Thankful for the little things

Look what the Solstice Elk brought S!

All lit up

I spent the last week pretending I had winter allergies, eventually acknowledging I had a nasty cold, and getting out of bed only long enough to play for multiple Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. Being sick always makes me appreciate the little things, like having a husband who makes the world's best matzo ball soup, and a son who enjoys playing nurse; like dwelling with a silky, easy-purring black cat who curls up with me all day in bed; and like experiencing sickness-induced spontaneous Christmas Day nosebleeds that begin during the spoken creed rather than during the accompanied liturgy (and like having sufficient tissues on hand, thanks to the cold; oh, and like not getting blood all over my face or having to sneeze; and like having a nice big grand piano to hide behind until it's all over).

Cold(s)

Not much to report of late, as we've all been sharing colds. S gave a talk in Chicago earlier this week, so E and I decided to bond in his absence over an evening DVD. We rented Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, about assorted human and animal activities in desolate Antarctica. We started the DVD, and I thought, gee, this looks oddly familiar. Turns out S and I had rented it before, and I had missed most of it because I had fallen asleep. I fell asleep again this time, but this time I'll remember not to rent it again.

The incredible shrinking newspaper

We are all vertical and able to breathe through our nostrils again, following a particularly evil manifestation of the common cold. Incidentally, there is no point trying to get used to brand new bifocals when you have a cold, as you can't tell the difference between a world distorted by profusely watery eyes and a world distorted by that irritating line in the middle of the glasses lenses.

We've been back in the U.S. for almost three weeks now. One aspect of reverse culture shock that still hasn't gone away is the apparent narrowness of the Triangle newspaper, The News and Observer (a.k.a. the N&O). I'm referring to its size as opposed to its news coverage, although the latter seems pretty slight at the moment as well.

When we moved to Freiburg, we immediately noticed that the Badische Zeitung (BZ) was wider and shorter than the N&O--no doubt measurable in some nice round sum of centimeters rather than inches. Nonetheless, coming back to Durham, I wasn't prepared for the startling difference in paper widths.

So today I finally pulled out a late 2008 edition of the N&O that just happened to be lying around inside our secret Important Documents and Mementos hiding spot. I put it on the floor above this past Friday's unmemorable Real Estate section. Eureka! The newspaper looks narrower than I remember it because it is narrower than I remember it.

The narrower width doesn't really diminish the quality of the N&O, for McClatchy has already handled that task by significantly cutting local reporting, reducing staff, and yielding most of the available print space to advertisements. But in conjunction with these other money-saving measures, the disturbing weight loss suggests a bleak prognosis: the newspaper--an invention with a 320-year history in North America--is wasting away before our very eyes, heading inexorably toward a 21st-century demise.

Felled

The common cold is making its way through our household. Wash your hands and eyeballs after reading this blog.