03.08.05 - 5:35 p.m.

Yesterday morning it was bright and sunny and sixty degrees, with a brilliant blue sky - the sort of sky you only get on clear days in winter and a few rare days in the summer, when the humidity is low, the sky is clear, and the winds are strong enough to keep the pollution from clouding the view. I suppose life here is better, though, than it is on the crowded west coast, at least when it comes to stultifying pollution.

When I went to bed last night, it was raining - a cold, cold rain that drummed on the roof and slapped against the windows and was unpleasant to muck about in, but comforting once you made it inside, tucked up in a warm house. This morning, it was snowing when I first woke up, and there was about an inch of snow on the grass and the car. Fortunately, very little stuck to the sidewalk and street, and my front steps were mostly clear. I swept away the accumulation and scattered salt - like so many of the rest of you, I'm careful about turning my ankles, so I shovel and/or sweep and salt at the slightest provocation. It's also good exercise, and part of being a good neighbor, so it works out just fine.

It's snowing now, but it's just one of those days where it seems to snow and snow, and very little sticks. In reality, I suppose there isn't that much snow in the air or coming down, or it would accummulate, but from my office, with the wind blowing what is falling this way and that, it makes quite a wintry scene.

I made stuffed peppers last night; or, actually, I made stuffing for peppers (or onions, or eggplant, or whatever), and baked it in a cassarole, since peppers aren't really in season. It was good, but plenty of work after a long day.

I'm going to a funeral tonight. Not a funeral: a viewing, the most barbaric of customs. I googled "history of funeral customs" but didn't have time to read any of the information that popped up, but I have too much experience with funerals and I don't like them. I don't like the way we segregate them from our daily lives, and I don't like the way we allow them to intrude on our daily lives. I hate the corpse: empty and waxy, stretched with hands folded across her heart, dead. And I hate the mourners, the strange and inappropriate impulse to cry, even when the deceased person was a virtual stranger. I hate the hushed atmosphere, the children's rooms, the boxes of Kleenex everywhere, and the Hallmark sympathy cards with the soft-focus portraits of lilies or waving stalks of wheat or sunsets or horizons and their horrible, horrible pre-printed sentiments, but I send them anyway, because it's a gesture, an important one, of solidarity against the end of all things and remembrance, if not of the dead, then of the living.