The prettiest boat that you've ever seen

So I didn't sleep for the last two and a half days, with the result that by evening yesterday I was mentally useless in the extreme. I took a brief walk with spatch and caught a very clear southwestern view of the departing conjunction, stared at half of We're No Angels (1955) on TCM, and fell over just after midnight. I estimate that I was asleep by one in the morning. I woke up like a shot at six. After lying in the dark for two hours watching the light come in around the edges of the curtains, I got up. I am still perceptibly tired, but no longer approaching the vegetative. And since then I have fed the cats, drunk a glass of orange juice, and made myself breakfast, which I almost never eat. I'm not sure if I have actually reset my schedule or if my circadian rhythms are just confused to the point where my body thinks we just had dinner, in which case the grilled cheese sandwich with roast beef makes perfect sense, but at the waning end of this our hellscape 2020, I'll take it. It's beautifully sunny outside, frost-snap bright. If it weren't below freezing with a pandemic on, I'd go for a walk.

See what sense of glad you have

I spent the afternoon at my parents' house, vacuuming and dusting in preparation for Christmas. We are not having our open house with eggnog any more than we had our latke extravaganza, of course, but we will have my brother's family, who have isolated and tested for the purpose. Normally they spend Christmas Day with the in-laws and come to us for Boxing Day, but curiously enough, that is also off the table this year. Everyone has agreed it will be a small holiday. Nonetheless, their friend who runs a chocolate shop came through heroically with the glacéed apricots and candied citron peel for the fruitcakes and plum pudding.

The tree in my parents' living room still looks rather like the "before" scene of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), but it has all the right colors of lights on it and we will decorate it tomorrow, as many ornaments as its small branches and long needles will take. After a mystifying near-death experience, my mother's avocado tree rallied with the solstice and is putting out new leaves; her jade plant is jungling out of its pot. The Christmas cactus has managed one fuchsia bloom and is working on another.

I'll have to check the model number tomorrow, but we believe the E-6B flight computer inherited from my father's uncle who was a flight instructor and flew transport over the Pacific during WWII must have been manufactured either late in 1941 or early in 1942 because it says "U.S. Army Air Forces" (instead of "Air Corps") at the top and "Type E-6B" (instead of "AN-C-74") at the bottom and it's made of metal instead of the much more common plastic. It has been kept in good repair; if you can work a slide rule, you can use it. I found my father a manual from 1944.

The pencil marks on the wall next to the stairwell claim that my niece has grown an inch in less than a month, which still leaves her a suitable size to pounce on me and be scooped up in turn.

( Certain there's more than searching. )

We lit the candle for my grandfather's yahrzeit.