The clock has turned the calendar here in the east to December.

No snow yet.

I'm waiting for that Christmas feeling, the spirit, the excitement of December, to hit me. Hasn't yet.

I tried this afternoon: I got out the Christmas lights, put on a tape I made a few years back of various Christmas melodies, and proceeded to begin cursing at all the tangled strands and random burnt out bulbs. I couldn't understand it -- these are strands of lights we've had for only a few years, new indoor/outdoor white lights that are supposed to remain lit "even if one bulb burns out." Well, whole sections of some of the strands were burnt out. What the HELL! And I couldn't find the staple gun, so I couldn't get them up on the porch anyway. So back to that tomorrow.

It was a rough night at work last night, so I got home, watched the tape of "The West Wing," and went to bed around 3 a.m. I decided not to set my alarm, and woke up at 1 p.m. I love these days.

I had thought of writing a long tirade about all that's wrong with work, the problems going on with the sports copy desk at the newspaper, but I'm over it now, and don't feel like getting back into that.

So after I separated the lights but couldn't put them up because of the aforementioned lack of a staple gun, I walked up the street to CVS to see if the 100 (give or take) reprints I ordered were in. It's supposed to be overnight developing, and I turned them in Tuesday afternoon, but they weren't back yet. I cut them some slack because it was a holiday weekend, which usually backs things up the following week.

But on the walk into town, I noticed the sun (it was in my eyes) shining brilliantly through a break in the clouds. It was about 3 p.m., so the sun was getting low, and it had dipped under a cover of clouds. (I sometimes type too fast, and "clouds" just came out as "coulds" before I changed it.) I had never seen tiny, cozy downtown Little Silver look so picturesque. The low sun cast long shadows over the ground, and lit the bare trees in a golden late-afternoon light. The overhead clouds took on a navy blue/purpleish hue. I felt like I was in a small New England mountain town. At one point, I turned around 180 degrees and walked backward, taking it in. I wished I had my camera with me, because it's a sight I've rarely seen at home.

There was one time, I was walking from the back of my church, just down the street from my house. Across the tiny parking lot, I looked out over a couple of houses and could just make out the top of the A&P shopping center -- basically a supermarket and cluster of small, non-chain businesses. A cluster of clouds hung in the sky, and a similar late-autumn-afternoon light shone on them, turning them a deep blue/purple shade. It actually looked like a mountain rising in the distance, which is something, considering the highest point in New Jersey is only a few thousand feet, not to mention 100 miles away. I remember stopping and staring at it for a long time, just standing there in the empty parking lot, next to the brick wall by the church, taken in by the "mountain" in the distance.

So on the whole, it was quite a good day.