The night is relatively warm, and somewhere a little fingernail of moon shines down. I brought Jen home on friday, but she is still nauseous a good part of the time. At least she is home. I think of all of the people who are stuck in the hospital. Some will spend the rest of their lives in one. I wonder what happened to the wife of the man I met outside the emergency room last week. He said she was pregnant and bleeding a lot, in addition to being diabetic. He was also asking for spare change so he could get something to eat. The cynic in me wondered if he had realized that people hanging around emergency rooms were likely to be in a more tender emotional state than people hanging around, say, a McDonald's. Maybe it was a scam. Probably not. At any rate, I gave him ninety-five cents and, after thinking for a moment, a couple of avocados and some pita bread. He seemed really happy about the avocados. I wish him and his wife well. I wish my wife would get well. It's hard to think of other things - they seem trivial somehow - when a loved one is ill.

I took the kids to the museum on saturday, which turned out to be the busiest I've seen the place in ages. I had forgotten about the Three Kings celebration, which is a big hispanic cultural event that draws hundreds of extra visitors to the museum. Sophie fell asleep in the car and I carried her around that way for about a half an hour until she woke up. I managed to not lose any of the kids in the crowds, thanks in part to the fact that we spent about half the time there in the back room hanging out with Lisa, who, along with Lexy, has developed a game called Stuck-to-the-Wall, which involves (you guessed it) getting stuck to the wall. Sophie tromped around and created mayhem. Then we went out and played on the lawn. Sophie loved watching the planes fly over (the museum is right under the flight path for planes landing at San Jose International airport). Nathan got kissed on the cheek by a girl and, predictably enough, hated it. Lexy got upset when the girls He and Nate were playing with didn't want to play 20 questions. Sophie ran around in circles and laughed.

cds I listened to while realizing that 2003 is really just an arbitrary number on a calendar: Marta Sebestyen "Apocrypha", Hagalaz' Runedance "On Wings of Rapture" and "Urd - That Which Was", Ale Moller "The Horse and the Crane", S:t Jacobs Chamber Choir w/Lena Willemark & Bo Hansson "Andetag", and Iva Bittova, Nederlands Blazers Ensemble "Dance of the Vampires"

Now: Marta Sebestyen "Muzsikas"