1. My new washer and dryer are all fancy and digital and thus show you how much time is left on the load. This is awesome, especially when they’re neck and neck — currently, for example, the dryer has 38 minutes and the washer has 37 minutes left. Sadly, I know from experience (i.e., running in there every few minutes to announce the time situation to Larry and ask him yet again which one he’s rooting for) that the dryer is going to win.

2. So, to recap our animal situation: there is Pete, o he of the murderous nature towards everyone on earth except the inhabitants of this house; Bob, Larry’s former office cat; Icky, the crusty outside cat who JUST WANTS TO COME INSIDE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE; and Lulu, the long-suffering dog. Pete sleeps wherever the hell he wants to, either on one of Lulu’s beds or on my shoulder, Bob sleeps in the laundry room, and Icky sleeps outside in the shed. On a heating pad! It is luxurious! But yes: we are assholes who throw poor Icky outside every night.

The other night, however, it snowed. And apparently my cat-inspired assholery has a limit, and thus everyone slept in the house at the same time, and I didn’t even put Bob in the laundry room, and no one clawed anyone else’s eyes out, and Icky got to wind his long black tail around my neck all night. The moral of the story is this: for years we have tried to make stupid Pete happy by keeping the other cat(s) away from him, but screw that. Nothing is going to make Pete happy! With that knowledge, the other cats are now much happier. As I type this, Icky is asleep beside me in the bed and Pete is perched atop a piece of furniture I will call a dresser but which we call “the yellow thing” because it’s really a weird, possibly Scandinavian kitchen cabinet thing with doors and drawers and a pretty glass detail and also: vents for hot pies to cool. It houses stationery and old videotapes. Bob just walked through to get a snack. No one growled, fought, or died. The end.

3. So I finished A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book last week, and whoa, what a ride. Do I sound like Keanu when I say that? It was, though: lots of characters, lots of time passed, lots of historical events [that occasionally I skimmed when it became clear that one of the 10,000 characters wasn’t going to interact with someone famous in that passage], and near the end, everyone’s fates were sealed and reported and it was tragic and awesome. Oh, and then I tried to go immediately to sleep. Didn’t work.

4. I also read Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked — finished it last night. It is good: maybe not as good as About a Boy but better than How to be Good and A Long Way Down. I think I would like to come back in another life as Nick Hornby’s career. Stable, entertaining, straddling the line between art and pop.

5. Yesterday during Spike’s nap I decided I would wrap all of his presents so I wouldn’t have to keep shooing him out of the guest room. So I did that, and then moved on to Larry’s presents. Still asleep. People, at the end of Spike’s almost three hour nap (!), I had wrapped all 46 presents. The tree looks lovely.