I'm not one to complain, exactly, more like kvetch. I like to think I'm placid but I'm not, really. Right now I'm placid-aggressive, in despair but not noisy about it. So I'm thinking about asparagus and strawberries. These days you don't have to go far to find such luxuries - used to be luxuries when they were rare treats.. Now they're available all seasons. I can remember in the late spring, when the asparagus crops in Ontario were flourishing, how heavenly it was to load a vegetable platter with all the colourful produce, the centrepiece of which was asparagus. I used to love white asparagus, too, and revelled one springtime in Germany when the restaurants flashed their special neon signs - SPARGEL, SPARGEL, SPARGEL - and I could pig out on it. And then I learned it had no chlorophyl whatsoever, no nutritional value at all, and felt so cheated. Of course. A plant without sunshine is a plant without chlorophyl. Another of life's little disappointments.

Strawberries are lovely, too, not only pretty but good for you, not as good as blueberries, though. "They" say that blueberries are good for the memory. That conjures up a picture of the Tin Man, putting his finger to his head and coming up with a mathematical equation. Eat a blueberry and memorize the Gettysburg Address with ease. It wasn't easy. I had to type it 47 times whenI was taking touch typing before I got it error-free. That had more to do with my eye-hand co-ordination of course, than with memory. Anyway, strawberries: At the height of the season where they are indigenous, a bowl full of them makes the whole refrigerator smell of sugar. That doesn't happen in January. A strawberry in any other month does not smell as sweet. They're good dipped in chocolate, though.

Now chocolate you can count on.

I am trying very hard to keep up my spirits and my energy, but it's difficult. It is not only cold in Toronto but also in my building where the boilers have broken and we are waiting for them to be repaired and heat to be restored. I just finished reading The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux and shivered right along with the last leg of the journey, crossing Russia on the Siberian Railway. I have eaten more than I intended because the food was warm and I have dug out my leg warmers (remember them?) and put them on along with various disparate layers of clothing. I have wristlets that a friend knit for me to help keep my hands warm while writing, but nothing to put on my nose. Since my brain has congealed and my thoughts are sluggish I have been browsing online, searching out odd things i have been meaning to look up: dugongs, for example; the novel WE, that preceded Orwell's 1984, by Zamyatin; those lines from Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning - "sad,sad, the articulation of the bones, etc. " and that led me into a discussion of humanistic psychology. And then people send you things, like "a very cool way to separate eggs" (with a plastic water bottle), - but that lured me into a memory of deadpan Katherine Hepburn trying to separate eggs in "Woman of the Year."

Remember that line of T.S.Eliot's in The Wasteland - "dry thoughts in a dry land." Well, I'm having lukewarm thoughts in a cold land and they're not helping a bit. SOW, does anyone understand bitcoins? Apparently Iceland is devoting enormous amounts of computer time to them/it.

I miss my fireplace.