I'm Back, I'm Back (and Is the Sky Falling?)...

Well I'm back in Ohio and back in the office and I survived my Thanksgiving road trip. There were skunks. There was a futon. There was a not-very-vegetarian-friendly TG dinner with sub-par pie. There was the most disgusting bathroom ever in a Washington, PA Sunoco station that still skeeves me out every time I think about it. And I did not, in fact, dodge the Nikki-from-my-husband's-high school bullet. (Despite the fact that we left State College a day later than my spouse wanted to, suddenly there was Nikki at the restaurant in Athens interrupting my salsa eating. OK, she seemed pleasant enough, but still...)

In the news since I last posted: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt froze acquistions, and just today Simon & Schuster is eliminating 35 positions. My company laid of 45 people at the end of October. My boss was vacationing in Thailand and is still working on getting home. My best- friend-since-I-was-8 is in India with her family. The news all around is worry-making.

Yet my husband called me this morning, laughing. He had just dropped Murray off at nursery school and told me they had a display of "make a wish" pictures hanging in the hallway. They took each kid's picture and asked them their holiday wishes. Murray really wants this pair of Thomas trains called Splatter and Dodge. He talks about Splatter and Dodge all the time. He dictated a letter to Santa about Splatter and Dodge. He claims to dream about Splatter and Dodge. Murray's make a wish picture was captioned "splattering dots." I wrote that on a Post-it and put it on my monitor. It's my happy-making graffiti.