Sorting

I spent most of the day slogging around in my old grey sweats, feeling off-kilter and woozily strange. But an unexpected highlight of enforced leisure was re-discovering the quiet and obsessive pleasure of sorting bottlecaps, in this case by brand. What a perfect thing to do when you feel out of sorts! Mr S, who otherwise felt perfectly fine, succumbed to the temptation and joined me in dipping hands into the giant glass bowl and grabbing a fistful of shiny caps. What a lovely noise they make, scratching against each other, like pebbles on a tin beach. We quickly found that some varieties merited their own jars, as the piles quickly built up. There are also many that are one of a kind. Mr S remembers the tastes of almost all of the beers that are represented here, and has anecdotes about where they were purchased. And we figured out that this collection is a good six or seven years in the making, judging by the year 2008 on some of the white caps in the foreground, so it's not like we're throwing big parties around here every night. No, it's quite literal that we share a beer most nights. I get the small half.
So these are the quiet pleasures of New Year's Eve at home: a nice fire, lemon-garlic chicken roasting in the oven, and the on-going sorting of bottlecaps. In the new year we look forward to arranging them by color, alphabetically, and perhaps by place of origin. Best holiday wishes to all you safe and sane blippers out there, and to the rest of you as well.