Hiatus

The off-days were spent readying The Hill for the holidays. There's still some work to be done, but the tree is decorated and the lights are up. The tree is especially beautiful this year - we'd never done one all in white lights, tinsel and garland before, and it turned out great. We do it like we do the groundswork in the summer - Mrs. S. gets the ideas and points, and I do my best to put things where she wants them. This has worked well for us for over twenty years now.

I'm also trying to clear my bookshelves of the growing number of titles yet unread. I blame the internets (of course) - the number of books I pick up here and there keeps growing, while I spend entirely too much time reading the same stuff in the blogosphere that's been said a hundred times before. I've just finished reading The Wise Men, a biographical study of Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, and the others instrumental in shaping the Cold War. It took a month to read 700 pages, something that I used to regularly do in a week or so before discovering the distractions of cyberspace.

Now there's a note when I sign in to Blogger saying that in a couple of months we're going to have to switch to the beta whether we like it or not. So if someday soon you come by the Hill and wonder where the hell the blog went...