I am wearing octarine nail polish.

Octarine, for those unacquainted with Terry Pratchett�s Discworld series of novels, is the colour of magic. It�s kind of a greenish shade of purple, and this particular example has touches of metallic silver, and every once in a while a flash of a pale brown. A bunny-like co-worker had received a bottle as a fun gift, and she shared it with me last night on break.

So, my nails are the colour of magic. How cool is that?

The coolness is matched only by Ceri�s Yule gift: a pair of Harry Potter non-slip socks in blue and gold, the Ravenclaw house colours. Toe socks, even. My first pair. Very awkward, and takes some getting used to. But fun.

Life should be this magical all the time. It is, I know, but I think what I mean has more to do with the playful aspect of magical. I need to work on the play part of �plays well with others�. I work well, I interact well, but the play part, however� I think the last couple of years have really fused the play setting in my brain, rendering it an unrecognisable lump of unmoving mechanism.

Project 2003: Learning how to have fun again.

December 20, 2002
Sunrise: 7:31 morn
Sunset: 4:13 eve

Hours of daylight: 8 h 41 min

It�s the day before the Winter Solstice. This means that it�s the shortest day of the year.

In a few minutes, the sun will officially set, and the longest night of the year will begin.

I have had an absolutely horrible December. This past couple of years has been bad, but this month in particular seems to out-bad them all. The phrase, �it�s darkest just before dawn� is something that I always associate with the night before the Winter Solstice, and this year in particular, I�m clinging to the idea that the longest night will give way to the sunrise, and as the days get longer and the sun gains strength once more, my life will turn around, and things will get better.

As 4:13 PM hits, I�ll turn off all the lights in the house, and light the candles in my Yule log on the mantelpiece, and by that light I will think about darkness, and what it means to me. When I go to bed tonight, I�ll transfer those flames to my wind lantern, which will burn on my altar all night. Tomorrow, before dawn, I will carry that lantern to a hill in the dark, and I will watch the sun rise over Montreal. I will greet it with quiet joy, and love, and the knowledge that darkness will always be balanced by light, in a never-ending cycle of give and take.

December 21, 2002
Sunrise: 7:31 morn
Sunset: 4:14 eve

Hours of daylight: 8h 43 min

Let the Wheel turn once again; let hope be reborn with the Sun.

Why is it that just when you think you’re okay, shaky but okay, things go wrong again?

Ugh. Osteo at 6.30 this morning. Working backwards, this means I got up at 5.30, after a night of not-so-good sleeping.

In between being awake last night, I had the strangest dream.

It began with a small gathering to play word games, with my husband making up a challenge involving a word scramble of over forty words. (This is odd right from the start.) For some reason, this game had to be played at dawn. Ceri and I didn�t manage to work it out; Rob did. With no problems at all; just tossed the answer off. He was distracted and bitter, though, and something was terribly wrong.

I think I woke up a bit at this point, because I remember thinking that my husband (dear soul) is an unlikely sort to develop a word puzzle as extensive as the one he produced in the dream. The second part of the dream is disjointed enough that it feels inspired by the first, but not necessarily a continuation.

Rob asked Ceri to do a Tarot reading for him, and they went off somewhere. A bunch of us decided to go out for breakfast, and we saw Rob and Ceri at another table, so we asked our server to arrange for a larger table.

Here�s where it starts to get even more strange. Somehow I was still in puzzle/problem solving mode, so like an amateur detective I tracked down a tiny hidey-hole, and opened an inch-by-inch square in a wall, and dug with a single finger through hardened insulating foam to find a tiny key, which I withdrew and went right to an old white wood filing cabinet/night table thing (how do you know these things in dreams?), dug through more foam to find a tiny padlock, and unlocked it. Inside the drawers, under old shredded paper, were many thin envelopes of money � used envelopes, as in the kind of institutional envelopes in which you receive your monthly statements. The money was in large denomination bills, all used� none of this Hollywood stacks-o-new-cash thing. It looked like it was someone�s life savings, tucked away. In the lowest drawer there were floppy binders with more word games that I knew would lead to more money.

