It's cold and windy again in the city and I truly feel I am going to go absolutely mad if the temperature does not stay above 60 for more than two days in a row.

Pennsylvania was really fun. We went to New Hope, which is a little enclave of gay antiques dealers on the New Jersey border. I bought two bottles of $6 merlot from a Jersey winery and a copy of White Noise at this great, low-ceiling-ed, wooden-floored bookstore. I cannot believe I have never read this book before. About two pages into it it became my favorite book. I found out about it through my new favorite pastime, googling (I love that that word is a verb) the names of colleges and universites along with the words "literature" or "fiction." So White Noise came up under "Contemporary Fiction: The Novel After Theory," Com. Lit. 167 at Harvard.

We also stopped off at the dreaded IKEA. I realized, while shuffling through the sea of birch veener and lacquered steel, that once you bring a piece of IKEA furniture into your home, the entire room where the item is placed revolves around that item. It's so screamingly "IKEA" that it's almost distracting. It causes your space to lose personality. Regardless, I still found a desk and file cabinet I liked. I bought my mom some paper napkins.