out. it's going into the box, and from whence nowhere, since you can't give away a puzzle that's missing one piece. if i were perhaps to give it away, i would then be more likely to find the piece, which is probably buried in some unread magazine somewhere beneath where the puzzle table was. i could get worried about that piece, and even start opening those magazines, but i haven't.

a granddaughter skypes me almost daily now, and that's a great development because i can hear her word development (gawa turns into gampa in a single week), and i get to blow her kisses. what a kid! i remember how exciting it is to watch someone being almost two. her mom leaves for a minute and she gives me an entire sentence, undecipherable, but dead serious, about what's going on. she tries her best to tell me everything.

it was groundhog day here, but it occurred to me that i'd lost track of what passes for groundhogs these days, and worse, what passes for winter. it was winter? it seemed to me that everything was a little suspended in half-warm, half-cold purgatory, with no rest for the cats at the window who can now see all the birds for lack of groundcover, the cats must, at least, stay in the house, and give the birds a fighting chance. the geese, above, honk loudly in the warm breeze; i'm convinced they're speaking french, or the geese dialect of it, anyway, as they are from canada and we don't have a whole lot of canadians around. they argue about whether to go back or what, and i reckon the must be working it out, whether to speak english, or french.

tiredness washes over me and i'm off to bed, only to say, i'll readvertise the poetry reading as soon as i can, it's not really the bane of my existence. it's good, and it's coming soon, one way or the other! ciao