Fog

I got up at about 4 a.m. this morning to get some water, and this is what it looked like out the front window. Remember the estate agent's office that I mentioned in Monday's post, the one that glows blue at the top of the street? You can see it up the hill on the left. That building across the road has been under renovation for some time. God only knows what they're doing to it.

Sometimes when I look out at the street in the silent, unmoving early hours, I'll see a fox running down the pavement. While the city sleeps, the foxes are in charge.

Well, this has been a dispiriting couple of days, hasn't it? To put it mildly. The shooting at Brown, the shooting in Australia, the heartbreaking family tragedy of the Reiners. I loved "All in the Family" when I was a young teenager, though I wasn't permitted to watch it when I was a small child -- my parents thought it was too mature. Rob Reiner, just like his character Michael Stivic, represented a liberal sensibility that I always valued and I will miss him. I can't imagine the degree of parental anguish he and his wife must have felt in dealing with their son's addictions, not to mention the torment and alienation of the son himself. And I hate the fact that Reiner died with Trump in office. He deserved to see the end of this reign of destructive narcissism.

Today is our last day with students -- and it's just a half-day, so I'll be home in the early afternoon. And then we're on Winter Break! Woo hoo! Dave and I have a couple of days to get ready for traveling -- laundry and that kind of thing -- and then we're off to Florida.

I made our end-of-the-year charitable donations yesterday. Same cast of characters as usual: the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I'm also going to support Hope Not Hate in the UK, sort of a UK equivalent to the SPLC.

And I wore my London Christmas sweater to work yesterday, even though it's overly warm and the lights no longer work. I'm always glad to get another use out of it. Hard to believe I bought it 11 years ago! Here's the little video Dave and I made back then to show it in action, which I apparently never embedded on my blog, though I did link to it:

What a time capsule that video is. Look how tiny our houseplants are! That's the avocado tree in the background by the window, now much taller than I am. And of course Olga on the floor behind me, gnawing on her Kong.

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten my money's worth out of that sweater.