Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, one and all! I'm enjoying a slightly decadent Christmas morning here at the old family homestead.

For some people, decadence would be breakfast in bed. For me, it's Internetting in bed, thanks to the magic of the lap desk and the laptop...and the 20 foot phone cable. I'm surfing the net at the blindingly fast speed of 41,333 bits per second. Oh well, it's better than nothing.

I managed to survive a night of sleep in the low humidity, low temperature homestead, thanks to the electric blanket and several layers of blanket on top of it. The rest of the family is either waking up or else puttering around making breakfast at the moment. When it's ready, I'll be expected to show up in the kitchen immediately, as it's popovers and they're at their best for the couple of minutes immediately after they come out of the oven, so I'd best close out the entry in preparation for the call.

Happy holidays to everyone out there! Hope you're enjoying them.

Merry Christmas, continued...

Well, it's not a white Christmas, at least where I am. But you know, I'm okay with that. I'm not even really sure what's so great about a white Christmas. Sure, it looks nice on the ground out there, and there are half a zillion sentimental songs written about the joys of snow. But then again, snow is cold, it interferes with travel, and once you're no longer a kid anymore, most of those fun snow activities aren't so fun anymore. Dollars to doughnuts most of those songs were written in a sense of "If we have to put up with it, we should at least pretend to enjoy it."

My Mom just caught, in her hands, a snowbird on the back porch of the homestead house. Apparently it had gotten in through a hole in the door and was then unable to get out again. She showed it to those of us in the house, then took it outside and released it. Tiny little thing.

My Dad should be arriving back with my grandmother in tow any time now, and the ETA on my brother who didn't come down yesterday is about forty-five minutes. After that, we get to open the presents!

And that's a(n un)wrap

Well, Christmas presents have been unwrapped and, in some cases, played with. There were plenty of toys and books for the 2- and 1-year-old nieces, and various things given or received by the rest of the family. My received gifts included a "gator" universal socket wrench, a knife sharpener, a Cuisinart-brand ice cream maker, a vacuum cleaner, the DVD of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (from right out of left field), and the CD of The Beatles Let it Be...Naked. Oddly enough, only one of those things (the Beatles CD) came off my Amazon wish list. So I ended up getting a lot of stuff I didn't ask for, and almost nothing that I specifically wanted. Not that I'm complaining; the vacuum cleaner will be exceedingly useful to me, and the rest of the stuff will be at least somewhat useful. It just would have been nice to have received more of the stuff from that list. Oh well...maybe for my birthday in March.

After the gift-opening, we were joined by my parents' Confederate friend John for Christmas dinner: turkey and all the fixings. It was a delicious dinner, marred only by the fact that my Mom only realized after it was all over that she'd forgotten to serve the yams. (Not quite as bad as the time she made tuna noodle casserole without the tuna...and nobody noticed until after supper...though.)

After that, I lounged on my bed and reread McCaffrey & Lackey's The Ship Who Searched for a while, whilst under the influence of turkey coma. At the moment, other family members are still in varying states of tryptophan-induced doze (or trying to be quiet for them) and John seems to have vanished somewhere along the way. I suppose I'll be heading back up to my apartment somewhere between now and the evening...just have to see what everyone else's plans are.