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

We got all our Christmas cards in the mail on Monday morning – even the stack that has been sitting on the scanner now for weeks, addressed, signed, sealed, and only needing stamps. I ended up swinging by the UPS store on the way home from work last week and buying every last sheet of stamps that they had (which wasn’t many). It seems more than a little odd that a store dedicated to mailing things has been continually running out of stamps this season, and even odder that they charged me a fee above just the stamp cost. But it saved me having to deal with the actual post office so at least there is that.

My mom and my sisters and I had an email-based discussion last week of which of us was going to make which of the traditional cookies and other goodies for Christmas, and I said I would make the gingerbread men. Naturally this was before I came down with this damn cold that simply will not go away, so the cookies are still not made, and as the number of days between now and Christmas dwindle rapidly I am wondering just when the heck I am going to fit in a few hours of rolling out dough. I *want* to make them – these years it’s the only Christmas baking I ever get to do anymore – but I am so tired, and there is so much to do and this cold is sapping every bit of strength that I have to care about any of it.

I swung by the yarn store in Davis on the way home from work today and picked up four new sets of needles because I wanted to make very sure there were not any more obstacles in getting the last of the Christmas knitting done. We will not discuss the two hours wasted fighting with a pattern which has turned out to be written incorrectly; the last hour of which was spent trying to rewrite it all by myself before giving up because the thought of remapping out 80 separate rows of long and complicated directions was making my brain spin. But it is started and I am going to stay up very late tonight to see how much i can get done. I suspect I am also going to stay up very late tonight because with all the coughing and the inability to breathe through my nose it’s kind of hard to get to sleep, but at the very least I can be productive in my cold-induced insomnia.

Happy Holidailies

I am tired and still fighting this damn cold, and annoyed because I do not have the right size needles for the last knitting project that I somehow still need to get done before Christmas. So instead of a new entry, I am going to repost something I wrote on Christmas of the very first year I started this journal, because sometimes it is nice to remember.

Ah, Christmas. The gathering of the families. The opening of presents next to the twinkling lights of the tree. The traditional food – homemade sticky rolls for breakfast, cookies and snacks throughout the day, the candlelit dinner. There’s something very comforting about going home for the holidays and knowing that things will be the same.

Except things aren’t the same. They never really are, no matter how much you want them to be. You don’t wake up at your parents’ place anymore and gather, giggling, with your sisters at the foot of the stairs while your mom fusses with the camera. You wake up at home when the cats stomp on you and insist that you get up and play with them, and then drive over to your parents’ house at a more acceptable hour, when the sun has already risen. You do the traditional opening of the stocking presents before breakfast, but somehow it isn’t quite the same when two of your sisters are missing. You eat the sticky rolls – which are just as good as they always are – but unlike when you were a kid and didn’t care about things like calories and fat, you actually stop when you’re full instead of continuing to suck them down because they are so darn good, and you drink juice and take a vitamin that isn’t shaped like a cartoon character, but comes instead from a bottle that says, somewhere on the label, ‘mature’.

You perch on the couch instead of the floor when opening your presents because your knees like it better that way, and instead of the coolest new toy, you get things like ladders and industrial measuring tapes and books on home repair, and you’re pretty darn excited about it because that’s really what you wanted anyway.

In years past, the whole family has gathered, but now that the sisters are married with children, and one lives in another state anyway, you don’t have that ‘whole family’ thing going anymore, and when the older sister shows up with her husband and son in tow, it’s more like they’re visiting then that they belong here in the first place.

You were once the one who was ripping open presents with child-like wonder, but now you watch your nephew do it, as he carefully tears the paper off and gets excited about whatever is inside each one (“Wow! A box!”). You all lose bets on which toy he will love the most because even though the wagon that your father painstakingly built for him in the garage garners a lot of childish glee, what really keeps him entertained for the rest of the day is the umbrella made by Crayola, with wide stripes of color. And he keeps coming up to you showing you his umbrella. “Jeffer! Grabrella! See grabrella!” and you are ridiculously pleased about how he keeps asking you and no one else to put the cover on, and then remove the cover, and all the while he watches soberly before running off with his favorite gift.

