december 8, 2001. Unofficial Amoret Day is going well. I woke up deliciously late, fooled about with the computer for 3 hours until the Boy woke up, showered, ate, and let myself loose on the town of Wolfville. Objective: Christmas presents. Results: well, at least we've made a start. Unfortunately, we're both occasionally prone to quick bouts of "buy anything to fill the present hole" fever, which at least leads to interesting conversations. ("Should we by [him] that t-shirt?" "It's a souvenir of a place he's never been to." "Yeah, but...it's unique to the area." "But the art isn't even that good." "I guess.") The bookstores were fun & very useful as well. I always know that I'll find something interesting - last spring I spent 20 minutes browsing the local used bookstore & came out with The Malleus Maleficarum and Making Puppets Come Alive, which were immediately sent to Chicago in a cereal box for a certain set of sibling birthdays. Anything could happen in that bookstore. Really. You know, I think I'm actually starting to look forward to Christmas. It's been a little obscured by practicum this year, and the one snowfall didn't stay on the ground, but I think I'm actually starting to feel the magic creep up on me. Cool. Last night was remarkable, in that I had a pretty good time with my peers. There was an Edumacational gathering scheduled for the local pub after school, and although I was initially reluctant, I felt a powerful need to have a conversation with someone who a) isn't 12 years old and b) knows enough about me to skip the tiresome amount small talk that accompanies meeting 30 people at once. I walked down by myself in the darkness, feeling a strange amount of tension in the middle of my back considering that the town is pretty unthreatening. Dinner was greasy, beer was very welcome, conversation was unforced & happy, and the only thing missing was a slate of real friends to make me laugh. I even got gobs of gratitude for doing a bit of shoulder-rubbing around the table, which is nice, and reminded me of when I discovered shoulder-rubbing in highschool (I used to bounce around parties and rub people's shoulders, simply because I could). My reward for this freelance massage work was that I got to drive the MathMobile up the hill and immediately enter a place in numerical-vehicular history. Or something. this time 2 years ago: a now-embarrassing memorial to my RPG character