Awaking in the middle of the night I looked out our fifth floor window onto the street below and everything was white--a real winter scene. This no doubt is a great shock to many Torontonians who've quickly gotten used to the milder winters. Last year, for instance, winter didn't actually begin until the end of January.

Now we're back to normal and, frankly, I like it. When I went to bed last night, I shut the window to our bedroom for the first time in a long while (we're weird: we don't turn on heat in the apartment unless it's absolutely necessary), threw an extra quilt on the bed, and brought Gussy the cat under, who (of course) purred with delight.

Reminds me of what Charity and I refer to as "Claremont days" when we lived in a hundred-year-old farmhouse that leaked cold air like a sieve. The cold winds used to sweep across the fields and buffet the northwest corner of the house while the windows shook, and we'd pull the blankets closer and snuggle. (When babies Ben and Jeremy arrived in February, 1977, and began sleeping in the same room with us, however, we got a space heater cranking away.)

In other news, well, we went to the company Christmas party and while the meal (whole Cornish game hens and fancy schmancy vegetables, etc.) was great, we were disappointed with what followed. Turned out that our table was about 15 feet from one of the speakers circling the room and the sound level was painful. Actually it was even too loud during the meal when we had to shout and move closer to each other to be heard. Charity and I were talking afterwards about when it was in time that people got the idea that to have a good time at such events music needed to be raised in volume to a point of pain--and to a point that has been clinically proven to damage hearing. (If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: invest in companies on the cutting edge of hearing aides. It's the future.)

Okay, that's all for today. Got things to do and places to go...