This household celebrates two birthdays in January. On Taylor's eleventh birthday, we rented a city gymnasium and transported him and a small band of revelers there for an afternoon of dodge ball, kick ball and Brownian motion before returning to the house for repose and posing until cake, ice cream, and birthday-gift fever stirred the little motes to more Brownian motion in the backyard.

The next birthday observance will occur in Houston, to which warmer clime I'll journey tomorrow to do the On Golden Pond thing when the clan gathers to watch my dad turn eighty. I considered flying�air would certainly be less wearying�but I'm also in the mood for some head-clearing time and motion on the blacktop.

After his birthday weekend, Taylor succumbed to mild flu symptoms that kept him out of school on the Monday and Tuesday that followed his birthday. In the daytime, he nested in a bed with a remote control and surfed his favorites: the Discovery, History, Learning and Comedy channels. In the evening, he would catch up with his school work in a fraction of an hour.

Later last week, Owen claimed some of the same symptoms but gained less sympathy and zero time away from school. The kind of sympathy that Taylor enjoyed seldom accrues to a walking hormone such as Owen.

We had our first snow of the season on Friday evening. Great, wet, fluffy dollops of the stuff fell slowly in the late afternoon and into the early evening. When it stopped, a three-inch layer had smoothed the rough winter edges of the neighborhood, but by Sunday afternoon only a few patches of snow in the shaded parts of the yard remained.

We've had so much good weather this winter�soaring bright skies and afternoon temperatures that climb almost daily into the sixties�that I haven't had a reason to indulge in my usual winter whining. And if the weather turns bad soon, I almost believe that I would be able to hold my breath until St. Pat's Day and the return of spring.

Proof that I've lost whatever edge I imagine I had: When I saw a headline on the Yahoo! index page that read "China Finds Bugs on Jet Equipped in U.S.," I thought Fruit flies? Roaches? Silverfish?

Reading: One Writer's Beginnings (E. Welty), The Body Artist (Don DeLillo), The Shakespeare Stealer (a "young adult" novel by Gary Blackwood), and browsing Essays of E.B. White

Watching: Fargo (Ya, you betcha!), Primary Colors, and When Harry Met Sally. The Field is in progress.