You all sit around the table for ‘lunch’ and eat crackers and dip and cheese, but you know you’re getting older because you worry about the fact that there’s really no vegetables for the meal and you try to limit the number of cookies you cram into your face, even though Christmas has always been the one day that mom and dad didn’t watch what you ate and let you stuff yourself silly.

And then when your older sister leaves and the house is suddenly quiet, you look at your mom who has been quietly miserable all day with a nasty cold and you tell her that if she is wanting to cook some huge dinner just because she thinks that you’ll be disappointed, that you won’t be, and you’d rather just do leftovers or something. So instead of the traditional holiday meatloaf and mashed potatoes and baby peas served on the fine china, with grape Kool-Aid served in the ugly green pitcher, you all pile into the car and drive around all of Solano county until you find the one place that is actually open on Christmas and you join hordes of other hungry travelers over burgers and fries and shakes. So maybe it’s not festive and it’s not by candlelight and instead of the dulcet tones of a brass quintet playing holiday tunes on the CD player in the other room, you hear the din of a short order cook and the snarling tones of the woman behind the counter who is making it painfully clear that she would rather be anywhere but here tonight. You joke about how your last Christmas dinner at ‘home’ wasn’t the traditional one and how it will scar you forever and you’re sure to need counseling (all said tongue in cheek when your mother dithers out loud about how this is just not what she had in mind) until your mom finally realizes that it’s okay, you really don’t mind at all, and that what matters more than the presentation and the food itself is that you’re laughing and eating together and having fun, and that’s what’s most important anyway.

Happy Holidailies

That cold that I have been doing my best to postpone finally caught up with me. I left work early yesterday because I could feel it kicking in, and when I woke up this morning I could barely drag myself out of bed. The rest of the day has been spent pretty much repeating the same scenario over and over. I would nap for a few hours and then drag myself out of bed to check my email, or eat lunch, and the ordeal would be so incredibly exhausting I would have to go right back to bed and sleep for a few more hours to recover.

When I emailed my coworkers to let them know I wasn’t coming in, one of them responded with a joking “are you sure you just haven’t finished your Christmas shopping?” Ha – I wish that was all this was. Unfortunately, however, I suspect that if I’d tried to do anything as strenuous as, say, driving a car today, I likely would have made it to the store and passed out in the parking lot. This is just one of the reasons I am glad that we do most of our Christmas shopping online.

Tonight was the annual caroling party, and Richard noted at one point today that this should have come as no surprise, having both of us home on this day, sick and exhausted and sneezing. Tradition has it that one of us is always sick, thus rendering us unable to go join in the fun. This has been going on for years, so why stop now?

At 11:30 this evening, I woke up from yet another nap and felt as if something had finally changed. It is the first time all day that getting up does not feel as if it takes the same amount of energy as it might to run a marathon. I’m finding it a little amusing, in a desperate sort of way, that it took until I really *should* be sleeping for me to finally find the energy to remain awake and alert.

I suspect that this rare burst of energy will not last very long, but I am going to take advantage of it while it’s here. There’s a sink full of dirty dishes to deal with, and bills to pay, and one or two more Christmas cards to sign and address (assuming we can track down those addresses), and oh, some last minute Christmas knitting to finish, assuming I can get that far. There may be a few people who get unfinished presents or IOU’s for the things I was hoping to make, considering that I have now lost two evenings to being sick (last night and all day today), but I think they’ll understand. And I am keeping all fingers and toes crossed that being sick this early in the week means that by the time the weekend rolls around I will be completely better.

Happy Holidailies

Dear Santa,

I know for the past few years I have asked you for a real live baby dragon. Okay, last year I agreed to forgo the baby dragon if you would just bring me a Finisher (which you did not, by the way). But this year I am going to pass on the baby dragon, and the self-cleaning house, and the dark chocolate that makes you lose weight and, also world ambivalence. Because this year, all I really want is for you to bring her back.

