These fragments I have shored

Found a recipe for what looks like a killer pineapple carrot cake.
The last time I was in Chicago with any kind of time to kill, I found
this place called Doc's Smoothies, which I enthusiastically recommend
if you're ever in or around Wicker Park. The smoothies were
excellent, but their pineapple carrot cake was heaven. The ambition
is to recreate that experience. Preparing food is sometimes an act of
piety to sentimental impulses.

Blundered around looking for Christmas cards too late--far, far too
late.* Bought a few, then got too tired and cranky and went home to
collapse. Dropped the cards off in a mailbox in front of the post
office on the way home from work this morning. So a few people are
getting cards that will arrive a little late. Everyone else is
getting awkward excuses the first time we talk after Christmas. And
that seems fair enough.

Bought books that I hope will be entertaining on winter days (some SJ
Perelman, some Thurber, Marion Meade's book about Dorothy Parker).
Also ordered, at long last, Left for Dead II.

It occurred to me this morning, while I was performing my traditional wintertime slapstick routine of trying to scrape the ice off of my windshield while trying to keep my footing in an icy parking lot that I actually really enjoy the first couple of times each year I have to scrape my windshield. Icy mornings are invariably calm and quiet and eerily pretty. It's the 44th time of the year, give or take, when I start to indignantly resent the obligation and curse the winter. Hell is repetition, as either Beckett or Stephen King once said. I think it was King, which is fitting, since I remember having exactly the same thought the fifth time he re-wrote the same protagonists with different names in a different book.

Waiting on English muffin. Then bed.

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* I nearly put a comma after the second "far". What stopped me was that I suddenly recalled an old episode of News Radio in which Dave had just handed Lisa a letter of apology from which she looked and angrily said "There's no comma after the second 'very' in 'very, very sorry.' "