2 December 2021

 Song mood: Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney and Wings. Just because I’m feeling sentimental.

Right now, bread is the enemy. I made the mistake of buying this deep dish pizza from Costco. Normally, I’m not a huge fan of deep dish pizza. I like the really the flat bread style. But the picture on the box looked really good. It kind of looked like the bread that one of my cousins makes. Which is one of my favorite breads, though I could not think of the name of the bread.

Anyway. The pizza tasted awesome. But I feel like crap after eating it. When I eat too much bread, my joints hurt. I woke up at 4:30am with joint pain. I was nauseous for the majority of the day. So, now the weekend is coming and I need to figure out what to eat that’s light. I foresee salads. Probably charcuterie.

I’m halfway through listening to The Secret of Chimneys. For all of Agatha Christie’s flaws, the one thing she does very well is making her characters playful. So I will keep this in mind while writing Phoebe. It will be her playfulness that changes Inspector Trevor. Where he is a stern and hard nosed detective, her cheerfulness pulls him out of the abyss of his dark thoughts. Or, that’s thought.

I’m currently reading Sleep No More by PD James. It’s a collection of short stories by the mystery author. For what I bought the book for, it did it’s job. Mainly, it showed me how to write mystery short stories.

I trying a lot of things to get my focus on stories back. Since I spent a lot of time this year doubting myself, the process to get back to writing is taking a bit longer. And that is okay. Because all things that I’m doing and trying to get this process back on track will help me in the long run. And after some persistance, the results will show. It’s just a little bit at a time.

For this month’s Haiku, my theme is all the things that make Christmas.

I remember as a kid, the church bazaar. Most of all, the cookies and other sweets my grandmother use to make. Divinities were my favorite. Store bought divinities are not the same. I suspect that my grandmother put in pure vanilla extract. 

And then I think of my little church. It was always cold during winter. Sometimes mass would be held in the basement because it was too cold to have it in the main part of the church. Or, as on Christmas Eve, everyone would being wearing their winter coats during mass.

It was an old style church. With massive wooden beams, a vaulted ceiling little room for insulation before the roof. And so the upstairs part of the church was never heated during the winter. On Christmas Eve, there were candles at every window to help heat the place.

Tomorrow, I will read the parts of the mystery that I plan on writing. I will write a bit. I will watch the next episode of The Wheel of Time. I will make sure I get in a good walk around the lake, especially with this unusually warm weather that we have been having. And continue Christmas shopping. I think, I maybe getting into the Christmas spirit after all.