Journal of a Sabbatical

January 3, 2000

leviathan - not

Today's Reading: Winter from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

Still in the grips of the cold virus, I was on the verge of feeling sorry for myself for having to miss the Moby Dick marathon. That is, until I read my e-mail and realized that at least I have heat and power and don't live in Kosovo. This from BiB on New Year's Day(some stuff deleted):

I went upstairs and had steamship round with the paramedics and safety staff. It was a good dinner. I am leaving early tonight, hopefully at 8 PM to watch a movie. We supposedly have power at the house. We have not had it for a while. It was 28 degrees inside this morning.

It has been cold and snowing. Our landlord put in some wood stoves, and we should be warmer tonight. We get up in the morning and dress and come to Headquarters to shower in the central facility. It is quite the adventure. Like wilderness survival, candlelight and sleeping bags.

I responded that it sounded a lot like camping at Fearings Pond (Myles Standish State Forest) to cut firewood during the energy crisis. And he's got it pretty good compared to folks who don't have any houses.

And this forwarded New Year's Eve greeting from one of his Kosovar Albanian coworkers:

Happy New Year 2000 to you all which you gave all your help for us ,and > we with Heart wish for you all the best in the future to have a good > Health and to be safe.

E-mail isn't quite enough to keep me feeling totally connected to the outside world though. So then I went out for coffee and human companionship. Two very nice baristas who used to work at Starbucks a long while back (in fact maybe when it was Coffee Connection), Jen and Lisa, are around for the holidays so I got to catch up with them (Lisa went off to culinary school in New York and I was eager to hear how that was going). Then Tom and Ned showed up within seconds of each other. There was no place to sit so we all clustered around the bar. Jen's working on a book about Native American stories and Ned's novel takes place in Paleo-Indian times so they exchanged information and networked. Everybody was seeming pretty chipper.

Then Ned announced that his car was stolen. On New Year's Day at 4:00 AM. FROM HIS GARAGE! Yikes. That beats my story by quite a bit. From his garage? The garage is attached to the house. The bad guys were practically in his house. The police found it in Cambridge today and he took off after coffee to go look at it. After he left, Tom marveled at how calmly he was taking it.

Seems like this cultural wasteland is turning into a high crime area...

And I don't remember seeing millennium celebrations from Kosovo on the New Year's Eve spectacular telecast. Did I fall asleep and miss it?