katra’s Neighborhood

1. More love.
   
2. Less weight.
   
3. More yoga.
4. More books.
5. More exercise.
   
6. More vacations.
   
7. More fun! 

These all seem totally doable.

Bring it, 2010! Bring it!

*Nice day yesterday: very lazy. We got up late, made a huge breakfast (oatmeal blueberry pancakes, french toast, bacon, banana bread, poached eggs, fresh fruit), then hung out in the living room until 1pm when we finally started opening presents. Imagine: when I was a kid, I'd get up at 6am, so excited to open them. Now sleeping in and having a slow, lazy morning is much more of a gift! Some stuff we got: new camera, external HD for my computer, optical mouse, a new winter coat. Some things I gave: a nice microwave (Masa's been wanting one for ages), a faux-fur-lined hoodie, a real fur hat (Ken is still getting used to these winters), DVDs, an iPod port/player for Masa (that, unfortunately isn't really designed for iPhones grrrr). And some other stuff.

*Another Christmas celebration Monday night with M is back from US with the chitlin. We'll have dinner open gifts, etc. Nice to drag it out. Then another party Tuesday night a few blocks away with a friend, then we're having people over Thursday night to celebrate the end of 2009 and the start of my 39th year (actually my 40th year but I'm turning 39!)*Today is back to work. And shopping. M is watching animation. Ken is cleaning and playing video games. 

sparklebaum

spent xmas with the future inlaws (which sounds totally scifi) in the south burbs. this holiday already has been most relaxing, welcoming and familial: full of tasty eats made by several different sets of beloved hands; a new stocking with "floyd" glitterscript by "grandma"; cards and packages by post including little schoolboy cookies, a cheese-making kit, and a hand-spun, -dyed, and -knitted hat from my sister. we welcome a new learning guitar into the house for the shower crooner. watched "julia and julie" this afternoon and identified so much with its chaotic women and their quietly brilliant men.

[interlude: at the moment floyd is giving the toy some love in a fashion that feels utterly wrong to us to witness.]

ten. daaaaaays. without any work schedule. open air and wide open space. we're planning a couple of mini-adventures, getting out and about, packing cameras and setting out to discover fragile dilapidations or inspiring conglomeroddities out along the Somewheres Roadside. we'll see what turns up, which is the point. and I'm booking some playtable time, for sure-- got a start xmas eve eve-- started out with wrapping and kind of took off. glue now sits drying, ideas jelling amid cluttered and resifted cutouts. I foresee several cups of cocoa, cups of tea, glasses of wine in the days ahead. this is the friday night of the long holiday stretch. staring down the double barrel of 2010 and 43-- out of the aughts we go!

I have been remembering to articulate the need for TIME. just to be, time without feeling rushed or late for or behind on one thing or another. really I have missed timelessness. to have it, even in small sputtering doses and within a confined space before returning to whatever ordinary routine, defined of course in part by having a routine to return to-- this feels like such a gift just now.

and quiet deeply craved... tho my inner mouth yearns to say "craven", just all kinds of wrong meaning, obstinately meaning-full language. logic foiling the tastiness of the straight and curly sound of things. a frequent trouble in my poetry days-- I'd let myself go traipsing down some nonsense for the pure auditory seduction in words, of letters thrown together in loving hodge-podge, and then wind up amounting to what, exactly? ah, yeoldesaga of sarah's tumultuous relationship with writing-- fraught with long silences and adverbial clot, the struggles with and hellyeah against meaning.

o, hello, quiet to listen through all this hubbub, the engine-starting, throat-clearing first paragraphs of getting down into the underneath and moving it forward. by gum and golly. Ima be moving it forward. that's the deal. into the fear. right into the jaws of a host of discomforts. toward the other side, up over the wall.

I didn't do a very good job of maintaining that music vox, did I?
It's okay though.  I've built an entirely new site from scratch, and I've ported all the old music posts from this blog as well as the djfstop vox over to it, complete with download links for the music, and new entries too.  You should really go check it out.

www.fstopdj.com

Happy year this year. Got a comfortable place, people around us, enough money, more than enough stuff. I miss friends and family far away but feel fortunate to be where I am this time of year.

Merry merry