Richard had to go back to work today but I have one more day off. I have been taking advantage of this by spending the entire day in my pajamas and taking long, delicious naps. It has not been all sloth and decadence, however; there were piles of laundry to do (due in part to having house guests, and also to Zucchini deciding that it had been far too long since he peed on Richard’s side of the bed – sigh), so I have been slowly working my way through those. Plus I dealt with all the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen and paid bills and put away a little bit more of the clutter that always manages to accrue after Christmas, and I also did a bit of knitting and made dinner, so it was actually a surprisingly productive day.

We ate dinner in front of the television so we could watch a few more episodes of the first season of Monk, which we actually started watching last night. Richard’s parents came up yesterday to take him out to dinner for his birthday, and the Monk DVD’s were one of his presents. My parents came along for dinner and we all smashed into a booth at one of the few places that were actually open on New Year’s Day, and had Italian food and coffee and then came home and ate spice cake with chocolate frosting (because that is Richard’s favorite cake) and ice cream. My parents brought him books on colonial times from their trip to colonial Wiliamsburg and I think my mom and I will be doing some arm wrestling to see who gets to read them first after he is done with them. And his parents brought him, among other things, a didgeridoo (actually, that was from his youngest sister) and a very cool telescope. I suspect once this weather we’ve been having finally clears that Richard will spend quite a bit of time either outside in the backyard trying to find things in the sky, or inside scaring the cats with his new noisy toy.

Happy Holidailies

When I got up yesterday morning my back was still sore, but it had subsided into a mostly low-grade ache. This was a good thing, considering that I needed to collect all of Richard’s birthday presents from where I’d stashed them around the house, and this included the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection, which has been living in the trunk of my car and is rather heavy and not the sort of thing one should be carting around if one’s back was wrenched.

I made a coffee cake for breakfast with some experimental streusel (it involved mini chocolate chips and toffee bits, because we happened to have them both in the cupboard) and wrapped all of Richard’s presents and the cake was just about ready to come out of the oven by the time Richard woke up. So he made coffee and I made glaze for the cake and we ate breakfast at the dining room table for a change, since that’s where I’d stacked all his presents. And in between bites of cake and sips of coffee he opened them all.

He’s had a low-grade fever on and off, and has been coughing and wheezing the past day or two, so we spent his birthday in a quiet and low-key way. We went out only once, to get lunch and swing by the grocery store for the ingredients for our New Year’s Eve dinner. We’d originally planned to go out for dinner, but with him being sick and me still recovering, and more importantly, with the rather crazy weather we’ve been having, I’m glad we stayed home instead.

We made pizza fondue for dinner, and while I was shredding the cheese Richard noted that s’mores would be a lot of fun for dinner, since we haven’t used the s’mores maker he bought for me in a year or two. So he zipped back to the store to pick up marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate bars. And then we put in some movies – March of the Penguins and Miracle on 34th Street (the original with Natalie Wood) and stuffed ourselves silly with bread and melted cheese and toasted marshmallows and chocolate and sticky goodness. In my family, the New Year’s tradition has always been to go get lots of ice cream, gather up all the leftover Christmas cookies and candy, and do our best to finish them all off. It’s always been our own version of ‘drinking to excess’, except that our version doesn’t leave anyone incapable of driving, or hung over the next day. Richard and I didn’t exactly do the same thing, but I think cheese and chocolate to excess was in the right spirit.

So now here is the part where I am supposed to get all maudlin and think back over the old year and list off all my dreams and hopes and goals for the new one, and declare that 2006 will be better than any year before it. Except that I cannot really find it in me to care, you see. New Year’s Eve has never been a huge celebration for me. It marks the end of the year, but only because someone arbitrarily decided that this day was the last day of one calendar and tomorrow would be the start of the next. In the grand scheme of life this means nothing at all except for some people it is an excuse to go have a party. And I am certainly not knocking excuses to go out and have a party, if that is your thing, but it just isn’t mine.

We watched the ball drop in Times Square (on television, of course) because that is tradition, and outside in the street we could hear people setting off firecrackers and blowing horns. But inside, it is just another night that happens to also be Richard’s birthday, and today is just another day, and I learned long ago that making resolutions that are set to start on the first day of an arbitrary calendar really doesn’t mean much or change anything.

