I could have used sick time, of which I have accrued approximately 4 hours, but I simply cannot lie. We are not allowed to use sick time for anything other than sickness. I don't know if the boss will whip out the thermometer or what, but… At lunch I was conspiring various stories about needing to get new lenses put in my glasses or some such nonsense but the blushing and stammering would have done me in.

Anyway.

Mon Frere is flying out from Beantown to spend the New Year with me! I have not seen him since June so it will be a fabulous extended weekend. I'm thinking sitting on Capitol Hill and watching the fireworks might be fun, or going down to the waterfront, or Gasworks Park, or a million other places. It will certainly be more wholesome than New Year's of old when he and I ran giggling through the Somerville night with open bottles of cheap pink champagne, jumping roof to roof down Broadway and in general just making a nuisance of ourselves. Last year was tame and good – Nathan Bright Autumn Sky came down from Maine and Jared up from Connecticut to visit JamÍn and me. We ordered really good sushi and played guitar. Then we wandered down to Harvard Sq. taking pictures -- some of which came out amazing which I have not yet posted, come to think of it. I'll have to put them up soon. Lots of random abstract shots. Color. Yay.

Oh so all you kids with access to decent venues, there are some upcoming shows you have to check out. Everyone is doing those Top 10 of the Year lists and while I'll probably get around to making one, it's not going to happen anytime soon. But I can tell you two of my favorite albums this year, and I can also tell you that both artists are coming to Boston and assorted other cities to play in upcoming months.

First off, the Arcade Fire. We went to see them play Neumo's not too long ago. Hands-down THE BEST live performance I have ever been to. And I've been to a lot. The CD, Funeral, is on repeat and every single time I listen to it I hear something new. It absolutely kills me. ("I carved your name across my eyelids / you pray for rain; I pray for blindness.") It's theatrical and dark and lush and dramatic. It's also catchy as all get-out. The lyrics are brilliant. The very first song on the album begins with the word "And". And they sample squealing teapots in one song, which just plain rocks.

Their live performance was so fraught with emotion it was unreal. All the emotions, raw and uncensored. Pure childlike joy, scathing heartbreak, hatred, rejoicing – every song sounded like it was the encore. So much energy I don't know how they didn't drop dead. There's the lead singer, and three Blue Man Group-esque guys who play guitar, bass, random percussion – handing the instruments off or wearing helmets and playing drums on each other's heads. One of them was total 50's high school Geek with the tie and horn-rimmed glasses and band jacket. Then there's the French Canadian chick who is straight out of a 1920's black and white movie. And the vampiric chinadoll violinist. The lead singer is this supertall boy with sandy hair that was all over the place and in his eyes and he sang with such intensity I thought he was going to pop a vein in his forehead.

I don't know. It was an amazing show. I couldn't believe they were making that sound right there – live – it blew my mind. I said to VVB today – "if you can only see one show ever again, go see the Arcade Fire." I'm serious. I'm not even being melodramatic. They're beautiful.

you change all the lead sleeping in my head to gold
as the day grows dim, I hear you sing a golden hymn
the song I've been trying to say.
purify the colors, purify my mind. purify the colors, purify my mind,
and spread the ashes of the colors over this heart of mine.
~Neighborhood #1 (tunnels)

So another of my top ten albums from 2004 who is also playing East Coast dates soon (and I heard a rumor West Coast, but we can't find hide nor hair of a confirmation for that), is Ray LaMontagne. He is barefoot worn blue jeans lemonade on the front porch music. And acoustic guitar. And nighttime. His song "Jolene" is one of the three songs in this world that can make me cry if I walk in the room while it's playing. Just flat out, no questions asked. Get Trouble and then go see him play.

Oh and the Frames are also on tour again, and have a new album due out in February. They were my favorite live band until I saw the Arcade Fire and they are full of such harmony. Plus they have that Irish desolate joy feeling about them. I highly recommend a live show of theirs. They tend to play two and a half hour sets, which means getting your $10 worth. If you can't make it to the show, pick up a copy of Set List which is their live album. Then for an authentic live show experience, turn up your stereo until the sound is distorted and have someone stand too close to you, talking over the music and blowing smoke in your face.

What are you waiting for? Go now. Go.

Not to say that I'm officially a Local, either. I think you have to survive at least one winter here before you can get that badge of honor. People ask me, "How do you like Seattle?" and I always say, "I love it. I can't get enough of it." And when I tell them I arrived at the end of June, they have a smug look on their face. "I'll ask you again in March."

