Might be time to find out what I owe and start paying

spatch woke me like a cat this afternoon, kneading his head against my chest. The new year feels strange and fragile and even more difficult to watch coming on than the usual future lately, but it is still the new year, so we took my niece to the reservoir for masked-and-socially-distanced tashlikh. She threw her pieces of cracker into the algae-dusted water shouting, "Not going to do that again! Definitely not going to do that!" which seems like a reasonable degree of teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah to expect from a six-year-old. We shared the holiday meal outdoors, including with a wasp that meticulously sliced a portion of roast chicken the size of its own body from my sister-in-law's plate and staggered triumphantly into the air with it, just skirting the fire pit as it made its escape. (It later returned for seconds.) We helped move a car on furniture dollies and came home to discover that our thermostat had impressively died. Rob took this picture of me in the afternoon:



Have some links that cheered me up.

1. sholio is hosting an apropos promptfest in her comments: Hold Me: A Comfort Fest.

2. Courtesy of moon_custafer: "I Am Anxiety." Or, a well-intentioned PSA catastrophically underestimates how thirsty its target audience can get for their mental health issues when personified by Ben Mendelsohn.

3. Thanks to a friend elsenet linking this tweet, I have stated for the record that while I cannot contra (or even country) dance to save my life, I would learn for the sake of a tune called "Fire Up the Harpsichord, Bartholomew." In a tradition whose tunes are all named things like "Haste to the Wedding," "Mr. Beveridge's Magot," "Smash the Windows," "Long Odds," and "Cuckolds All Awry," it'd fit right in.