All that said...

I am pretty grateful for my family; we are mostly a low-drama group (three-year-old's occasional tantrums notwithstanding).

I'm also grateful to be home. Apparently up in Oklahoma City they had some pretty nasty ice, and out in both Panhandles there is ice. I don't like ice; it does far too much damage. But I'm grateful to be home - drove through a cold rain most of the way. Being home when it's cold and rainy is just nice. I have my little tree lit up and the lights on the garland that are up over the window.

All I have to do tomorrow is teach Sunday school; I am not on duty as elder and as I filled in for someone absent last week, even if the regulars are absent, I should (by rights) get someone else as a fill in.

I re-read (though I remembered little of the story of the second one, as I read it some 10 years ago) two Inspector Alleyn mysteries over break. This is pure comfort-reading for me, both the setting and the characters and the idea that things are made as right as possible (given the fact that there is a murder that takes place - in one, the minor-aristocrat friend of Alleyn, in the other, a well-loved valet to an old military man) in the end. I also read about half of "The Clockwork Universe," a book on the early work on cosmology/astronomy/mathematics by the likes of Newton and Copernicus and Tycho Brahe (most commonly referred to as Tycho).

Actually, I've opined before that Tycho would make an excellent subject for a movie or perhaps even a modern opera. He was a *bizarre* man - wealthy, with a "private observatory on a private island" (Or, if you will: "A private (insert your favorite intensifier here) observatory on a private (insert your favorite intensifier here) island," which is how I think of it). Also, Tycho lost part of his nose in a duel, and so he wore a gold or silver prosthesis. And he had a walrus mustache. And he had a private jester named Jepp, who was sort of an early version of Wee Man. And a pet moose, that apparently got drunk and died after falling down stairs. And Tycho himself met his end by (allegedly) drinking so much but not getting up from the table to urinate that he caused himself a fatal bladder or kidney infection. Crazy.

(By contrast, fellow astronomer/mathematician, Johannes Kepler, who eventually inherited some of Tycho's data, was poverty-stricken and was much more abstemious - and wound up as Tycho's assistant for a while. More fodder for the movie.)

I also finished a pair of socks and got in a bit of work on a simple shawl. 

On the way home, I stopped and picked up enough food for the coming week, and also found a "cookie box" (a gift box for giving cookies) at the store that will make an excellent gift box for the gift cowl, so that's ready to go.