abundance

Holiday party going has been in full force and I'm spoilt from Friday's shindig at Peter's (where I actually met some of the people I work with face-to-face) and Emily and Chris's Saturday “Holiday Bamo-wamo.” Featuring a drum kit in front of the oven so Tora’s band "Sugarbutt Tiger" and Emily and Corey’s one-off band "Ethel Bourbon" could perform in the kitchen, the house was filled with musicians and writers. Along with the bands above and the Whoreshoes members, I caught up with Heidi-Jane whose hard at work on her new CD.
Boogieing on the linoleum to Led Zeppelin and Go-Gos covers helped account for some of the increased chocolate and cookie consumption of the past few weeks. However, I knew I was a little over done when I looked at a table laden with salmon, truffles, spanokopita, olives, a groaning cheeseboard, multiple varieties of cookies, free-flowing wine and reached past all for the Pelligrino. How fortunate I've been this season, of which Saturday was a good reminder, as it was a day spent with friends, both new and old.
Earlier, I took a train to the South Bay to meet up with Sally to furniture shop and continue our ongoing mulling over what it means to be approaching 40. Sally and I have known one another since kindergarten. Ostensibly, I was looking for a couch and she was shopping for a gift for her son, but our conversation’s terrain included more thoughts on children, husbands, boyfriends and the vagaries of love than couch fabric and easel height and we both exited the store encouraged if empty handed (We did manage to check in on a couple of her landscape designs, which are developing nicely.)
Getting up this morning with a day off, mostly unplanned save for some last-minute menu planning for the cooking I'm set to do for the family on Christmas day, meant I have time for writing, a welcome event I know Karen Hildebrand in NYC understands. I met Karen about 10 years ago at a writer's conference in the Colorado Rockies. We were both in the midst of making radical changes in our lives, in part so we could pursue our creative dreams, which led to the West Coast and beyond. I'm so glad we're still in touch, too, so I can appreciate the journey it's been from the desire to make an idea or a feeling into art, the sacrifices undertaken to do so, and the actual result. Karen's been enjoying a wave of poetry publications of late, so check out the sidebar of her blog.

Congrats and kudos to all my accomplished friends for going the distance! Here's to more in 2008.