I actually met another person who lives in my building yesterday. You’d think that with only 12 units in my building I’d have known everybody by now… but no.

I’ve seen this guy around before, and we’ve even said hi to each other before. He’s almost always either loading his jeep up with camping, hiking, or kayaking supplies, or he’s unloading the jeep so that he can air everything out before going back into the wild. He must go out to woods and lakes at least once a week, no matter the weather. It’s incredible.

He’s also deaf, or at least very hard of hearing. I hadn’t noticed before today that he relies almost entirely on lip reading. So as I walked past him this evening, scurrying for the warmth of the apartment, he called out, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I responded.

“I’m alright, just a little cold,” he answered.

[“Hmmm, he didn’t hear me. Is he just hard of hearing? Will he hear if I speak louder?”]

“IT SURE IS COLDER LATELY!” I said, with emphasis.

At this point he gave a little frustrated smile and ran to catch up with me so he could see my lips. And from that point on we had a rather nice conversation without any -er- emphasis on either side.

Turns out he lives under Mr. Never There, who lives across the hall from me. Just my luck that I have noise-sensitive Ms. Second Floor living under me (or rather, under my loud-as-all-get-out cat), but Mr. Never There gets Deaf Guy as his downstairs neighbor. The apartment gods were having a good giggle the day they dreamt this one up.

I just got back from spending several hours going through potential choir music at my church. Rehearsals start up again in a couple of weeks, and I haven’t yet decided what we’ll be singing.

So there I was, singing merrily away as I plucked out harmonies and accompaniments on the piano, when my pastor showed up looking puzzled. He walked slowly up through the entire church peering at me as I sat at the piano. “Oh, it’s you!” he finally realized, laughing at himself for not recognizing me. I made some crack about keeping my scarf on indoors (we’re in the negative temps here, and I didn’t want to turn on the whole church heating system just so I could pick out choir music) only to realize that I’d also left my hat on all evening. So here I was, mostly obscured by the piano, and then swathed in a hat and scarf. No wonder he couldn’t figure out if I was someone he knew or just some singing, piano-playing tramp off the street.

Anyway, we got to talking, which should have been pleasant except that just then my left eye started to prick and burn. Now, you should know that my eyes have acted up before… in my previous church. I’d get to choir practice, get everyone warmed up, start waving my arms in time with the music, and tears would start rolling down my cheeks. (My choir members had great fun wondering if these were tears of joy or of distress at their rendition of the music at hand.)

As he chattered away I found myself losing the thread of the conversation. Would he think he’d moved me to tears? Would he think he’d interrupted me at an emotional moment? There’s just no easy way to explain away sudden onslaught tears.

Eventually he left, and then I left, escaping into the allergen-free outdoors. I wonder if he believed my story about allergies…

Party Girl and a few of her unseemly friends have been tramping in and out of her apartment all afternoon. I caught a glimpse of cardboard boxes, and about an hour ago it sounded like a box of pots and pans spilled down the stairs.

If she is moving out, that means our new apartment manager moved very quickly through the eviction process, and it means that I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying about waking up to drunken screaming and the inane, shouted conversations between her and her high, smashed guests (or flames in the hallway, which is even more frightening). I’ll be able to tear up the slip of paper that lives next to my bedroom phone and has the non-emergency police number written on it. I’ll be able to stop parking as far from her car as I can (you never know when she’ll go out to get more booze). I’ll be able to listen to my own music instead of the unsettling combination of my music and her blasted country ballads. (And I fully intend all meanings of the word “blasted.”)

If she isn’t moving out, I’ll be terribly disappointed and very curious about what she’s been doing all day.

[Update: It’s official. When I got back from partying in the new year all her door decorations were gone. And now, this morning, she came back to vacuum and stuff, and I heard her telling someone about her “new place” and how much bigger and nicer it is that this “dump” was.]

Cards of all sizes, sent with colorful stamps and mass-produced greetings, tumble from my mail box, each one a silent reproach against me and the stack of un-signed, un-stamped, un-addressed, and (most importantly) un-sent cards sitting on my desk. Long letters from half-remembered friends point out in tiny and ornate fonts that I have not had children (or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, or offspring of any kind), have not published a book, have not gone on a cruise, have not recently graduated from anything, have not started a not-for-profit organization or advocacy group (or a company of any kind). Nor have I recently adopted anything that would otherwise have gone homeless, or invented anything that will surely revolutionize … anything.

I will not be writing a letter this year. I have never written a letter. There’s a fine line between writing resume cover letters and Christmas letters, and I’ve seen too few actual Christmas letters to be any judge of my own writing during this season.

Truth be told, I’ll be lucky to send out a mailing of any kind this year, no matter how silently my stacked cards reproach me from the desk. And if I do, I will limit myself to an unimaginative, though legibly printed, “Merry Christmas, Love Iris.” I will concentrate on spelling names correctly and keeping names properly matched with addresses.

Next month I will go back to opening my mail box with anticipation rather than dread.

I normally keep a decently neat house. This is partly because I like a neat house and partly because there’s not all that much stuff in the house to keep neat. I haven’t accumulated all the knick-knacks that come with long residence in a house, nor do I have older or seasonal items stored in the garage or closets. And I like it this way.

But some days, I take pleasure in NOT keeping house. Take today, for example. Every time I walked through the kitchen and saw my breakfast dishes in the sink or the detritus of coffee making on the counter, every time I wandered down the hall and saw the unmade bed, and every time I snuggled back into my indentation in the couch, I was reminded that today was my day off from everything. Every unwashed dish represented a few minutes of guiltless indolence. Every wrinkled blanket attested to a morning spent doing as much as possible of nothing at all.

Tomorrow, life will start up again with all the chores and errands of housekeeping, prepping for work, and leading the choir, baking, plus the necessary preparations for a Christmas that is coming so much more quickly than I could have imagined possible. But for today, vacation reigns supreme in this household. Everyone’s done more sitting, sleeping, and lying around than anything else, secure in the knowledge that the dishes will keep until tomorrow.