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.