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2

1933

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HOME, FAMILY AND FRIENDS

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   All but two of the diary days occur between January 1st and 13th but they bring out a variety of domestic life and problems. After retiring at 4:30 a.m. New Years Day, I began the New Year for all practical purposes at 6:15 a.m. when I arose to give Rog his bottle. It was a bit rugged but I made it successfully and got up to stay at 9:30. I felt okay except that my legs were a bit tired. Later in the day, Bab and I drove to the Peninsula, where we took a walk along the Bay shore. The harbor was partly frozen, the ice pale blue stretching away to the dark open water. Across the Bay lay the city in a bluish haze. As always, it appealed to my imagination--all the things which had happened there over the past century and a half, all the things happening there now. I still had that secret and unsatisfied yearning to write a great story about life as I saw it. I thought that with a four-day week now very imminent, what could be a better thing for me to do. My big problem was what to write about--what plot to use to convey my message.
   Because New Years Day came on Sunday, we had Monday off. The whole family took a walk, stopping along the way at the Downies for a call. Back home, I took some "photoflash" pictures of Willie and the children. It was an experiment for me and I hoped they'd turn out. They did and are included herewith. The same day, Bab and I took another ride, heading for Fairview to watch the "choo-choos", but Dodgem's engine began to miss half way out there, so I turned around and headed for home. Bab remarked that the trouble was probably caused by "Mother buying only two gallons of gas that day." (Willie had bought two gallons of gas one day about three weeks before.) We saw some chickens and Bab recalled, "In Louisville, Mother took me out to a place where we saw a lot of chickens and cows--and they had a [[underline]] turkey [[/underline]] there too. It was a real for sure turkey--not the kind we eat, but a real [[underline]] animal turkey! [[/underline]]" She was simply wound up and too funny for words. And that same day, Rog graduated to the playpen and enjoyed it enormously, rolling around it to his heart's content. As his pictures indicate, he, like his sister, was an adorable baby and he had just about everybody wound around his finger. And Bab was indeed a character as I've indicated. Another example of this was her nonchalant advice to me that I shouldn't read McCall's because there wasn't anything of "timely" interest in it. This was pretty good, coming from a four-year-old. And so the holiday season came to an end at last and I returned to work. On January 3rd, Willie hadn't yet fully recovered from the frivolity of New Years and was pretty well fagged out. We began to wonder if, after all, it was really worth it.