Hi y'all. I have been too busy to post. Seriously. The deadline schedule at my workplace changed a couple of years ago so that it is incomprehensibly busy right around Christmas every year. And then once I get home I have a million holiday-ish things to do. Usually this is fun; I like being busy and having plans. But I got a cold yesterday (well, I probably got it before then, and am now just feeling it) and despite feeling crappy I still had to wrap all of my gifts. I also decided to make some gift cards (which I did, though they're somewhat uninspired) which took about an hour in itself. I managed to wrap everything I'll be taking to New Jersey for the holidays save the stocking presents. Yes, our family, at my and my sister's insistence, still do stockings, though the youngest among us are 31. We insistuted a stocking-gift rule last year that served us well: Only food and disposable items (magazines, mainly) allowed. We all have enough pieces of funny, cheap, little plastic crap in our various homes. My sister and I have grandfathered-in an exception to the rule: you may have some little animal or creature sticking out of the top of the stocking. I got my sister's little guy over the weekend.

I also finally saw the current art show at the new Smith Art Museum. Loved it. It turns out M has met one of the artists (he's a friend of a friend), and it's an artist whose work I saw at MoMA a few years ago: Tom Friedman. His stuff is made from common household materials, and is funny and semi-conceptual and shows some serious obsessive tendancies, which I like. He stuck all of the spaghetti from one box together end-to-end and had it harden into a delicate and beautiful tangle. He created a perfect and intricate spiral of hair on a bar of soap. He smeared all of the blue-gel toothpaste from a single tube onto the wall to make a gorgeous trapezoidal shape. Anyway, be sure to check out the show, there are some wonderful pieces in it. We got kicked out before I could see the new permanent collection spaces fully, though I barged in to show M my favorite painting, Elmer's Mourning Picture. It's on the top floor, take a look. It helps to have read Adrienne Rich's poem about the painting, also titled Mourning Picture. But I can't find it online anywhere, dammit.

*edited to add a link (thanks, henning) to the painting.