Dec. 14, 2013. Gravy-Laden.

I am essentially home alone. Mary Ann and her siblings are having an exclusive lunch together to note the seventieth birthday of the oldest among them. She had other plans for the rest of the day, and I would not see her until much later. While she was gone, I installed the Christmas tree in its stand. That to me is the worst moment of Christmas, owing to recollections of that ordeal when I was growing up. My father--who was not adept at handling large loads or anything even elementarily mechanical--did the job to the limits of his ability and patience. But that was not even close to what was demanded by my mother, who always insisted that the tree was canted to one side or another. Nothing my poor dad did would ever get it right. Finally, Mama would storm out of the living room in exasperation, applying scars to the psyches of us kids that remain to this day. Well, she was a great cook. By comparison, I'm extremely fortunate. Mary Ann seems neither to notice or care if the tree is a few degrees off vertical. Once, not believing my good fortune, I gave the tree what was to my eye obvious skew. She looked at it for a second and said, "Great! Start hanging the lights!" But I made a mistake. I had one of my every-few-years lower back problems on Thanksgiving, from which I'm still not quite healed. Dragging the nine-foot tree up six steps onto the deck, I knew I was going to have a setback. It would give me problems for the next week. With no radio show to give forth, I waited as late as I could before the cleaners closed to run my Saturday route. In the midst of the errands, I had lunch at the Frostop in Covington. The urge to eat roast beef poor boys has been strong in me lately. This one is the third or fourth best in the Mandeville-Covington corridor, after Bear's, Pontchartrain, and maybe Monster. And the Frostop of today is a good deal more ambitious and better than it was in its glory years of the 1960s. I ate half the oversize poor boy, which despite my instructions to the contrary bore a bit too much gravy. But the bread was only just beginning to dissolve, so no big problem. I do wish they'd toast the French bread a bit more aggressively. Then back home to an empty house. Mary Leigh and The Boy are in his hometown of Baltimore for the next week or so. The loneliness didn't affect me, though--not with the massive amounts of website work I have before me. I was proud to finish entering all 100-plus top-dozen lists into the site--an easier job than I thought it would be. But then on to the next part of the project, until I literally became cross-eyed.