It is getting cold here in Connecticut. Lately the mornings have been bright and blue and half-filled with clouds that just rush across without ever completely vanishing or filling up the sky. Too blustery the other day to go do much of anything out there; yesterday I wanted to catch up inside on writing and I did; today I worked for Dad. The ground is already frozen; I feel it beneath my boots as I take the dog out for a walk, or at night when I step out in bare feet, drop off the stoop into the leaves alongside the house to unplug the multicolored net-lights slung over three of the six or seven bushes in front. When the snow comes - and it's supposed to come Sunday - it's going to stick, not just melt and seep away. For that I am glad. December too many times cold without snow; what's the point of that? Iron-hard ground, bristly grass, stiff white branches, dog shit like little black rocks. I am about halfway through my R & R now.

I spent yesterday stuck here; a dead battery kept me from getting to the doctor's for a checkup on my knee, which keeps me from making a PT appointment, which keeps me from knowing how long until I can start running, kicking, stressing it again. I am lazy and housebound enough without machines aiding and abetting me. Brother, while setting the trickle charger up in the finger-chilling dark, suggests the problem might be the fan belt that squeals for a minute or two every time I start the car. The belt slips; the alternator isn't recharging the battery as I drive - something like that. That would explain how my battery died while I filled up at a station in NJ, nine hours into the drive back from Ohio. Suggests I take it down to the station that his buddy's family owns and runs, let them have a look at it. The same place that supposedly fixed this squeaking belt problem a year ago. The squealing started up again the morning I got the car back. Brother is a mechanic, though, so I'll listen.

I fell asleep in the late afternoon reading Bertrand Russell on Kant. And I still haven't started what should really be a rudimentary paper on Habermas. I haven't registered for classes, nor do I even know what I should be taking - problematic since I plan on returning the day before the quarter starts. Choices for my committee? Dissertation ideas? Surely you jest.

I am not really saying much about Kyra. I don't know what to say, which goes hand in hand with having nothing to say just now. I have no control over what she does or doesn't do, if she says hello to me or remains cut off - she's too far away and I've got no way to get her closer or me closer. She reads this and she knows that well. I just don't want our story - a wild and weird and pretty twisted story, now that I think about it - to end like this. No one but the two of us know the whole of the story...not even close...but I'm working on that now. I always deferred to her wish not to tell it, as long as she was with me (so to speak), but its hard to hold it in now.

AOL Radio's Bossa Nova channel isn't all that great (and what is it doing in "Latino", anyway?), but man, I love Marisa Monte.

Now I'll go grab a beer, slide into the hot tub, and later settle down with an old friend, Max Frisch (Sketchbook, 1946-49). Hope that I'm able to pluck something sharp and steady to round off this with, to dilute the LiveJournalish tone of it...