10:32 p.m. I'm going to take a page from Catherine's fabulous Naked Eye journal and learn how to celebrate the small things, the tiny moments in each day, the urinals, the warm homey things that make up the mental furniture in each of our worlds.

Yes, I may drag around and say there's nothing to write about now that the days are short and the nights are long and the work keeps piling up, but we all know that's not exactly the whole story. Every day I water my urinal, for example. Look how spry it is. And no, I don't use the flusher mechanism -- I don't feel happy as a female pulling that lever -- instead I fill the flowered toothpaste cup and gently sprinkle the leaves.

This plant talks to me, calls to me in the middle of the night ... and it's a feisty little greenery. It has great spunk, as you can see ... and plans for world domination, as you can imagine.

Next to the urinal is, of course, the bidet ... where I store the extra toilet paper and a nice pine arrangement from last Christmas. Next to the bidet, finally, is the toilet that we Americans prefer to all other means of elimination. Now isn't this a typically American bathroom? An excess of choice?

And yet, our house was built by two French people, according to the local real-estate lore. He ran a magazine in the '70s called Wet, and she used to live on a houseboat on the Seine. The entire bathroom, of which the above grouping is only a small part, is totally covered with tiny brown tile -- totally and utterly -- walls, floor, you name it.

There is a brown tile tub, I kid you not. It's dusty. I've been told it leaks and I don't have the courage to test it out. I saw The Money Pit, and I took notes. There is also a huge step-up shower and a drain in the middle of the floor. The idea was, I suppose, to spew water all over the place with gay abandon, get wet, get down, get funky.

I hope they did. Then they got divorced.

Now we move on to the next bit of trivia: my carrot soup from yesterday. It was yummy. It is history now. Here is a glancing photo to note its brief existence. The bowl, meanwhile, is from the Pottery Barn and is nearly indestructible. It's been packed and unpacked countless times; its mate was shattered into a million pieces by a fireman's black studded boot when we lived in a loft in New York over a Hindi jewelry store.

It's that age-old story: there were exotic cleaning chemicals stored in closed containers, a blowtorch or two late at night, piles of greasy rags, a hammering on our metal loft door with the heel of the fireman's ax, and then we were forced to flee for our lives.

A wise relative once told me that instead of lying in bed worrying through the night, I should make careful plans for what I would do in whatever fearful scenario might be keeping me awake. So one night I figured out a fire-escape floor plan, going into minute, nitpicking detail.

And it's a good thing I did. When I had but minutes to flee that Sunday evening 11 years ago, I didn't have to think. I robotically grabbed some Balducci's bags and gathered up the cats, the floppy disks, and my 21 handwritten journals and followed the gas-masked men with the huge yellow tanks of oxygen on their back down the stairs.

Then I stood in the street as the cherry-picker crane broke through the floor-to-ceiling windows to vent the fire and the Red Cross volunteers circulated with blankets, while my cat grew steel legs and claws and tried to climb up my face in terror. It was then that I had plenty of time to reflect on what I didn't take out of the burning building. Things like our wallets, our documents, our underwear.

You've got to carry out the irreplaceable, the alive, the priceless. The journals.

The moral here: you can never be too prepared, or too mundane, or too wet.