Shoveling! Major blizzard here on the East Coast; an unexpected day off from work. Woo-hoo!

Hey buster, I need all the blessedness I can get!

Arrived back from Florida just ahead of the snow. Work was closed today, hooray. During a brief lull in the storm that nicely coincided with the plow guy doing my driveway I was able to go fetch Oreo out of kitty jail. Now it's snowing like crazy again.

Other than that, ordinary life has resumed, since I have no new year's eve plans.

"Liminal Days" is the perfect way to describe this time. I wish we had better cultural structure for it. But I do OK anyway.

I loved the cards as well -- also sent only to my group of 7 but got many additional as well. THanks to al.

Mine all ended up in the mail on the 24th, so you should all be receiving them shortly. It's so much fun to get something in the mail nearly every day. Thanks everyone!!!

By the way, what's "kletspraters?"

We don't have much cultural structure for these days here either. Only that people generally have days off right now. And even when you're at work there's little to do. (unless you work in retail I guess)
And that's precisely why they feel liminal: there are no schedules, no calendars, nowhere to go. Just time to hang out with people. It's precisely what I love about these days.

kletspraters is my replacement for bunnies. to chat= kletsen. praten=to prate, to talk. kletspraat=nonsense, chit chat. Prater = talker. Hence kletspraters. I couldn't come up with a way to address you people by pure derivation from metachat. And addressing people as bunnies is not quite my social register of discourse.
It's an affectionate term.
I could cutify the term further into kletspratertjes. tjes = diminutive postfix. But then I guess it'd sound as if I was addressing a bunch of kids.

I love getting cards at this time of year. It gives me a reason to actually check my mail every day (instead of just once a week because I am laaaaaaaaazy and the mailbox is so far away). I'm back at work this week (having taken off last week using up my comp days for the year) and it is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. I suspect all the students are either nursing hangovers or thought that school would be closed today.

Just time to hang out with people. It's precisely what I love about these days.

I love that too, but what i mean is that the culture isn't in agreement about this. These days end up getting interrupted by commitments to be at jobs, when we all know nothing but timewasting is going on at these jobs. I wish we had a cultural committment to saying that the seven days at the end of the year are basically a time for minimal work, a holiday for all nonessential workers and a light-duty time, to the degree possible, for essential workers. We have a de facto holiday but we don't really have agreement from our institutions that it's permissible. I agree that they're liminal for this reason, and that's a great way to express it, but i think I would rather have a widespread effort at declaring the whole time a true holiday nationwide. The US is rotten at stuff like that.

I loved getting all the cards. I only sent to my eight, but got more, so thanks all! If anyone is wondering why my cards were not exactly seasonal, it's because I got super busy and entrusted the card buying to a trusted associate, who interpreted "non-denominational" to mean butterflies and dandelions. I promise next year there will be some snowflakes or something.