Still, I know there are a lot of people who might be glad to be done with 2005 because a new calendar does offer a frame for what could be a new, shiny chapter in someone’s life. So on the first day of 2006, here’s hoping that good things come to those who need them, and that if you really want to make those resolutions come true, that this be the year you find the strength to do so.

Happy Holidailies

I woke up this morning to the sound of rain pounding on the roof, much the same sound as when I went to bed last night. When I went downstairs to make breakfast and wrap Richard’s birthday presents, I looked outside and it was evident just how much water the latest winter storm had dumped. Normally when we get a heavy rain we get a little pond that forms in the middle of the path in the backyard, right where the white peach tree stands. This morning the pond stretched all the away around the raised flowerbed, covered the bottom step to our back porch, and joined up with a new pond on the other side of the yard, behind the garage. So much water in such a short period of time that the ground is too saturated and it simply has nowhere else to go but there. I’ve joked occasionally that a house with a dragon on the roof really ought to have a moat, but this morning, when it looked like we might be halfway there, it wasn’t quite so funny.

Reports of worse than just flooded backyards have been trickling in throughout the day. My older sister up in Napa lost power for a few hours during the day, and parts of the main town were flooded. News reports mention mudslides and people being evacuated in Napa, Sacramento, and other parts of Northern California. The 80-680 interchange was shut down in Fairfield/Cordelia, likely due to flooding. My brain is having a hard time wrapping around all of this – we just don’t get this kind of extreme weather in this area, and yet, here we are in the middle of it, with another storm supposedly on the way.

I assumed the flood in our backyard was the worst it got in our immediate vicinity, since we’re not close enough to any creeks, rivers, or lakes where larger scale flooding might be a problem. I’d not thought about clogged storm drains, nor would we have seen the problem anyway, since it occurred just around the corner down the road. But as we left the house for the first time in the day, to go for lunch, the neighbor noted that our street had, indeed flooded. We passed city trucks and men in bright orange jumpsuits still poking in and conferring over various storm drains, and the line of debris from the flood was clearly visible halfway up a number of the neighbors’ driveways.

The storm literally blew itself out eventually, but high winds are so common around here that I doubt anyone would have noticed anything unusual. As it was, I only paid attention to the fact that there had been wind because the streets were dried so quickly after the deluge.

The weather people are saying that we’re due for at least one more huge storm to sweep through the area, likely tomorrow. But in the meantime there is wind outside, and even more startling after the sogginess of the night and the morning, there is bright, lovely sun.

Happy Holidailies

Because I have had the week off and my mom also had some time off, we decided to go off shopping together. My mom came and picked me up, since I am still not completely 100% with the back and driving, which requires occasionally being able to twist the back, is out of the question – and we headed off to the mail because we’d heard stories of grand sales at a few stores.

We had lunch first, at Mimi’s Cafe because their buttermilk spice muffins are amazing. Apparently my mom and my sisters went there yesterday for lunch and my little sister, who has recently finished school to become a pastry chef, spent a bit of time crumbling her muffin into tiny pieces in an attempt to figure out what all was inside. I have high hopes that she is able to reconstruct the muffin recipe, although I suspect that it might not be a good thing in the long run because they probably are far higher in all the bad things (fat, calories, sugar, you name it) than any of us want to know.

Next we hit the mall – or at least a small portion of it. I’m still a bit slow with walking, so mostly we stuck to two stores. The first was Lane Bryant, because they claimed to have huge sales, and even though their smallest size is often a bit too large for me, we thought it might be worth the trip. The tales of grand sales were grander than the sales themselves, despite the presence of deceptive signs in the front promising huge savings. Okay, I should give them credit – there were huge savings to be had if you did not mind an original price that was perhaps twice as much as it would have been in another store, for things that fell mostly into the categories of cheap, tawdry, or both. It’s a bit of a disappointment because both of us remember when Lane Bryant used to carry nice things that were made with decent quality and were appropriate for professional women to wear. But I suspect we are clinging to a memory that has not existed for quite some time, and perhaps there is no need to enter that particular establishment ever again. So instead, we headed off somewhere else, and managed to find a few things there that were meant for actual adults to wear, and for significantly better prices – even without the sales – than we would have paid for something that we wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing anyway.

