November 29. It’s been a good day. J had a good rehearsal, I had a good run and some piano practice. Even finished a piece for the writing class. But I can’t hide from myself just how empty I feel.

November 28. I’m piecing together my sleep from a few hours during the night and a few during the day. I’m on-call and finally able to break out of the dull on-call and propose something to solve a problem that’s looming on the horizon. The solution scares me because it’s a productive system I’m tinkering with, but that thrill is one of the reasons I like my job so much.

November 27. My son calls for help from Sweden, his hard drive is full and we help, still barely awake, via video with the cleanup. Disappointing day at the piano, almost all progress from yesterday seems to have disappeared. I try to cook dinner out of two completely different dishes. Depression comes to visit.

November 26. L. is writing a book about photography, and she writes that it is not enough to be content after learning a given technique. I wonder: not enough for what?

November 25. Tended to my retail customer, as is the custom, over Black Friday. Hardly over 10,000 queries per second, there was almost nothing for me to do. So two hours piano, writing group in the evening.

November 24, Thanksgiving. J makes Sauerbraten mit Klößen and I bake American Pie.

November 23, Newburgh. Tired, but happy, because I see my agility at the piano increasing, and more and more idiomatic expressions slipping into my English. A screw is stuck in the left front tire of J.’s Toyota, making a grinding-slamming sound with each turn of the wheel. We leave it in for now because it would be hard to repair the tire now over Thanksgiving if removing the screw would damage the tube. At the supermarket, the whipped cream that is supposed to go on the pumpkin pie is completely sold out.

November 22. From now on, I will base everything that I say on the assumption that I have already told it to my counterpart, in order to avoid the impression of doddering that I would otherwise inevitably give off.

November 21. Back to New York. Slept a lot on the plane.

November 20, Liseberg. The one-hundred-and-sixty-feet drop of the Valkyrie was the worst and most difficult and best. The first time you are most rightfully afraid, because you don’t know what’s coming, and it is only from the fact that normal people are doing it that you can conclude that it is bearable for normal people – although it doesn’t look like it. The view down the drop – we weren’t sitting in the first row, but the third, because the first row could be traumatic, as my daughter expertly assessed –, the bottomless drop, which lasts three seconds, but how long can three seconds be, the sixty miles per hour at which you hurtle into the ground, the g-force of deceleration, and then immediately the inversion. Hanging upside down is always the least of your worries.