I should have spent the night in my bed. I wake up nearly twenty hours later, and my knee feels like it's broken into a million pieces, which it is. I wake with a yelp, catch my breath, yelp again, and Daisy is up and crouching beside me in a flash. Tony arrives a moment later and they take me to bed. I spend New Year's there, behind a wall of codeine, and Daisy dips her finger into her glass of fizzy nauga-champagne and touches it to my lips at midnight.
#
I eat four codeine tabs before getting up, my usual dose. Feb is on us, as filthy and darky as the grime around the toilet bowl, but I accentuate the positive.
By the time I make it downstairs, Tony's in full dervish, helping unload a freshly-scrounged palette of brown bread, lifted from the back of some bakery. He grins his trademark at me when I come into the kitchen and I grin back.
"Foo-oo-ood!" he says, tearing the heel of a loaf and tossing it my way. A half-doz of my housemates, new arrivals whose names I haven't picked up yet, are already sitting around the kitchen, stuffing their faces.
I reach into my robe-pocket for my comm and shout "Smile!" and snap a pict, then stash it in the dir I'm using for working files for the e-zine.
"What's the caption?" said Tony.
"*Man oh manna*," I say.
I eat my heel of bread, then stump into the room that Daisy calls the Butler's Pantry, that I use for my office and shut the door. Our e-zine, *Sit/Spin,* went from occasional to daily when I took it over after New Year's, and I commandeered an office to work in. Apparently, it's *de rigueur* cafe reading in Copenhagen.
Whatever. The important things are: