A treasure in our midst goes unnoticed, unappreciated... people should be competing for the honor of who gets to have Stacey at their New Year's Eve party! The invites should pile in you should be debating which one to accept.

Everything in this post is worthy of highlighting, reacting to - and I'm nine days late finding it. I'm one of those blockheads overlooking treasure at my fingertips.

This made me laugh:

I learned a lot of bookkeeping, which turned out to come in very handy in my future career as head bottle scrubber in a series of food businesses.

And the irony of a "master of arts" degree in math.... but, but, math is elegant, math is truth, math is God, and aside from the [daunting, to me] accounting aspects of it, math is art and beauty. I'd love to have the acument to deduce this:

...if your balance is off by a factor of nine, someone somewhere in the bank had probably transposed two adjacent digits. It was my job to find the transpositions.

Like you, I find myself alone even when in the midst of a community. No one is pounding at my door, seeking my attention, my advice, my wisdom. Money is what everyone wants. Most of my mail is from Kohls, thanking me for patronizing them, telling me how VALUED I am as a consumer. Someday I'll write a story about a woman and her mailbox, and the surprise twist at the end is that she is beloved by.... A DEPARTMENT STORE!

I'd love to spend New Year's Eve with you in New York, in your hometown, in the home that goes back to your childhood and your cousin Peter. (And with Freddy!)

Today our son heads back to Mexico. We are in the throes of a winter weather advisory. Cold and blowing snow and noisy winds to see him off to the land of sunshine and honey (or something as metaphorically sweet as honey). Better get offf the pc and get ready to see him off......