I know I’m asking for the impossible. But there has been a big huge hole in this house since she left us and sometimes, when I am alone in the house and I am curled up in a chair and I let myself think about it, sometimes I still cry.

All the other cats are friendly and affectionate and we love them all dearly and I would not want to have lost one of them in place of her. But when she left, she took a big piece of my soul with her. Someone told me once that they believed that if we are very lucky, we will have a pet this is truly a part of us; a pet who is our external self in furry form. And since she has been gone I have realized that that’s who she was. She embodied all the attitude and bitchiness and annoyance that builds up inside me all the time, except that she could let it out without saying or doing something she would regret later, tearing around the house, muttering under her breath, lying in wait to smack a person or a cat before running off to do it all over again.

I miss her. Oh, how much I miss her. This house is not the same. And the hole she left behind doesn’t seem to want to go away.

So please, Santa. That’s really all I want. Just please find a way to cheat death, just this once, and bring my little girl home.

Happy Holidailies

I woke up last night to the sound of rain pounding on the roof, and sure enough, this morning there was quite a lake in the backyard. It’s been raining on and off ever since, although not nearly as hard. Turns out the rain has been working its way down south and west, since Richard’s parents unfortunately had to drive through it on their way up to hear our cantata. I’m glad, at least, that they came for the morning one, because I would not have wished the trip home in such dismal weather, especially in the dark, on them. They may not have gotten to hear the extended version of the cantata, which we only did for the evening, but the morning version (which was during the church service and thus has the bonus factor of not requiring any ticket purchase) went really well, so they didn’t miss much.

This morning also marked the last day of the church food drive. It was the last morning to collect food, and I am so very, very glad that we do not have to make more scarves for the final pile of donations because my team donated so much I think I would have had to make possibly up to ten more scarves and I think that would break me. I am so amazingly sick of making scarves.

My knitting mom and I passed out the 27 scarves we had so far, which ‘equalled’ the 2700 pounds of food donated, and got 27 people to come up to the front as a visible indication of just how much the church had accomplished. Even though I would probably cry from having to make the scarves to match it, it would have been even more fun to bring up a crowd of 40 people, since final totals stand at just a bit over 4000 pounds. But considering the aforementioned scarf-knitting-overload issue, I can live with this teeny little disappointment.

We all went out to lunch (Richard’s parents and sister, my parents, and Richard and I) and smashed ourselves into a booth that wasn’t exactly large enough to contain us, because the restaurant was crowded. Luckily we all get along well enough that being smashed into a restaurant booth only means we have something else to joke about, so it was fun. Then Richard wandered off to do some Christmas shopping and I headed off to a bakery in Vacaville for some much needed knitting time with one of my knitting groups. The group keeps growing and we are definitely not quiet and sedate, but no one ever seems to mind and in fact this time there were some surprise free pastries and also a reporter from a local paper who showed up and amused us all by rather clearly demonstrating that he had absolutely no clue about anything to do with knitting at all. But he was very nice and friendly and took some pictures, and showed appropriate enthusiasm and amazement about all the very cool things we are all knitting.

It is a very good thing we did manage to get to Costco yesterday after all, because one of the things we picked up was a huge pack of Airborne, and at one point this afternoon, shortly before the evening concert, I felt as if I was some sort of pusher, passing out huge chalky orange tablets to everyone who sidled up to me and said “I hear you have some Airborne”. All of us in the choir have been more than a little paranoid about getting sick.

This evening’s performance went well too. There were glitches – amusingly, not the same as this morning’s – but those are always to be expected and the audience seemed to enjoy the whole thing regardless. And now we are done with choir, at least for the year, and I am done with scarves (at least for the year). And as lovely as the cantata was, and as much fun as it was to sing it, and as much stash yarn as I have managed to plow through making all those darn scarves, I cannot even begin to describe how very glad I am to be done with both.

Happy Holidailies