11:48 p.m. Yes, the Christmas decorations are still up, and yes, I will take them down tomorrow. Can't I just enjoy them a little longer?

Not really, according to the guys who finally came back to finish installing the new gas heater. One of them crinkled one of the branches of the tree, which is over to the far right of this picture, out of the shot. Yeah, so it was a little dry.

He had a tale to tell, of course, of a lady who was taking her tree down, with the fireplace going, and what with a stray spark or so, the whole place jumped to "400 degrees in exactly 2 seconds! Four-hundred degrees!"

Trust a guy who's installing a heater to know his temperature horror stories to the micronudule. Meanwhile, he disputes me when I tell him that I've been smelling gas after the thing goes off. He says it's just a bit of extra paint from the back of the door ... so now I've got two things to worry about.

Plus, tonight I lit the shabbat candle and watched it like a hawk. We saw the mouse run right in front of the (non-lit) fireplace and I was afraid it was going to get behind the tree, somehow push it over in a mighty moment, and -- you know: 400 degrees.

So now there are four things to worry about. Plus, I tried to reinstall Netscape so I can hear RealAudio and it's screwed the entire system up, as expected. That's five. What else? I've a headache from the Chinese food, and the beginnings of ... what? No. I won't even type the word.

Five, six.

So, first thing tomorrow I will remove the beautiful, but now potentially deadly thing that I'd like to call a pine plant, but nobody's letting me keep it. Already I hate this mouse. I thought I heard him in there last night, late, sort of making a chunky, chippy sound.

I got up several times to check, because with the blinking Christmas tree lights on and all, you don't want to hear any snap, crackle, or pop sounds ... but each time I went into the middle room, there was no more noise. Duh. So I thought I was imagining things.

Why don't I trust my instincts?

And now we're going to have to either get a humane trap and deal with separating this creature from its family, and you know that's going to bring the whole mishbucha out in protest ... what happened to Daddy? He only went out for a swallow of milk and a scrap of bread and he never came home ... now we'll all have to link our little rubbery fingers and find that bad person who took our Poppa away ...

... or we'll have to get poison and deal with the drama of finding a dead thing or the trauma of NOT finding a dead thing but smelling a dead thing ...

... or we'll have to get an actual mouse trap and then there's going to be that snap! sound one night, in the middle, I swear, of one of my glorious fun feasts in front of either the computer or the TV and we will look at each other with horror and know -- just totally know -- that it's there, writhing in all its brown fat furryness ...

What are we up to now? Seven, eight, nine more things to worry about? I dropped a little tea cup and broke it into a thousand pieces this afternoon. I think I picked it all up. I like to wander around in my bare feet.

That would therefore be ten. Ten things to worry about. I can stop now. But if I flipped it, I could go to bed happy. Here are a couple things I'm grateful for:

I didn't step on the mouse. I didn't step on the broken pottery. The tree didn't burst into flames. The picture I took of the balcony actually did come out straight -- in spite of how it looks. Every single wall in this house is at an angle.

And you wonder why I write the way I do.