I hope no one I am romantically involved with ever comes across Alexandra Fuller. I will do my best to prevent it, I’ll pretend she’s never been born. They won’t hear about her from me, my lovers won’t. Nope. Unh-uh. Never. She’s a tough horse-riding girl, I think she shoots guns. She drinks and swears and is ridiculously beautiful, and if that’s not enough, she writes like butterflies. She uses words, for instance, like “tiffin,” yes, tiffin. She used “tiffin” on Friday in Paper Cuts and what a pretty little word that is. I’ll be jealous all day about tiffin, and that she rattled it off without lifting a little finger, I’ll bet. Of Somerset Maugham she says each of his stories has someone “reassuringly drunk before tiffin”. I won’t make you look it up; “tiffin” is, basically, lunch.

Because of Fuller I thought I’d reread Wodehouse and so I went to Amazon where I reread people for free with their Search Inside gadget and this was appalling, almost as much as my coffee pot. They’re selling a complete novels package of Wodehouse, a Kindle edition, for — you won’t believe this — ninety-nine cents! Is that what it comes to then? A career, a lifetime of words, on sale to any Kindle-packing Tom, Dick or Joe for ninety-nine cents? I guess so.

I dreamed about cardboard last night. Tell me what that means.

The children who live with me go to a school next door to a church and sometimes they go into the church and on December Mondays they light advent candles and today I went to that. There was a little buzz in the air because after two weeks of purple, today the pink candle got lit. No one likes monotony. Then after a song and things recited, the kids could raise their hands and get called on and pray for something. They prayed mostly for their cats and birds who’d run away and also dead people. It concerned me how many cats have run away. What’s going on right now with the cats? Seasonal affective disorder? Unplanned kittens?

This isn’t related to that but it’s been bugging me for weeks, it’s my coffee pot. The number on the side of the pot doesn’t match the number where you put in the water so if I want to make five cups, and fill the pot up to the number 5, and pour it into the water container, the container tells me it’s only making four. This galls me. I can’t make only four because I’ve already put five coffee scoops in the filter so I’ve got to then add more water, it drags the whole process out, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know if the manufacturers of my coffee machine designed it this way as some sick joke, but I don’t find it funny.

My poinsettas are going to die, I bought them from the basketball team, I didn’t know they’d be so big. They want water or food or something, it seems, non-stop and when they don’t get it when they want it, they throw leaves on the ground. There are three of them and I’ve been running from one to the other with water and cold cuts and they’re still petulant and demanding so now I’m thinking, “Fine, poinsettas. I’ll just not give you anything at all, how will you like that? Drop every one of your dumb little leaves, I don’t even care.” It’s true, I don’t. The good news, though, is the train, we worked the kinks out of the train. There were track issues, we brought a consultant in, he fixed it with cardboard and some jimmying on the broken piece and now the train runs under the couch and around the tree and the animals chase after it like maniacs.

If you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas, I want the light changed in the room where laundry goes. I want to come home and have it work and that’s all I want. I want that and the leaves dug out of the pool, and I want Slurpee back to work and a little environmentally unfriendly leaf-blowing around the place. But that’s all I want. Except for the hamsters to die or be adopted, I’d like that, and the carpet replaced upstairs and that, seriously, is really all I want. That and the drip fixed and a promise that I’ll never once in my life have to use a plunger ever again. (And I mean it. That’s really all I want.)

The heater has broken, but please don’t worry about me. It’s cold, it’s likely I’ll die, it’s one big cliche that’s the bad thing. The heater, I mean. The breaking of it, it’s a cliche. I’ve a repeating dream (I’d say “recurring” but that’s what everyone says) where I’m Kay Boyle and have a flat in Paris littered with children who are huddled around the kitchen stove while I write books. It’s not that I want to be cold and child-ridden in a cramped French kitchen, it’s just always seemed so glamorous to me that she did it. She had a string of Lords and Barons and handsome, complicated men who fathered the children. She kept leaving them all, she wrote beautiful books. I wonder where her children are today, and if they’re warm.

My own heatlessness is far less glamorous. A man named Travis is coming to fix it, the whole routine will be dull. I’ll show him the furnace, I’ll explain that we’ve been cold, he’ll go outside to look at something (I never follow these men outside, I don’t know the outside contraptions or what they do). Then he’ll clean the filters or flip a switch or text his lover for an hour and give me a bill. And tonight we’ll be warm. Last night we camped. I have another house you know, it’s a tiny little one, it’s just behind the garage. So we camped there and watched a movie and turned the tiny heater up as high as it would go then all slept fine. This morning it was 54 degrees in the big house. We had breakfast in the car.

I went to lunch at the school today, I brought Jr. a hat. I skipped recess because it’s cold outside, and they didn’t seem to mind. It’s not that cold, I know, it’s just colder than I like. And some people are in Tampa where it’s warm with poisonous spiders. And some people are not.

Send me a poem.

Hacked again, can you believe it? This time it didn’t completely shut me down but it crippled me a little more and I don’t know where to start to clean it. I just barely fixed the last one. If you would like to be my IT guy and keep on top of these things that would be great, please come over. I’ll pay you in hamsters, I’ll give you four.

R. is gone for five weeks and already madness reigns, mostly with laundry. “The room” as I call the spot where laundry goes on, has never been nice to me. It hasn’t mattered which house I’m in, it’s snarky and sinister, it looms. I’ve skirted it for years, but now for five weeks “the room” and I are face to face. So far it’s macabre. Their are odd bits of clothing spread on counters and dryer tops and some are trailed through rooms on the floor. There are undergarments in freezers, mismatched socks line the halls. There are mixed-up piles in dark corners, and bright colors are all twisted up with the whites. There are also, oddly, no school clothes, none anywhere. This I find strange. When R. comes she leaves trousers and skirts and school-color polo shirts in nice piles in drawers and we’re always good for a week. But now that she’s gone I’ve found only one. One uniform, one outfit per child, and so I wash it every day in the dark. (Oh yes, the light bulb has gone out in “the room.” It’s dark.)

This weekend I want a Christmas tree and I need your help getting one. I want to drive down the street to a parking lot, give the man a little money, ask him to tie it to my car and drive home. I need you, though, to help get into the house. I need you to cut branches off if that seems necessary, and to screw the tree into a little red thing I have that holds it. I need you to do all that, etc. I know, I must be independent and so on, but I just want help with this one little tree, it will only take minutes and I’ll pay you in hamsters.

The pool has soured, I feel bad about that. It normally glistens in the winter but Slurpee, this winter, keeps shutting off, it’s worn me out. So there are leaves on the bottom, scads of leaves; and Slurpee sits idle. The water is a little green, too, we just try to ignore it.

One day I’ll laugh at all this.

There is another last thing, it’s about Tina. She was in front of me in the drive-through today and when I ordered my double cappuccino, they said, “it’s already paid”. That’s a fun thing to have happen. I love her. I’m just saying.