After the shopping my mom brought me back home because my back was twinging a bit. Richard has been home all day, happily doing something with various Linux operating systems, or something, because for some reason that makes no sense to me (much like my obsession with yarn makes no sense to him, I suspect) he finds great joy in wrestling with kernals and operating systems and seeing how close he can come to getting his computers to crash. He has also been staying close to his nebulizer because even though it looked earlier as if he’d managed to avoid falling under the influence of this latest winter cold from hell that has been making the rounds, our optimism appears to be premature. We’d originally planned to go to The Firehouse tomorrow night for their New Year’s Eve dinner, because there are fireworks in Old Sacramento and we’ve done this before and it’s always marvelous food and a lot of fun. But with both of us either getting over the death virus, or coming down with it, we realized it was likely better to just stay home and celebrate in a more subdued manner, with Kleenex and cough suppressants and large quantities of ibuprofen and the rest.

There were reports that a few more rounds of winter storm were coming our way and that seems to be the case, since the rains started a few hours ago and it’s pretty much now pouring out there. Neither of us is up to going to the store or out to dinner, so we ordered pizza and gave the delivery guy a large tip for making him brave the storm to bring us food.

Happy Holidailies

I spent today mostly babying my wrenched back, with only short trips out where I knew the amount of walking I’d have to do would be minimal. I have been walking around a bit duck-like, and Richard has permission to laugh at me because I am laughing at myself about this too. My back may hurt but how can I not find the humor in the fact that I have to prop myself up just to stand up straight? Also, ibuprofen is my very best friend and I know that in a day or two this will all be over and I might as well laugh about it while I can.

There was a brief detour to meet a friend at the yarn store in Davis, which was not having as impressive a sale as we had been led to believe, but which still prompted me to pick up three skeins of brightly colored wool to make myself a cute little felted bag, and two skeins of sock yarn that will produce socks with the loveliest purple stripes. We will not discuss the fact that I got a pile of sock yarn for Christmas and I have not even touched the sock yarn I bought in Ashland during the knitting retreat in November because one can never have too much sock yarn. The next trip was off to the allergy clinic so Richard and I could get our shots, since we are now both back on a monthly schedule and I am determined to keep us on it so we do not have to have them any more often than necessary.

In between trips out of the house I have been camped out on the bed knitting. It’s the most comfortable spot in the house where the cats can be near me, or even on me, without my needing to contort my body into back-displeasing postures. I finished my secret project and started on the felted bag, and I am currently toying with casting on for at least three other projects, just for the heck of it, because I have this delicious sense of freedom, now that Christmas is over and I have nothing whatsoever that has to be done. It is time to make frivolous things just for me, like some socks, and maybe a new cardigan for myself, or even perhaps another lace shawl that I will never wear and which will drive me crazy making, but which I will adore knitting anyway.

Despite what I’d thought yesterday, it turned out that we did get a short final visit with my little sister and niece and brother-in-law. They all went to the Jelly Belly factory for the tour, where I heard that they got to see some of the machines waving at them, but then decided it made more sense to come back to my parents’ house instead of heading back to Napa, because my parents’ house is closer to the airport. So I went over to spend a little more time with them, and give them a few more hugs goodbye.

My little niece spent a good portion of the time we were there standing in front of Richard and jumping up and down in circles so that his outstretched hand would bonk her lightly on the head, all while giggling madly. She kept insisting that he do it, so apparently it was a marvelous game, and in fact as we were all leaving – them for the airport and us for home – she declared that her Uncle Richard was her favorite because of the head-bonking game. We figure we’re not holding her to that because five is a rather fickle age for who is one’s favorite, but it was still pretty darn cute.

A friend called, finally back in town, and since we have been trying to hook up for ages, we made dinner plans in order to pass over presents for Christmas and his birthday. It was fun to linger over dinner and pie and catch up on what he and his wife have been up to, and it was with regret that we finally had to head home and say goodbye.

Happy Holidailies

On Saturday my knitting mom gave me a call. She had to make a baby sweater by Friday and she knew I had the knitting machine – which I still hadn’t really learned how to use – and was wondering if we could figure it out together so she could try to whip out the sweater in time. Monday we ran into her and her grandkids at one of the stores while doing the after-Christmas shopping and it turns out she went out and took advantage of a 40% off coupon, so bought her own knitting machine, but she wasn’t getting any further than I did. So we made plans to meet today, both of us with our machines, rightly figuring that if the two of us were fighting with them together, maybe we’d be able to make heads or tails of the whole process and also get a baby sweater out of the whole ordeal.

