The weather is behaving strangely. Today is very gray. It's also a bit cold. I lit the furnace this afternoon in Oneida (the building in which I live). This was my first attempt to light the Oneida furnace in many weeks. The first time I tried to light the furnace, it took me 45 minutes to build a fire that had any chance of maintaining itself. Today, it took me five or ten. I have had a lot of practice on the stove in Degania in the intervening time. I feel like a fire-building champion.

I took a week off of running due to an ankle injury and emotional distress. I returned to running on Sunday morning and was pleased to find that I could pick right back up where I left off in my program. In four runs, I'm supposed to run for 20 minutes straight! This is crazy. Just a few weeks ago, I was running for only 60 seconds at a time.

I quit my work in accounting. I had been thinking about quitting for quite a while; it turned out to be a lot easier to quit than I had thought it would. I told Biddy that I would finish up the tofu accounting for 2011, but that I didn't want to be on the team for 2012. No problem. I had my final accounting date today. She gave me a hug at the end of it.

That's one less thing on my schedule that I am not excited to do. Hooray!

I realized yesterday that I am excited about power washing things in the tofu hut. There's been a job opening for tofu hut deep clean for a few weeks; I'm thinking about signing up. It's so satisfying to blast away layers of grime and mold.

Something else that I realized recently is that I don't have very many friends here. I think it's easy to forget to forge close, supportive relationships here. I'm surrounded by people all the time; I know all of them by name, and could probably tell you a few personal details about any of them. I guess I just forgot to get closer than that. During my recent episode of emotional distress, I found that I did not have many people to whom I could turn for support. I would like to fix this. I will fix this.

There are pictures on the internet of me at a rave. What a strange era we live in. Is anyone else almost constantly struck by how surreal everything is?