I don't know. Granted it's only the end of December, but I've yet to see all this gloom and doom everyone's been threatening me with for the past two years. Yesterday was our shortest day. The sun rose at 8:00 and set at 4:15. Guess what? I was at work under fluorescent lights from 8:45 until 5:30! And in Boston, the sun rose at 7:15 and set at 4:20. And guess what? I still would have been at work under fluorescent lights from 8:45 until 5:30. And besides, Boston winters are not especially known for their ovewhelming cheeriness. This knowledge was reinforced after talking to Mon Frere this week while he was attempting to navigate I90 in a snowstorm, when all the Massholes in SUVs with snow tires forget how to drive.

The secret is that, yes, it rains almost every day. Take yesterday for example: it rained from 6:00 am until 7:00 am, and then was 50 degrees and sunny all day. But the weather report says "rain".

Oh wait – I’m not supposed to tell East Coasters any of this. That was part of my Orientation. I was sworn to secrecy so that all of you Northeasterners bragging about your extra 45 minutes of meager winter daylight stay on that coast and we can have this gorgeous city to ourselves.

See, even though I have not earned the title of Local, I do hold the title of Resident, which enables me to refer to Seattlites as "we" and all the Northeasterners "you".

That said, I miss the snow a little bit. The Boy was in New York for Christmas and I was fleetingly jealous of the negative temperatures and falling snow. And I miss Harvard Sq. at Christmas time. And gingerbread muffins at Au Bon Pain. And walking into the Someday Cafe in Davis Sq. with my glasses steaming up to grab my free espresso.

But the Space Needle has a Christmas tree on top of it, and somehow that makes it okay.

"Horrible, inevitable and necessary." Those were the words poet Donald Hall used to describe what it was like to stop writing letters to his dead wife using the pronoun "you" and to start addressing her as "she". Last night I listened to him read passages from his book, Without, about his wife who got leukemia, went though unsuccessful treatment, and died. It was the way he spoke about their relationship and his feelings about her death that just moved me beyond all mortal bounds.

I don’t have a television. I’ve been listening to "This American Life" a lot. It’s a program on NPR and with my fancy new internet connection I can play back any of the shows from the past eight years. The shows are filled with such moments of humanity – I mean humans – and the interviews and vignettes and essays are better reality than any Survivor could ever fake. So I’ve been listening – kick back in a big easy chair and just listen for an hour. Doing that makes me feel like I’m living in the 50’s. Somehow I think our imaginations would be better off if we took away the visual assault of television and its orgy of advertising.

So this Mr. Hall just. God. Granted, I’ve been accused more than once of melodrama and hyperbole, but that’s me. I think big. I’m easily enraptured. I don’t think this is a weakness. But listening to this poet read pieces he wrote about what it was like to curl in bed with his wife as she held his hand and took her last few breaths, in this quiet morning moment, and after she passed, he just lay there smiling and crying, stroking the bridge of her big, crooked nose that he loved so much.

He wrote about how the pond days were the best, he remembered all the ordinary moments the best – those days we have just walking with someone in a beautiful place, relaxed, and we suddenly realize everything is perfect and still for that one moment. I call it my Moment of Zen. I have them a lot. Sometimes I walk around in that state for days. And I know how it can make "ordinary" days stay in your mind more vividly than your biggest party or most frightening event.

He loved his life, his world, this woman with such quiet devotion and indiscretion. It was amazing. As though he couldn't differentiate between what we generally consider "good" and "bad" – it was just an element of the process of living and therefore worthy of all his emotion.

Listening to him shook me up (there was lots of tears and snot – even now writing this and remembering it I’m welling up) and I highly recommend listening to that show, or to any show. Because one after another these programs have been amazing me and making me think about the world I live in and how I react to it.

It had another affect on me, and combined with my past three days of total solitude, I realized how many of my own stories I have to tell and that I want to tell them. And I need to stop being so self-obsessed and afraid because that’s truly a ridiculous way to go through life.