So this morning I packed up all the pieces and parts of my knitting machine and I headed off to her house, and we set both the machines up and got started. There was a lot of grumbling under our breath and not a small amount of swearing, and each of us managed to produce a decent sized swatch. So then we decided that if we could do that much we might as well tackle the sweater because, it being for a baby, it is made of small pieces and maybe we could handle them. She cast on for the back and her machine started giving her a lot of trouble, but I cast on for a sleeve and miracle of miracles, it worked. There was a small kitten zipping around the house while we did all of this, and I think this was actually a good thing because there were a few times when we were very much in need of a kitten’s rattley purr and comic relief.

By this time we had been at it a few hours, so we took a break for lunch and I got to try all the traditional Swedish Christmas foods, like pickled herring and creamed herring, and headcheese (which is sort of like a gray lumpy liverwurst kind of thing) and some kind of beans which were surprisingly sweet, and cardamom rolls and pickled beets, and a strangely pale and gray potato sausage that was quite delicious, and then paper thin spice cookies with slivers of almonds in them. And then fresh from lunch and starting to get excited about finally figuring out this darn contraption I whipped out the second sleeve in about fifteen minutes and while her machine still wasn’t playing nicely I also did the two front sections. And by the time I was finished with those she had finally wrestled her machine into submission and even though she ran into one more snag, the back piece was pretty close to done by the time we finished with our afternoon. So it was all very exciting, especially in that we were able to crank out all the pieces for a baby sweater in one day. It amused us because a knitting machine is actually hard work and we can see that if one used it a lot one would build up some impressive upper arm muscles. There is still finishing and seaming to do so no matter what, there will always be some work that has to be done by hand. But for the boring long stretches, this machine is marvelous.

Following our success, we bundled up all the pieces and headed off to visit her daughter to show them all off. But I didn’t end up staying there very long because there was a series of phone calls on my cell phone from my mom and Richard and my older sister, so I headed home to be ready for the sisters to call because they were on their way down to our area with spouses and kids, and I was to go meet them at the bowling alley on the UC Davis campus so we could all go bowling.

None of us are good bowlers by any stretch of the imagination, but it was still pretty funny that all three of the kids got far higher scores than any of us adults. Granted, this is because for kids their age, they put up the bumpers, and the two younger kids were using a bowling ramp to get the ball started. The kids seemed to have fun, although there were a few times when we thought we might have to send a second ball down the lane because the ball rolled by the kids was in serious danger of coming to a complete stop.

After bowling one game (where we all learned to stay far away from my little sister because she managed to drop her ball *behind* her three times) we all headed back to my house. I called Richard to order pizza and called my mom to let her know that we were heading home, eventually everyone showed up – sisters and their families, my mom, and the pizza. We put the extra leaf back into the dining room table and got all ten of us around the table for dinner, and managed to polish off two large pizzas without a single slice remaining.

After dinner, the two oldest kids wanted to play a game. We have tried to make sure to have kid-appropriate toys in the house for when friends or our niece and nephews come over, like Silly Putty and Tinker Toys and Legos and K’nex and such, but we don’t really have any kid-appropriate games. So I frantically poked around in the rather huge pile of games that we own, that are all too complicated for small fry, and stumbled across a card game I got in my stocking from Richard’s family this year that said for ages six and up. The oldest nephew is seven and the niece is five but she’s very smart, and I figured one of the adults could help the youngest nephew, since he is four – although it turned out he’d rather play with Richard’s antique cast iron train cars instead, so it all worked out well. My little sister and I puzzled out the rules and decided to ignore all the variations and make things as simple as possible, and we played the game, which is called Rat-a-Tat-Cat and involved a little bit of memory and a little bit of math and has cards with very goofy pictures of cats and rats on them, and it was a lot of fun. So much so that the kids wanted to play it again. And when the two boys headed upstairs to take their baths (because our big green garden tub in the master bathroom is still the coolest place to take a bath) my niece wanted to play another game, and when the boys were done and it was her turn for the bath, the oldest nephew wanted to play another game, and when all three kids were bathed and in their pajamas and ready for the ride back to my older sister’s house, there was such clamor for one more game that we all said why not. So for a goofy little stocking stuffer present it was an instant hit and I am very grateful to whichever member of Richard’s family who gave it to me because the kids thought it was a blast.

