About half the afternoons the light is so beautiful that I feel the world must be ending.

Incidentally, the only way I successfully spell "beautiful" is to sound it out in my mind every time I write it: bee-ah-oo-tiful. I have yet to devise a mnemonic that will allow me to spell "embarrassing" correctly.

I forgot to mention that on the day before Christmas my mom and a friend rented the local skating rink for an hour. Susan and I, who had just arrived at my mom's house the previous day and were already deep into vacation mode, found it exceedingly difficult to get out of bed in time to get there for our morning time slot. Apparently the rink was cheaper in the early morning, but once we arrived we found it was worth the small measure of suffering. The hocky-rink sized span of ice looked like a football field with only two families and a few friends (maybe 15 people) skating out onto it. My usual skating haunts are the tiny outdoor rink at Pershing Park -- which is seldom crowded, but 1/4 the size of this monstrosity -- or the indoor rink north of Bethesda, which is occasionally too popular to be enjoyable. Having this much free ice and few dangers of collisions allowed me to play around and practice things that I'll seldom attempt on a public rink. Susan worked on jumps in the center while I zipped into tight little turns and took a few stabs at skating backwards. Someday I really will have to learn how to stop, but that just seemed too boring to spend time on during this precious hour.

What was pretty funny was that most people there just settled into the usual pattern of counterclockwise trips around the rink (do people in the southern hemisphere skate the opposite direction?), contented to do the same thing they'd be doing on any other trip to the rink. Meanwhile I flew around like a little stray electron, pleasantly on the edges of my ability to control my speed and direction.