Yesterday afternoon I walked past a display of wreaths. The smell of the evergreen brought the feeling, for the first time, really felt that Christmas is approaching. We've had Christmas gifts and displays in the stores since August, but it's been just noise to me. Christmas lights went up on many houses over the weekend and they look nice enough. The fragrance of the greens, though, brought me around. I'm now ready to face the season, a season that brings us stuff like this - http://www.hammacher.com/publish/71144.asp?promo=sportleisure.

My mother's been gone for more than four years, but we're still receiving mail for her. It ranges from Catholic worker newspaper to the journal of the Insight Meditation Center in Barre MA. How else might we learn about the grim tale of the Foolish Monkey - http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/1999a/ss_monkey.htm?

The work deadline that had been scheduled for Friday, in my mind, at leasst, is now the end of the day on Wednesday. Today and tomorrow may be a bit frantic. I'm pretty sure that I have enough time. The major difficulty comes from interesting interruptions.