Crisp and even

Boxing day and even Christmas day go without note in Japan and I retain but a few tendrils that connect me to these Christian holidays. Touching the bottom in the depths of winter at the solstice seems to be a stronger force to me these days, but I don't have a personal ceremony to perform in recognition of that. Christmas is established in its place and we exchange gifts as is traditional and popped a bottle of bubbly yesterday, too.
A greater concern today was convincing my body that I have work to get on with and it must not take this latent holiday as an opportunity to lapse into illness. The cold my wife has succumbed to seems to be nasty and indeed it must be particularly pernicious as she is rarely hit by winter maladies. And is almost never the first to succumb in our family. So in order to pretend I am in emergency mode I embarked on a bout of dimensioning timber for a minor project coming up. The tropical hardwood packing case material I picked up a while ago to be specific. It is all very roughly cut to size, so I cut thirty pieces to length and to a rough thickness. I was glad to have the fish bowl helmet for this as there were crisp and even drifts of saw dust covering the assortment of objects on the bench at the end of the day.
I have also taken to dousing my throat with a spoonful of honey whenever I feel that something hideous may be sprouting there, of course it is impossible to prove a negative, but there have been many colds I have felt approaching and never had to welcome over the door mat, which for me constitutes some kind of evidence that honey is of the essence in repelling these miniature Jehova's witnesses when they come calling.