This is not my beautiful refrigerator.

Also not my moon. The moon is not full tonight. But it did sort of look like this at dusk.
(moon from here.)

The day was spent doing more appropriately beginning of the year things like cracking the whip while the children cleaned the (900-years-overdue-for-a-good-wipe-down) fridge and trudging through this pile of grading.

Trudge is a word I like for its sound. If it weren't so onomatopoetic I would wish it meant something else to fit my enthusiasm.

In the afternoon, I went out to do an hour's worth of erranding that took two hours, when I returned home the kids were out stalking around the house with Nerf weapons and their favorite college-aged x-babysitter. When I finally exhorted them to come in to finish the refrigerator project, Z's hands were bright red with cold, O was happy in his gym shorts, and the moon glowed with a huge orange penumbra.

Overall the day was a moderate success in the slow down project. Tea was made, children were conversed with, gifts were puttered into place, thank you notes were posted, the cat was walked, I managed to only sort of weirdly lurk on social media.

Reading: I love this piece about art making and found materials from today's NYT.

Writing: I read a lot of other people's (student) writing. I thought optimistically about writer's group.

Dinner: Pressure cooker project #2: pot roast with onions, garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes, and carrots over mashed potatoes.

(Nancy wished for yesterday's white bean pasta sauce recipe. It was sort of like this, quantities liberally interpreted. I think mine had more garlic, more basil, and more beans. I mashed the beans with a potato masher. In the absence of fresh tomato, I used the dregs of some bruschetta sauce that was in the fridge to top it off, along with parm.)

Soundtrack: Mozart piano concertos, and stuff.

Random thing: Perusing the Best of 2014 stuff in the Times, I learned about Debbie Tucker Green's Generations, which is a play about AIDS across three-generations of a South African family framed as an argument about learning to cook. I really want to get my hands on this script because it completely gibes with a writing exercise I have students do about argument and subtext.