And it was all meant for Rob. I knew that, somehow.

I had someone call him over, and I gave it to him � envelopes, binders with more word games, everything. He was stunned to the core.

And you know, even with all the horrendous financial difficulty I�ve been in lately, I was happy to hand it to him. It was his. It never even crossed my mind that we could use it.

So, what does this mean? Probably something saccharine like I care about my friends� welfare even when I�m in a bad position. Or maybe that I�m hoping someone would do the same for me � just hand me envelopes and envelopes of money.

Or maybe it�s all about the word games, although I can�t think why; I lose patience with puzzles very quickly.

Eh. Whatever.

Grrr.

I’m just back from teaching. Well, what should have been teaching, except for the fact that no students showed up.

It’s not like they misunderstood the date; this is a reguar Saturday morning class. This same class of students didn’t happen last week. The only difference is that last week, most of them called or e-mailed me to let me know what was going on (not that I got the messages until I had arrived, but they made the effort). This week, I didn’t even get that. I had to call them half an hour after class was to have started, trying to track them down. They all come from the South Shore, so I thought that perhaps a bridge was closed or something.

No. They called each other to say they weren’t coming in to class, but no one called me.

I would have liked to have slept in this morning. I would have liked to stay in bed, fighting this cold that I’ve been fighting for over a week (and I’m still winning). I had a packed classs planned, catching up from last week as well as covering this week’s material.

Am I missing something? Am I asking too much? I know it’s December, and eveyone’s exhausted, and sick, and busy… but I don’t think I’m asking more than common courtesy when my time is involved.

I have amazing friends.

Things have been really, really tough lately. Last night, to cheer us up, our upstairs neighbours came down laden with nibblies, Kaluha, and a copy of the special extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring� and left it behind, an early Yule gift.

I was stunned, and grateful, and thrilled. If I hadn�t been so tired, I probably would have expressed it better. As it was, I had just sat through three and a half hours of very good film, and it was eleven-thirty at night, so I�m fairly certain that I managed to convey mildly stunned, but that�s about it.

General reaction to the extended edition? Valuable character development was cut out for the theatrical release (but as I�m on of the few who thinks character development is important, I�m not surprised); the fight scenes were trimmed (which means that die-hard fans get to watch more sword-swinging and arrow action and axe-whacking than before� and all with such finesse!); and some landscape shots were taken out. The latter two sort of cuts I understand, but there were some serious character bits removed that filled out events and gave them more grounding. All in all, I�d say that this is my preferred version. The pace is slower, yes, but it allows the film to breathe a bit, and a viewer can appreciate the sense of time passing in a way that the theatrical release did (could!) not.

We all found that the restored scenes seemed so natural that at times we couldn�t remember if they were indeed new or not. The other change that really stood out was the enhanced voice of the One Ring, turning it into an active, manipulative presence as opposed to the more passive role it plays (mainly as a foreboding visual focal point) in the theatrical release.

Then there�s all those extra discs that we haven�t even thought about looking at, yet. The four commentary tracks alone make up fourteen hours of viewing. And then there’s all those doumentaries on development, storyboards, costuming, sets…

All this has served to heighten my awareness that The Two Towers is being released in four days. Oh, the suspense!

So many, many thank-yous. You three are terrific.

I’ve spent this afternoon on the phone with pleasant switchboard operators at medical firms across Canada, doing research for a client. I have discovered, much to my surprise, that handling a phone in a non-retail environment is much less stressful than I had expected.

It’s good for a couple of laughs here and there, too. For example, at one point I called Proctor & Gamble, and jumped through the hoops required by their electronic phone system that sorts you around – you know, the ones that keep asking, “If you have called for information on X, press 1 now”. One of the choices I encountered was, “If you are calling for information on the Proctor & Gamble warehouse sale, please press 3 now.”

Warehouse sale? For a pharmaceutical firm?

I pondered it as I pressed buttons routing me (eventually) to the information I needed, and laughed at the ludicrous image it conjured up.

Warehouse sale, indeed.