Anyway I remember at one point thinking how my strongest writing is first person narrative, which I believe may be because I’ve been keeping a journal religiously since the fifth grade. And as I mentioned recently, I’m self-obsessed. As Thoreau said, “I would not talk so much about myself were there anyone else I knew so well.” Well, I’ve written plenty of fiction too, and plenty of other stuff about other people, but when it comes down to it, I enjoy telling my own stories in my own voice. And I remember feeling that this was not a valid genre, neither was it marketable, and so I never felt valid in my chosen form, whatever the hell that means. Enter David Sedaris. Man, once I picked up Barrel Fever three years ago, I rejoiced. I have been validated! And then I watched wide-eyed as his books went, one by one, to the top of the Best Seller list and stayed there. And then I discovered David Foster Wallace, and then I realized these guys were on to something.

Long story short, the barricade of my writer’s block that has plagued me for the past seven months has been blown to smithereens by the tanks of “This American Life”, with David Sedaris in the driver’s seat. In my future installment, I will fill you in on my project that I’m now working on, that was my brainchild in August but one I could not put underway until this morning, writing wildly at my work computer, trying to get stuff down fast enough before I forgot it. It involves craigslist but I haven’t more time right now as lunch break is over in 3 minutes.

Go here and listen. I promise it’ll be good.

I'm staying in Queen Anne and I hesitate to say "alone" because, well, I'm not. Although I'm not surrounded by family as usual, I'm staying with Willie. He and I just returned from metropolitan market (and yes, they spell it with all lowercase letters in century gothic font) to buy some firewood.

It seems so unnatural to be buying firewood. Wood is not something for which you go into a grocery store. You don't stroll through the deli section to pick up a log shrink-wrapped in plastic. Firewood does not come with directions. Firewood comes by the cord, a pile delivered in early fall, twenty feet long and a dozen feet high. The pieces need to be chopped by hand, and until they are, little mice and lizards take up residency between the planks. Firewood is carried in from the cold, snowy outside in a black canvas sling that always trails assorted leaves and bark from the door to the fireplace. Sometimes the wood screams and pops because it is still damp with snow. Wood does not cost $4.79 plus tax.

We sashay to Queen Anne Center, Willie and me, in a very urban fashion, using cross-walks, passing three Starbucks on the way. My hands are soft and lily-white, ten long winters away from wood delivered by the plank to a colonial home in New England. This is the West Coast. I am metropolitan now. With a small "m".

Back at the house, I kneel on the cold tile in front of the enormous fireplace that dominates the room and free the log from its plastic sheath. It is peeled and sterile, homogenous; no bark, no leaves, no mice. I place it on the wrought iron grill and light it. The log has its own wick. Inside the fireplace this single lonely log looks like a mere pencil. But it's warm and the wrapper assures me it will burn for five long hours. Willie has wasted no time; he is sprawled and snoozing on the oriental carpet, basking in the golden glow of our Duraflame®, one ear cocked to the crackling of pressure-treated wood, paws ladling the air as he dreams about chasing a certain rabbit.

Every so often the log turns over, sending a shower of sparks upwards toward the flue, startling me slightly and reminding me that I'm grateful to be in the city where fire trucks are only a few blocks away.

Although they did not plan on spending Christmas in their house, my friends got a tree so I'd have something festive to wake up to on Christmas. It's two and a half feet tall and sprinkled with colored lights. I have arranged my gifts beneath the tree. I forced myself to leave most of them wrapped. It has been an exercise in sheer willpower.

The house crowns Queen Anne, with the whole city tumbling at her feet. Life is easy in this house, organic and airy. Honey hardwood floors and exposed brick, down blankets, floor to ceiling windows framing Elliott Bay. I stayed here my first night in Seattle. Shea and I arrived in the middle of the night. Mark took us out on the porch. "We have a nice view. Basically, anywhere you don't see lights is water," he told us, making a sweeping gesture left to right at the dark landscape. Oh -- and mountains. He forgot to tell us about the mountains. When I awoke in this city I now call home, I slid out in the morning sunshine to the porch and realized how high up we were. He was right. The Bay for miles, hugged by the snowy peaks of the Olympics.

I think about that night a lot. What it was like to wake up here for the first time. In this city, in this house. Feeling like I'd finally made it home. I remember what it smelled like, what the air felt like. The possibilities, the energy still runs up my spine when I'm here. This place is magical.