Now for the not-so-fun part of the evening. While standing there in the living room I twisted ever so slightly and felt a sharp pain across my lower back, the likes of which I have not felt in years but recognized immediately. I had the presence of mind to not say out loud the various curse words I was thinking in my head, and instead asked Richard to bring me a small pile of ibuprofen, since I knew that the first thing I needed to do was to relax the muscles around it to allow me to do more than just stand in one awkward position because moving hurt like hell. Eventually the ibuprofen kicked in, but I still cannot straighten my back entirely and I had to sort of shuffle around the house in a bit of a hunched over squat. My sisters and the kids were talking about going to the Jelly Belly Factory tomorrow for the tour but I suspect that I will not be joining them because from what I remember of the last time I did this, I have several days of high doses of painkillers and the hunched over squat walk to look forward to before everything goes back to normal, and taking an entire tour is not going to work well amid all that.

So tonight was the last time I will see my little sister and her husband and my very adorable niece for a very long time and I am feeling a bit melancholy about it. It has been lovely to have them in the area for this long, and as always I find myself wishing that somehow we could figure out a way to twist geography and weather so that we could all live closer to one another – my sisters and my parents and I – so that it does not take major holidays or business trips or carefully planned weekend flights to see one another again.

Happy Holidailies

Richard had to go back to work today, so he got up and fed the screaming hordes so that I could try to sleep in instead. It was very lovely to lie in bed another hour or two, surrounded (eventually) by sated, sleepy cats, and knowing that I had nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be.

Eventually, though, I did get up because I was getting hungry. So I ate gingerbread cookies for breakfast since we are out of milk for cereal (and have been for days) and then I lounged in bed and read books and worked on my little sister’s scarf because it is lovely, mindless knitting that requires no tiny needles or skinny yarn or fiddly bits like some of the things I finished barely in time for Christmas morning.

I only left the house once today, braving the rain to make a run to Costco so I could pick up milk and chicken and little cups of fruit and applesauce for lunches to take to work. But then it was back home, where I took long, delicious naps and caught up on my Bloglines and knit some more.

I made a meatloaf out of veggie crumbles for dinner, which turned out really good (based on a recipe my older sister gave me), and we sat and ate our dinner in front of the television while watching MST3K’s version of Santa Claus Defeats the Martians. The movie is, naturally, amazing in its horridness, but this was my very first exposure to MST3K and I found it quite fun. Plus the movie was mindless enough that I could keep on zipping through my little sister’s scarf, with the hopes that I will finish it in time to hand it off to her before they fly back to Seattle.

Happy Holidailies

This morning was yet another morning where I got up and dressed and out the door while it was still dark out. This being the day after Christmas, my mom and my sisters and I had to take part in the annual post-Christmas shopping wars, and even though one of the stores we usually go to opened at 6 this morning, we decided to give ourselves the luxury of one more hour of sleep. So I made it to Target before 7am, and joined the throngs of people gathered outside because this year, even though we have plenty of cards and do not need any more, there were *some* things I was hoping to find, and I wanted to make sure to get in there right at the start.

For shopping wars, it has been a surprisingly calm day. Even in Target, when the throngs descended on the Christmas stuff and carts clogged the aisles, people were being uncharacteristically polite to each other. I heard a lot of ‘excuse me please’ as people tried to maneuver the crowded aisles, and it wasn’t the sarcastic sort of tone, but a genuine niceness. Maybe if we’d hit the earlier store at 6 in the morning the nastiness would have been visible, but I am going to pretend that maybe people were just in a better mood this year.

I was weak and bought gift wrap, even though later Richard reminded me that last year I swore I would not buy any more for a few years, but I did not buy any cards, so I stuck to that at least. I also picked up a pair of very pink and sparkly shoes for my niece because her birthday is at the end of January and I wanted to get her something to go with the very pink and purple afghan I made her. And of course there were a pile of things for next year’s stocking stuffers, and a t-shirt for Richard that had to come home with me because it made me laugh, and then we were on to the next store, and the next one after that, with only a brief coffee break in the middle. We hit two craft stores mainly for stocking stuffers for small people for next year, and while in both of them I successfully refrained from buying any yarn at all. Granted, my little sister picked out two skeins of yarn and asked me to make her a hat and a scarf, but the key point here is that I was not the one buying it.

All the spouses and kids met us for lunch, and then Richard and I headed home so I could unload all my acquisitions and he could tease me about buying more gift wrap while the rest of the family swung by the Osh Kosh outlet to exchange some overalls for the nephews (we’d gone there before lunch and oh, the cute stuff they have for little kids!).

