Happy New Year's Eve from under a blanket on my couch, where I am about to have the most crazy, insane, balls-to-the-wall, rock n' roll evening ever, and by this I mean I have bought a special yogurt. Yes, you heard me right: a special yogurt. I also have a frozen pizza in the kitchen and a load of laundry on the go, plus a 70% chance of being able to live stream a fireworks display on BBC iPlayer at midnight, if I can figure out how it works. Do I know how to live or do I know how to live?

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England is cold and rainy and damp. I'd remembered the cold and the rain, but the damp is a surprise, a cruel curveball I'd managed to block out since the last time I was here in winter.

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Happy Christmas Eve!

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Now you're going to have to be patient with me, because I'm a little rusty at this whole blogging thing. I've been snowed under with work, and more work, and things that aren't work but feel like work because I make them work, like throwing a holiday party for forty people and insisting on making adorable little santa hat brownie bites and homemade invitations for everyone, when anyone knows a veggie plate from Costco and an evite would have been fine.

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As I climbed under my duvet just shy of 2am on Tuesday morning, I realized that out of the last twelve nights, I'd spent exactly one in my own bed. That sounds rather scandalous and exciting, until I clarify that most of them have been spent in other people's spare bedrooms. Wait, that still sounds kind of scandalous and exciting. Huh, except maybe not so scandalous. Or exciting. 

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Wait, wait, wait—before I have an important update about mascara, I have an important update about the ear balls. Thank you all for being so kind about the ear balls—and also for being game enough to refer to them as ear balls in your comments, which made me cackle with glee every single time—but it turns out that my mother doesn't have ear balls after all. No ear balls! It's a negative on the ear balls! Instead, it has been determined that she has something with an even crazier name.

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Remember when I said there was nothing quite so scary as waking up to an email with the subject line "MUM IN HOSPITAL"? Well, it turns out there is. Here is the thing that is scarier than waking up to an email with the subject line "MUM IN HOSPITAL": it's getting an IM from your sister in the middle of a meeting that says "Can you call dad? Mum has collapsed and been taken to hospital in an ambulance." 

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I'm a little late in saying this, but I do hope none of you were too badly affected by Superstorm Sandy last week. We lost my brother Tom for a while—text messages and emails unanswered, phone straight to voicemail, a low-grade alarm mounting everso slightly as the hours ticked by—but he turned up in the end and he was fine.

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First of all, is it weird if the adult accompanying the child holds out a trick-or-treating bag too? That's kind of weird, right? Is it? I don't even know. I was just pretty excited that we even got some trick-or-treaters after the unintentionally creepy note I had to leave on the front gate.  

Come on, children, walk into my vestibule and knock on my door! I'm not a serial killer! Would a serial killer draw you such an adorable pumpkin? 

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In an unsurprising display of immense unoriginality, I would like to announce that my favorite season is fall. Fall? Autumn? Which should I have said there? I realized yesterday that I've lived full-time in the states for exactly ten years—plus six part-time years before that—which means I probably shouldn't feel such a fraud saying "fall," and yet I do because it's not what I grew up saying. I mean, what if I'm turning into Madonna, except the opposite? Would somebody tell me if that was happening?

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