It is my last chance to work in any substantial way before Christmas and I can�t seem to do it. I�ve been shuffling things around my desk, carrying my computer and books from room to room in the house in hopes of inspiration, but nothing is working. I am now curled up in my favorite red chair with my feet on an ottoman and a purring cat on my shoulder. What I really want to do is take a nap.

I dropped AJ off at the gym this morning, where he was meeting up with 50 other kids for three hours of insanity while the parents got to escape. They gym referred to the event as �Drop and Shop,� but I opted to drop the shop and took myself and my skates to the pond instead. The park staff were out grooming the ice when I got there, so I got to pull my Buster Keaton on skates routine in front of witnesses. My husband says he likes to watch me skate because I look so graceful, but I can assure you that I could not feel like more of a klutz than I do on skates. The ice was in fairly good condition for the pond, so I did better than I expected for my first time really skating (I took AJ last week, but I didn�t really get to skate much myself) this season. That meant that I kept the number of falls down, although I have to say that the quality of the falls was quite impressive. Mostly I tend to go down on one knee. But today I managed one full frontal sprawl across the ice, which had me sliding like a human hockey puck, toward the far end of the rink. And on my way off the ice, after missing on my first attempt to pick up my blade guards from the snow at the side of the rink, I doubled back, caught my blade in a small crack and fell with all my limbs flying into the air, landing on my ass.

I sincerely hope nobody was videotaping the event.

I also sincerely hope that AJ has had a less accident-prone morning at gymnastics. He was pretty tired, as we went to see a screening of The Polar Express at our local library last night. It was worth every minute of the exhausted tantrum he threw when he got home, just to see the look on his face at the end of the film. He was rapt. We tried to see the movie in the theater last year, but he was frightened by the possibility of the girl being thrown off the train to the wolves, so we left after about 25 minutes. He said he wanted to go at exactly the same point this time, but as he started putting on his coat, the film caught his attention and he took it off again and began inching on his hands and knees, so as to avoid the projector�s beam, to the front of the room to watch with the other kids lying on their bellies on the carpet.

The cat has moved off my shoulder and onto the back of the chair. I think I should take that as my cue to go pick up AJ. Hopefully I�ll be able to manage the task without falling down.

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