The plan for the afternoon was for the kids to all go down for naps at my parents’ house and for us adult ‘kids’ to all go out to spend some time together. We made an attempt to see a movie, but considering that we did not even leave the house until 20 minutes before it was to start, and there was traffic on the road, and the parking lot at the theater was insanely packed, it was sort of no surprise at all that the movie was sold out. We were not the only one thinking that the day after Christmas was a good time to go see a movie. So instead, we went to the bakery where I go with one of my knitting groups once a month and we had coffee and pastries and sat around little tables for about an hour and did a lot of talking and laughing instead. And I am actually rather glad that we didn’t get to see the movie because while movies are fun, they are not remotely conducive to talking with one’s siblings and their spouses.

We headed back to my parents’ house after that, and my dad and my older brother-in-law and I unearthed their set of giant tinker toys and sent the three kids out into my parents very new and very nice enclosed porch, where there is plenty of room for them to run around and yell and go crazy, and a door in between them and the house where we can close out most of the noise but still keep an eye on them just in case someone tries to take someone else’s head off.

There was tortellini and ravioli for dinner, followed by leftover Christmas cookies and pie, but by then some of us were starting to fade (that would be the little kids, and me, since I am still not feeling 100% recovered from this damn winter ick). So we hugged everyone goodbye, which was good timing since all the little kids were being loaded into their respective cars and car seats, and came back home to be yelled at by the cats for having the audacity to be *gone* during the day for two whole days in a row, and now I think I will cast on for my little sister’s scarf and see how long it takes for me to fall asleep.

Happy Holidailies

We got up and drove up to Napa this morning, because my older sister is hosting Christmas this year, and we managed to get there by 7 am because my little sister and her family were down from Seattle, and this meant there would be three small children under the age of 8 in that house – three small children who were not going to be very patient about waiting for lazy aunts and uncles and grandparents to drag their tired, coughing, sniffling bodies to the house at a later hour. Because there were presents! And when there are presents, children can only wait so long.

There were stockings to open, and a huge mound of presents (because there are eleven of us when we are all together in my family), and homemade cinnamon rolls, and piles of cookies. There were books and toys and little hand-held electronic 20 Questions games, to which we lost Richard and my youngest brother-in-law a few times throughout the day. And two both my nephews’ delight, there were battery operated, remote controlled cars, which took their dad and both their uncles to figure out how to open and load with the batteries before they would work.

Once breakfast was over and the presents were all opened and things were calming down, the two boys (the oldest is seven; the youngest is four) took their cars outside. They live in a little cul-de-sac, and there are a few other families with similarly aged little kids, so it’s not uncommon to see small people out there, playing in the street where no one has to worry about cars.

However, it wasn’t long before we saw the older one running for the door, a look of extreme worry on his face. We all met him halfway, and amid tears he told us that the younger nephew’s car had gone down the storm drain!

There were tears from both of them, and while their mom and dad went out to assess the situation and try to comfort the little one, my mom and I crouched with the older one on the front porch, trying to reassure him. We were going shopping tomorrow, we told him. If we couldn’t get the car, why, we’d just make sure to buy another one. And boy did we step into a minefield there, because apparently those cars were from Santa, and my nephew was completely distraught. Mommy couldn’t get a new one, because Santa brought them, and that meant they might not get a new one until next Christmas. And my older sister came by and muttered under her breath that this wasn’t far off because it just so happened these were the last two on the shelf when she’d found them anyway.

But one should never underestimate the power of a small crowd of adults when confronted with inconsolable children who have just inadvertently run their favorite Christmas toy into a storm drain. There is a manhole cover right over the drain, and since there was no way anyone could reach inside the drain itself, one of the guys got the bright idea to try opening the manhole directly to take a look inside. Before my mom and I knew what was happening, there were my dad, the boys’ dad, and Richard, circling the manhole with crowbar in hand, doing their best to pry it open. At one point we all determined that we needed a second crowbar, so my sister went off to find a neighbor, and then they came over to see what all the fuss was about – the neighbor and his wife. And once I told my little sister and her husband, and he heard that all the other guys were getting to play with heavy cement objects and crowbars, he headed right outside to help too.

I did not expect that they would be able to get the thing open, and even if they did get it open I figured the drain would be too deep, or the car would have washed away. But somehow, through sheer force of will, they got the manhole cover off, and even more miraculous, there it was, in sight, and nearly within reach.

