Tuesdays are just made for rambling and musing. So pull up a chair, put on your PJ's, pour yourself a little sumthin' and tell me about your day. You're going to hear about mine.

-I'm getting my groove on with the kickboxing class. My push up skill has improved and I earned my first belt stripe. That may not seem like much to you, but for this old broad, it felt like an achievement. My boxing partner, Hadas, grazed my face yesterday with a clumsy cross. I kept cool, registering an "It's only a flesh wound" sort of response. She droned, in that languid way that South Americans have, "You need to keep the defense mitt up higher." And I was thinking: And you need to keep your head down when it's my turn, be-yoych.

-I failed to mention the passing of the character actor Peter Boyle last week. I know a lot of people associate him with "Everybody Loves Raymond," but he's had an interesting film career ("Young Frankenstein" and "Joe" were particular standouts). And here's a bit of trivia: Boyle was John Lennon's best man at Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono. That makes him even more intriguing.

-Because it's winter and the couch looks mighty appealing on a cold winter evening, it's a good time to actually start digging into the stack of books congregating next to my bed. As a warm up, I always read Edith Wharton. For me, her prose is like the high end porn. There's such pleasure in the rich and vivid detail she paints. Her characters, so stoic with the rigid standards of the period, are burning with passion and longing in their correct tortured souls. I started with a favorite, "Ethan Frome." I've read it more times that I can count, but I always come back to it. It makes me cry like hell every time. Heartbreaking; brilliant. Please read it, if you haven't.

-I had the misfortune of witnessing a rotund pug dog being walked on the street today and his owner saw fit to outfit the poor creature in a Santa Claus cape with white fur collar and jangling bells. Do people dress their creatures in seasonal costumes as a means to express their true selves, but without suffering the humiliation of wearing such atrocities themselves? I fear I will verbally abuse anyone I see forcing their Labrador to wear antlers.

-I think one of the reasons the holiday feels a bit off this year is because Mamela was out of town for the start of Hanukkah. I know if she had been here, she would have brought in her homemade potato latkes as her means of sharing the holiday with the rest of us. I can live without potatoes if I have to (and right now I must do), but Mamela's latkes are otherworldly. With a little sour cream, you'd be asking for seconds too. In Hebrew.

-Speaking of the holidays, let's take a straw poll here. What's your all-time favorite holiday song? "I'll Be Home For Christmas" always gets to me. OK, so? I am terribly sentimental. Is that so wrong?!

-Entertainment selections from Jewels today included random quotes from "Napoleon Dynamite," interpretive belly dance and a propensity for ending each sentence with the phrase "...stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon." (In fairness, at lunch today we had a tapas selection which included figs stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon. Oh yes, people, it was deee--lish).

-My new favorite Yiddish word is "Verbissene." It means bitter (as in a cynical person). And the best thing about Yiddish? It may function as either a noun or an adjective. Who knew?

-This is technically my last day in the office before cashing in my vacation for the holiday break. However, in the last two hours of the day today, four things happened that insure I will be spending part of my first day of vacation (tomorrow) back here in the office. You get to a point where it really doesn't matter anyway. We work in magazine publishing and this business never sleeps. Hollaback Girl spent her vacation today trying to close a work project that the client wants closed, you know, like yesterday.

-How was your day?