I apologize for the long silence. Thanksgiving at home was lovely: it was wonderful to spend time with the fam, wonderful to eat amazing food, wonderful to sleep, wonderful to see Tuffy, wonderful to celebrate Remus’ birthday by showering her with alcohol, wonderful to cook, wonderful to drive. I had a great time. The last couple days I started to feel sick and by the time I made it back to the city I was quite ill. Spent a few days at work trying not to die, chugging Robatussin (and spilt it all over the inside of my bag; a tragedy). Eventually recovered.

Since then things have been sailing along quite merrily. I’ve been really enjoying work. Now I am fully qualified sales person as well as a fitter. So I split my time between the two, working in the back fitting frames until they need me to help someone up front. Sometimes it’s hard to completely change mindsets and be interrupted, but its ok. I do most of my sales on the weekends, usually it’s pretty quiet during the week and other people help the clients.

I’m still loving my coworkers. They are awesome people and so much fun to be around. I’m closest with the other 4 full-time fitters: David, Justin, Karina, and Jeremy. This is because on any given work day I will be fitting across from one of them and we will get to spend the day talking as we work. David and I get on swimmingly; we have very similar personalities and hit it off very quickly. We spend the days being ridiculous, making up stories and talking about anything that comes up. The other day we outlined a bestselling novel that one of us will write, describing my to-come epic adventure of stealing a camel from the Bronx Zoo and taking it north in a motorboat to freedom in Canada so that we can use it for an experiment to determine exactly how many straws it takes to break a camel’s back. Justin and I don’t get to work together as much, but we are chill, mostly discussing coffee and music. Karina has been stuck in the back working on an enormous project and I haven’t worked with her in forever. But today we shared some amazing caramels that were incredibly delicious. Jeremy has been showing me some cool tricks and framing techniques. His brother is a stage manager, so we talk about theatre, too.

Other important things that have happened since Thanksgiving have included my getting a new bank account and a library card, both much needed and long-awaited. The first book I checked out was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I hadn’t read in forever and thoroughly enjoyed. David recommended that I try Catch-22, saying that he really enjoyed both, and so I got that one next. And am really loving it. It’s hysterical just like Hitchhikers, though even less linear and more ridiculous if that’s possible. It’s also more cynical and 60’s-ish, but I’m liking it. I’ve been getting lots of weird looks on the subway the last few weeks as I burst out laughing for no apparent reason.

My friend Stephanie and I went to see a play called Looking at Christmas a couple weeks ago and really enjoyed it. It was about Christmas in New York, as a young couple visits all the window displays of the various department stores. It alternates scenes between the couple and scenes of the displays coming to life. It was hilarious and a lot of fun. Since then I’ve been more aware of Christmas in the city; trees are for sale everywhere, there are Christmas lights and wreaths and window displays, last weekend we started playing Christmas music in the shop (which we all regretted soon after because it’s repetitive). I’ve been meaning to visit the department stores and see the tree at Rockafeller Center, but haven’t made it out yet. My Christmas shopping is mostly complete, the majority of my gifts having been purchased online and shipped home in an attempt to make my luggage lighter.

Church and small group have been great recently. Timmy K has been doing a series of sermons on knowing God that have been illuminating and inspiring. Small group is going through his recent book The Gospel in Life, which is an excellent examination of what it looks like to have the gospel be impacting your day to day life in real ways.

My cooking adventures have continued. I made a big pot of chili that I lived on for a while. This past week I made Thai chicken and steak satay, a curry-marinated fried-on-skewers concoction that was quite exciting to make, and an apple pie. Tomorrow I’m planning on my Mexican casserole and pumpkin bread to get me through to the weekend.

For your reading pleasure, this is my favorite passage from Catch-22 so far. The main character, Yossarian is an American Army officer in WWII and is in the hospital:

“All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an, and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation “Dear Mary” from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, “I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.” A.T. Tappman was the group chaplain’s name. When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God.”

That is all. See you all soon for Christmas!!!