I did some Christmas…

I did some Christmas shopping this morning, by mail-order. If it takes seven days to get here from England, it shouldn't take more than two weeks to then get to Australia, right? So I'm in plenty of time to not be late with Karina's Xmas presents. The fact that they're also her birthday presents (quite late) makes is seem less virtuous, somehow. It was lots of fun buying the presents, and I also got myself a little present -- a Gothic rose window collapsible umbrella, because I've been wanting an interesting umbrella for forever. Black is practical, but oh, so boring. This one is in gorgeous jewel tones -- I hope it looks half as good in person as it did on paper.

I found a gift for Roshani too, a lady's writing slope -- an old-fashioned wood box that stores paper and pens and opens to create a felt-lined surface suitable for writing letters. Roshani is even more of a romantic than I am; she would have been very happy in some earlier era (as a suitably wealthy lady, of course), paying courtesy calls on her friends, sending off reams of delicate letters...that kind of thing. She knows the lingo better than I do. She's been wanting one of these for quite a while, and it'll be fun to give it to her. Mostly, Tom supplies all her needs, but this is just too fussy a thing for him to buy for her. That's what girlfriends are for. :-)

At some point, I really should get cracking on that little book I wanted to write for Christmas, The Poet and the Mathematician. I did start it, and I'm reasonably happy with it so far, but she hasn't actually encountered the mathematician yet. That'll be the tricky bit. We'll see how it goes.

1.

In a far away land under the coconut palms, there was a quiet little house by the sea. It had old boards that creaked when the wind whistled through them. It had small rooms that filled with sunshine on sunny days and moonlight on cloudless nights. Sometimes the roof leaked a little rain. And it had a young poet.

I cannot tell you if she was a good poet or a bad poet -- she wasn't sure of that herself. But I do know that she was a real poet. She had been on a journey. She had visited crows and dragons, unicorns and hazel trees. She had found good paper, and a good pencil, and a good house at journey's end. Somewhere along the way, she had become a poet.

This is not that story. This is another story altogether.

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