My mom and dad started yelling for someone, anyone, to get a camera, because the first idea for how to get it was to lower the older nephew headfirst down into the drain to fetch it. But even though he was okay with the idea in theory, the minute his head started going below the edge of the manhole, he started to panic, and they pulled him back up immediately. There was discussion of various options. Someone ran off to see if they could find a pool scoop or a rake. At this point my little sister and I were trying so hard to not laugh that we were in danger of hurting something. And then the boys’ dad, in a flash of bravery, leaned into the drain as far as he could, and rescued the car, rendering him nothing less than a hero in the eyes of two little boys.

The rest of the day passed in much calmer blur. After the week I’ve had, I was exhausted, so I ended up doing a lot of napping upstairs in their guest room. At one point I borrowed a needle and some thread and added the finishing touches to the platypus I made for my brother-in-law (because he said that was his favorite animal and how many times does one really get an opportunity to knit a platypus, anyway?) and tried out the 20 Questions game, and then took another nap. We ate ham and potatoes and pumpkin bread for dinner and followed that with more cookies and candy and pie. And then, since it was getting late and my mom and my sisters and I at least have a very early day tomorrow, we all loaded up our cars with our presents and headed home. On the way home my right ear finally depressurized, which means that the antibiotics are starting to kick in, and even though it is not a remote control car and I did not have to mobilize a neighborhood to rescue it for me, this is quite possibly, for me, the very best present of all.

Happy Holidailies

Despite my hoping otherwise, this damn winter cold (which has definitely become more than just a stupid cold) has simply gotten worse instead of better. Today we were supposed to go to the in-laws for the traditional Christmas Eve stocking stuffer and present exchange. But when I woke up this morning I could not breathe out of my nose at all, and the pressure behind both ears was so bad my eyes were tearing constantly and I could not make them stop, and oh, did I mention the occasional coughing fits so bad that I felt as if I was going to throw up?

Richard wins points for being the nicest, most wonderful husband this week for a lot of reasons, not the least of which for quietly supporting me in my knitting-induced panic of trying to get several very complicated projects done by Christmas, and by being willing to wrap every single present so I wouldn’t have to worry about them. Today he called the pharmacy and went off to find some cough suppressant for me so at least that would be taken care of, and he volunteered several times to stay home because I was feeling so horrid. But I figured it did not make sense for both of us to miss out on all the fun, and I really wanted him to be able to go spend time with his family, because they are very cool people. So he headed off to San Jose and I stayed home. At some point I decided that enough was enough and that a week of this damn thing was long enough, so I called the urgent care clinic and by some miracle they had one appointment left. My parents very nicely drove me because I wasn’t sure how well I’d drive, what with the wheezing and the hacking and the involuntary weeping and all.

The doctor took one look at the notes on my chart from the nurse who took me to the little room, and said “oh, I see you have what everyone else has”. And then he peered into my nose and my ears and poked at my head and declared that not only do I have a sinus infection, I *also* have an ear infection. This earned me a prescription for Zithromax, which we went and picked up immediately. And my dad also very nicely volunteered to cover me for the late service tonight, since I was originally supposed to play the piano for the service, but came to the realization that this just wasn’t going to work. I do not even want to try to imagine how hellish it would have been to also have tried to play the recorder when both ears are so pressurized that I can hear my own heartbeat every time it thuds, and every other noise sounds as if it is coming at me down a tunnel.

Richard came home after dinner, bearing a pile of all my stocking stuffers and presents from his family. A little while later, our friend stopped by, since he was going to crash at our house for the night, on his way from school to wherever it was he was going to end up for Christmas. Since I’d finally managed to get a little sleep (something I’ve not gotten the past few days, thank you stupid winter ick) I was able to come down and be social for a short period of time, and also open my presents. There were some wonderful things, including a small pile of sock yarn (yay!) and two gorgeous nightshirts and a knitting-themed murder mystery, which I am looking forward to reading, and even two crinkly catnip-filled toys that the cats decided were quite possibly some of the coolest things ever.

Now they are sitting downstairs talking about gaming and animation things. The cats are lolling around, a little stoned from the catnip. In a little bit I will get back to the knitting because I am determined to have these things done by Christmas, and not even the combination of a sinus infection and an ear infection is going to stand in my way.

Happy Holidailies