RBOC: New year edition

• I'm doing my best to maintain a social life over winter break, so that I don't cloister myself in my apartment and get all weird and stir-crazy.  Mixed results so far, but at least I occasionally get to hang out with Fie and her family.  Fun to start the new year with some good old-fashioned hang-out sessions.
• Speaking of Fie, I can't believe that teh internetz still have not commented at all upon this photograph.  The sheer cuteness has overwhelmed all of you, hasn't it?
• I am righteously sick of planning my spring syllabi.  Can't these things just work themselves out? I'm starting to feel dread when I sit down at my computer and see my unfinished syllabi sitting there.  More than anything else, it's planning out the day-by-day schedule that irritates me.  It's not how I conceive of the material I teach, but I guess it's hard to avoid doing this for the students' sakes.
• Reading what I just wrote above makes me realize that a vision of my own private hell is a split consciousness in which half of me is my professorial self, and the other half is me when I was a junior in college.  Both halves would deserve the other, I fear.
• Might as well admit it: I'm fussing with my syllabi partly to procrastinate from working on my manuscript revisions.  I need to get my head into that game for real, now that we're into January and my winter break no longer feels like an endless Siberian hibernation.
• The thermostat in my apartment appears to be partly a theoretical construction.  I am always a little cold nowadays, and as a result, I have become obsessed with acquiring woolen clothing.  I'm trying to convince myself that I've already bought all that I need, especially now that the clutch of crew neck sweaters has arrived.
• To continue with obsessive acquisition, I recently indulged in a small online shopping spree of goods relating to my vainest, geekiest interest: nice shaving gear.  I'm getting to know a little badger-hair brush that I acquired, and I have a slightly larger one on the way.  I'm also currently working my way through a sample pack of aftershave splashes and colognes, all of them variations of a particular scent that I like.  My life may be an unending stream of chaos and confusion, but damn it, I will confront all of it with an amazingly smooth, close shave, and smelling good.  (I finally grok my female friends who just don't feel capable of leaving the house until they have applied their lipstick and mascara.)
• Unless some more deals get worked out in Congress soon, I expect to be paying more in taxes this year.  Please remind me not to buy any more shaving stuff until I settle on an aftershave.  And maybe a cologne.