Since I find that when I fail to report on my activities to you — faithful voyeur — the vessel of my memory empties quickly and I forget what they have been, here is a quick review of holiday week adventures that I should like to hold on to for longer than they will live within my poor brain.

We went to two lovely small dinner parties; one at Jenn’s, where there was a belt-tightening spread of delectables that included homemade ricotta gnocchi with two choices of sauce, and a roasted vegetable torte that took my favorite almost-doctor two days to make. Two days, people! This is the kind of fortitude that it comforts me to know is beating in the breasts of the future of the medical profession. We also had the good luck of being invited to a joint Chanukah/Christmas celebration at the home of our compatriots in the adventure of Jewish-Gentile miscegeny, Marina and Alex. There was turkey and sufganiot, a decorated tree and a chanukiah, and a well-thumbed book on inter-faith marriages was sitting underneath the coffee table, and it was all quite inspiring. Ross and I will have to keep up with the Christmassy side of things better next year, as we’ve been lighting Chanukah candles all week long but there is no sign of mistletoe anywhere in our cosy house.

Sunday itself we spent mostly with Grandma Evelyn, whose apartment is now festooned with extremely well-aligned pictures hung by the eagle-eyed Ross. Hooray! While we were there we watched Adam’s Rib on her gigantonormous television screen, and have I told you lately that I love Katherine Hepburn? Have I told you there’s no one else before her? Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my — ahem. Anyway, Adam’s Rib is of the strange breed of 50s movies (it’s actually from 1949) that would like to think of itself as radical and feminist, but ultimately still holds a terribly narrow and condescending view of women. Nevertheless, it’s quite a romp and you get to see Spencer Tracy lifted off his feet by a very muscley woman and good old Katherine sticking her tongue out at him under a court-table.

Ben and Erica have both been in town, too, and I got to see them separately — which is nice, because I am selfish like that. (Or maybe it’s the fact that I can only pay attention to one human being at a time, because there’s only so much of my brain alloted for listening to other people in the first place?) Erica always turns me into an annoying evangelist for the merits of various genres of art — by which I mean writing and tv, mostly — because she has such strong opinions about what she does and does not like and I am a frustrated teacher who can’t abide being disagreed with. As a result I showed her two picturebooks that she hated and made her watch an episode of Monty Python, which thank the lord she at least had the decency to chuckle at.

Other things that will fall through my sieve of a mind soon: we made mocha-banana-chocolate-chip muffins, which turned out beautifully. My parents had 70 carollers in their house on Christmas Eve. 70! I fell on my butt getting into the car outside Marina’s house, so I am no longer waiting for the first tumble of the winter. I saw on Tuesday that the river was frozen over, but it’s been warm since then so I think it’s already melting again. And the best news of all is that we are planning an (all-too-short) trip to Singapore in February! Somehow three years have managed to pass since I was last home, which quite frankly I think means that the clocks have all gone mad. I am not in my upper twenties I am not in my upper twenties I am not in my upper twenties

Here’s to the last three days of 2005, lovelies! Salud!