Our fire is roaring now, and Willie still snoozes while I muse about my affection for Queen Anne. The nooks and surprised alleyway gardens, the stairs built into the sidewalks so you don't fall down the steep street, the sides of buildings covered gently in a breath of moss -- the leafless trees, too -- so they look like they're made of aging copper. The tangled growth hanging from towering trees, where the vines lining the sidewalk lift up to the branches above, forming a wall of green along the damp streets with flowers accidentally peeking through the spaces. Wind chimes, bird baths, mosaic stairways, stone statues, the people who say good morning to you on the street, a park on every corner, smothered in life -- all of it perched at the top of Queen Anne Ave., with slopes so steep they don't dare put a stop light on it. The Queen Anne Ave. I saw as I pulled off the highway for the first time, lugging the u-Haul with everything I own in it, Shea on the phone taking directions from Mark. I remember how we turned that corner and found ourselves at the foot of Queen Anne Ave., the steepest paved incline I had ever seen in my life, and I was sure we weren't going to make it up. We were going to tip over backwards and roll right down because there was no way these four cylinders were going to get us up that hill. The hill that people were slalom skiing down during the freak snowstorm last year. But we made it. And I think about that every single time I pass under the monorail and stop at the foot of Lower Queen Anne.

That thought is usually followed closely by the memory of the truck stop payphone in Wyoming, where I danced from one bare foot to the other because the dusty sidewalk was so hot, and there was a starving young dog milling about as a dirty, sunburnt guy in a pickup truck fed him Reese's peanut butter cups through the window. We were hundreds of miles from cell phone service, and I was lining up quarters along the top of the payphone and squinting in the harsh light. The people at this truck stop made me truly nervous. I feared for my life. I left a hasty message on Mark's answering machine: "This is Kristin, from Boston, um... I'm in Wyoming I think, we'll be in Seattle soon, give me a call if we can still crash with you." I had never spoken to him before, got his number from my friend's sister's boyfriend who told me he was a great person who would me up when I got to Seattle, if I needed it. So I showed up at his door at midnight on a Tuesday with Shea in tow and an unannounced bunny.

We lived in Mark and Lori's house for a week while I looked for an apartment and wore the same suit to three interviews. They fed us and gave us maps and gave us the key to their house without second thought, saying they would be absolutely offended if we didn't take whatever we needed. We should make ourselves at home.

And now on Christmas Eve, I am. In this magical little house on Queen Anne, where six months ago I stumbled from a car that had just done 3,000 miles to the new city I call home. The log turns over, sending shooting stars to dance on the exposed brick, and Willie turns over in his sleep, remembering the first time this crazy girl brought a fat rabbit into the house that he wasn't allowed to chase.

I've been lamenting the ease with which communication gets dropped between friends just through relocation. I know the time difference is an obstacle, as is the "after 7:00" cell phone rate change (my 7:00 is 10:00 on the East Coast, which may or may not be too late to initiate a potentially-long conversation, depending on one's daily wine/caffeine ingesetion). I am guilty of falling out of touch. I get these beautiful emails from people that I want to respond to, or I have the idea to write them, but then I'm waiting for the Perfect Time when I have hours to write and endless Inspiration and I won't dump my occasional negative crap on someone else's head because I hate my job or I lost my wallet with my last $30 in it (read as: today). That time never comes. People have bad days. People lose their wallets. Everyone has a gripe, to one degree or another, with their job. As much as I'd like to believe it, my life is not so groundbreaking and original. So I should just sit down and write the email that tells the truth, that tells the person I think of them every day, that tells them I want to feed this friendship -- 3,000 miles between us or not.

Needing to be Perfect and Original and Happy is probably the main reason I have not been writing publicly for the past few weeks. I want to. But I also want to be this idealized version of myself. Waking up shiny, working hard, living deeply, immersed in creation, keeping track of where my wallet is.

Speaking of wallet, I'm more poor right now than I have ever been in my life, and it's kind of scary. I'd probably have to take to sneaking a lot more of the catering leftovers than I have been if it weren't for The Boy, who keeps a consistent supply of bananas on the counter and pasta in the cupboard. And also has free laundry in his house. It's a temporary state, moving having drained my savings and having my own apartment as opposed to sharing it and splitting expenses with two other people. Plus, Kobie has been eating like an absolute pig and his little bunny belly is insatiable for organic carrots like I've never seen before in my life. I find myself doling out thousands of dollars a month just to keep his little gopher lifestyle afloat. Endless scoops of banana chips, yogurt drops, and collard greens. He's going to have to get a job soon if he wants to keep this up.

My white suburban brush with "poverty" is laughable and not keeping me up nights, but I could use a new pair of corderoys and some fresh pillowcases.