Sundance just hopped up on the desk, I ran my hand down his back even to the tip of his tail, he looked up at me, mewed, then jumped to the floor.

It's raining. Rather miserable. This is winter. 'Tis! 'Tis! My mother called to tell me her power is still out. Since she talked to me yesterday? No. It seems the power was on then, though it had been off earlier, then it went off again shortly after the call, then again returned briefly in the evening, then was out all night & through to her call. She was bundled up, even to her Alaska parka. She took the bananas out of the fridge, otherwise, she says, there isn't much in there. She has three flashlights and she read to me the dates she'd written on each one. Whenever she changes the batteries on a flashlight she affixes a piece of masking tape to the outside and writes on it the date she put the batteries in. She was, naturally, most worried about the one she'd retrieved from the car as it was dated '99. She said she was going to call my brother, too. She's surprised she's not all jittery and unhappy.

Jack Martin says in an email that he read the new blog. He tried one once (I don't remember him telling me about it) but got paranoid about the thieving multitudes of the web so scuttled it after only a couple weeks. Then he recounted a story about a high school student who tried to pass off as her own a movie review she'd plucked from the web. Seems she got caught by a student teacher, who googled a phrase from the review and found its original, also found the student's blog which was loaded with bad behavior, brought the bad behavior to the attention of people the student probably didn't have in mind as audience (reminds me of the perennial interview question for poets: do you write for an audience, if so who?); I wonder if her parents took away her internet privileges?