And I am here now and I am staying put

derspatchel helped me make the charoses for tonight's seder. My brother had to leave early, but not before doing the voice for Pharaoh. He and Audrey alternated the Four Questions, in Hebrew and English; she found the afikomen where he had hidden it. The telling is different every year, but we always open the door for Elijah: let all who are hungry come and eat, let all who are thirsty come and drink, let all who are enslaved be free. My mother's Christmas cactus bloomed.

Right before we ran out the door to catch the 87, Rob spotted the package from Seattle in our mailbox and handed it to me. It turned out to be my contributor's copy of Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson. It's huge. It has an amazing cover and interior art and an excellent foreword and it reprints my poem "A Find at Þingvellir," about Mjölnir. They even got the thorn in the right dialogue font.

I don't know if we're going to be able to see the eclipse. Rob stuck his head out the window a moment ago and reported, profanely, that it's overcast out there. Where the hell is my box of Magic cards? Maybe if I play Blood Moon, the sky'll get the idea.

[edit] Solid cloud-wall. We went out twice. We knew where in the sky the moon should be, but all we saw was light pollution. Boston sky, I am disappointed. You could have showed us something mythic for the spring.

Watching storms start to form over America

Today I paid my taxes and buried my umbrella. It was free from the World Wildlife Foundation, but I expected it to last more than a month. Having already cracked from the stress of the wind on my way to the post office, it snapped in half and blew inside out as I walked back from my dentist's appointment. After that it was a beautiful piece of conceptual art and absolutely no use at keeping off the rain: I gave it a state funeral in the trash can outside the Au Bon Pain on Cambridge Street. It had a wooden shaft, black metal struts, and a blue-and-white design of pandas. I felt bad for the pandas, but I think "decorative" is the least endangered species. I am told it's going to snow tonight.

ALL RIGHT, NEW ENGLAND, YOU CAN STOP NOW.