The internet is still not working in the Castle. We went into my workplace today to capture a few hours of connectedness. While I’m the first to admit I’m a wee-bit addicted to the internet, it’s not just the lack of the constant flow of information that causes me to miss the tubes. Okay it is partly the shaking that my hands do when I’m away from it for more than three waking hours. It’s also strange being without it even for a few days. (Although, truth be told—and when it benefits my narrative I will at times tell the truth—I do have some internet through my very smart phone. It is slow internet on a tiny screen with not enough buttons, but it is internet.) There are things I take for granted: the internet is today’s yellow pages, television, and newspaper. It’s been years since I’ve had to search for a phone number or address, watch television (that’s more of a choice than a decision that the internet is better than cable), or read the dead trees (as the next generation—I remember when we were the next generation!—call it).

I can’t escape talking about the weather. Once Seattle returns to its humdrum wintry weather of constant misty rain in the mid-40s, you won’t hear much about it from me. But for now you’ll have to deal with my constant complaining and explaining of the strange weather patterns. It was cold again today. We woke up to frosted grass and car windows, and while the sun melted most of the frost and frozen remnants of the rainstorm, it didn’t get much above the 30s today. I pulled out my long heavy black coat, the coat I bought during our winter visit to Paris and that I usually reserve for visits to New York’s winter. Houston spoiled me. There I learned that cold exists only in supermarkets and shopping malls. Seattle was teaching me that wet is a state of mind more so than a slice of weather. It’s now teaching me about long black coats and heated seats.

I started this entry late, as Doolies and I attended a Chanukah celebration tonight. It’s interesting to see the different ways the holiday is taught. As a child growing up in a conservative home, I learned that Chanukah celebrated the miracle of the oil. After the Jews drove the Greeks out of Jerusalem, they returned to find the holy of holies (the high temple) defiled by the Greeks. As part of the temple service, special oil was required to be lit each day. They searched for the undefiled oil but found only one vile of oil that should have lasted one day. They knew it would take eight days to fetch clean oil. The one vile of oil burned for eight days. For the victory of the Jews over the Greeks and for the miracle of the oil, Chanukah is celebrated. It turns out there are many different versions of this story, many of which don’t even mention the oil.

Doolies is pushing me to finish this up. I’m only a third of the way through my words. It’s cold in the Castle and we returned late from the class. She’s still jetlagged from her trip to Taiwan, and she wants me to hold her (and I want to hold her) to keep warm. She went to sleep ridiculously early last night, and woke up ridiculously early this morning. At four thirty in the morning she stood over me as I slept. She resisted poking me awake and instead stood there staring. I could feel her doing that, however. It was like how children hold their fingers an inch off their sibling’s face, and say, “I’m not touching you.” Doolies stood over me and I opened my eyes and saw her staring. It was not a bad way to wake, but it was still too early in the morning for me.

I didn’t get to bed until midnight, as I began playing with my computer. I sent my brand-new Alienware computer back to be fixed. The technology I bought was too cutting edge, and something was wrong with the motherboard and how it handled the memory. Or something like that. I got around to putting together my old computer and reinstalling Windows. Because I grow addicted when I start a project, I had to finish installing Windows before I went to bed. I don’t know what it is about me and projects, but they can keep me up to all hours of the night. And this was a silly project. Without internet, I couldn’t complete the installation or install any drivers or do anything useful with the computer. But still I remained downstairs watching the countdown until it finished installing.

Tonight I obviously won’t get back to the story I started yesterday. I spent many hours forming those words. Except for the Marathon, I usually write in that fashion: I draft a few paragraphs and then return to them to hammer them into some semblance of either what I originally intended them to say, or what I realized after the fact that I now wanted them to say. Either way it takes a lot of manipulating and patting, adding clay here and removing clay there, to get to a form that works for a particular paragraph. Ideally this should happen after I throw the entire raw story on the page. But this is a rare occurrence.

I wanted to get the bones of the story on the page yesterday. I wasted so much of my energy figuring out the best way of saying what I wanted to say (which I didn’t figure out until the third or fourth rewrite for that particular paragraph) that I didn’t get very far. But I’ll take the little storytelling time I can get. I’m hoping to return to it tomorrow if energy and time permitting. For today, I’ll be satisfied with this. I am trying to cut down on the consternations. I didn’t today, but it is a plan.