Because Christmas is looming, this means that the television stations are beginning to bombard the air waves with all the classics of the season – along with whatever new versions of sap that some energetic young producer has come up with. I hear rumors, for example, that there is at least one cable station that shows A Christmas Story back to back, all day on Christmas. Surely I cannot be the only out there who thinks that being forced to endure something like that could easily be one of the lesser rings of hell?

Luckily, we are avoiding the stuff on television, choosing instead to load up the Netflix queue with Christmas movie ‘ some we’ve seen before and some we’ve only heard of, but which sound vaguely entertaining. On suggestions from some of the folks on TUS, our Christmas movie run began with Christmas in Connecticut – the original one that stars Barbara Stanwyck and was made in the 40’s or 50’s. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, seeing as how it’s old enough that I knew we were going to have to make a concerted effort to ignore any of the overtly non-PC (by today’s standards, of course) themes. But we actually both enjoyed it quite a bit.

Unfortunately for me, the next movie in the queue was the aforementioned A Christmas Story, which we watched tonight. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this one before, and perhaps it was because I was only exposed to short clips that I was under the delusion it was actually amusing. Watching the entire thing, however, has convinced me otherwise. It is really, really, mind-numbingly dull.

I realize this puts me in a distinct minority, to say that I have not fallen head over heels in love with this story about a little boy who wants an air rifle, and the father who gets a lamp shaped like a leg in fishnet stockings, but I just cannot not find it in me to care one way or the other about the plot at all. But then I also fail to see what is so marvelous about It’s a Wonderful Life. If I take the story away from the movie it’s warm and fuzzy, but unfortunately the movie features Jimmy Stewart, whose method of delivering his lines is more likely to make me grit my teeth than succumb to any sort of holiday spirit.

Next up on our queue is The Ref, and at some point we will also get to watch Santa Claus Defeats the Martians because nothing quite says holidays like watching a truly horrible horror flick. And I am not all that much a scrooge, despite my not grasping the joy of Wonderful Life or Christmas Story. I could cheerfully watch White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street more than once this season (which reminds me that, while we own the first, the second one we do not, so I really ought to add it to the queue).

Happy Holidailies

We’ve entered the pre-Christmas time when everyone begins to eye each other warily, wincing at any sound that vaguely resembles a cough, a sniffle, or a sneeze. Is that tickle in my throat just a random thing or the start of a cold? Is the runny nose because it’s really cold outside, or does this mean I’m coming down with something? And it doesn’t help when coworkers actually *are* sick, even though they do their very best to stay away from the rest of the office.

So at my office, and at home, and also, I suspect, throughout much of the choir, we are all waging our own little war against the possibility of coming down sick. We are all dropping Airborne tablets in water and swilling down stuff that tastes as if you watered down a bottle of ginger ale. We are washing our hands furiously and clutching bottles of anti-germ hand stuff to apply whenever it looks like it might be necessary.

And we are counting down the days until we can relax and be sick if we are going to be sick, because after all, for some of us it really is inevitable for any holiday season. It’s just that maybe, just once, we’d like to postpone the coughing and wheezing and sneezing and stuffed sinuses until *after*.

Happy Holidailies

Dear Internet,

2005 is almost over, so I guess this means it’s that time again. Yep, time for the annual holiday letter, now with all the snark that the printed version does not contain.

First the very best news. Unlike in previous years, I do not have any job hopping to report. Richard and I are both at the same place, full time, employed, no looming lay-offs or cuts staring us in the face. I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but I have to admit I like it, and would really prefer we keep things this way in the foreseeable future. Even better, this is a year without job switching, where we are both actually *happy* in the jobs we have. I get to write white papers and reports and poke at databases and learn new technologies and build pretty webpages, and Richard has spent the year happily playing with Moodle and redesigning the architecture of the distance education system for the university campus.

Outside of work, we’re keeping busy with other things that keep us happy and (mostly) productive. I’m still just as obsessed with all things knitting, and kicked off the year by making a pile of afghans and a really cool topsy turvy doll for my niece. This year I learned how to make socks and I also learned how to make lace (although I think I will likely wear all the socks I’ve knit far more often than the lace). I’ve joined two knitting groups and even went on a knitting retreat (30 women, gathered in one hotel, for the express purpose of knitting. Fear us. We have pointy sticks and yarn and are not afraid to use them). And Richard’s still just as obsessed with poking about on computers, and is in process of revamping the really cool wishlist program he wrote for our families to use, to make it bigger and better than ever.

We are both continuing to write, although I tend to stick to non-fiction, and Richard tends to stick to stories about weird people and strange things that go bump in the night. On a whim I volunteered to be part of a curriculum-writing team for the California / Nevada conference of the United Methodist Church, never expecting they’d actually pick me, but they did and I had a blast and in May they released the six-week curriculum, of which one week was written by me. Richard’s been getting published right and left with his fiction – four acceptances this year: two in on-line magazines (“The Unrevealed Tort, Revealed,” in Sorcery and Science, which has sadly folded; and The Harrow, which will publish his short story “Who Remembers Molly” in January ); and two print publications (“An Interrupted Nap”, which was published in the premiere edition of Shimmer magazine, and “Who Remembers Molly”, which will be published in the upcoming anthology ). Amusingly, we’ve both been featured in local papers, with pictures and everything for our various writing pursuits – I was featured in an article on online journaling this spring, and Richard was featured in an article on National Novel Writing Month this November.

We’ve been keeping busy in other ways too. I’m still one of the rotating accompanists at church, playing once or twice a month, I’m still in the choir, and this summer I took over leadership of the little recorder ensemble. Richard’s so far avoided taking on any more musical responsibilities than just occasionally singing in the choir; instead co-leading a class called Christian Believer, which explores ways in which church doctrine has evolved from Scripture. My friend and I took over as Chair and Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees, respectively, and Richard’s the Director of Adult Ministries, which means he gets to plot out all the adult curriculum for the year. Did I use this to my advantage to get the curriculum I helped write on the schedule? Do cats like tuna?

We took a little bit of a break on the back yard this year; the only new addition has been a tiny little red grapefruit tree which has so far produced nothing more than lots of leaves, but I am being patient. Inside the house, however, we decided to give up on the concept of a guest room and instead converted the extra bedroom into a library / place for me to store all my knitting paraphernalia. Also we had a new attic access put in, which means we can finally use the attic for storage. This has made me extremely happy because one can never have too much space for storage.

Let’s see. What else ? We went to DragonCon in Atlanta because we are still both big nerds. We got to see a pre-screening of Serenity and squealed like giddy fan boys. We got completely hooked on the new Battlestar Galactica and also on Lost. We bought ourselves a Roomba. We learned how to barbecue a turkey. We dried a lot of fruit. And, sadly, we also lost one of our cats – Allegra – who we still miss fiercely, because the house is not the same without her and thinking about it still makes me cry.

So that’s it for 2005 – mostly ups, a few downs, but overall, pretty good. Here’s hoping 2006 will be even better.

Happy Holidays (bite me, Bill O’Reilly, and the right wing fundamental hate mongers you rode in on). May his Noodly Appendage touch you all.

Sincerely,

Me

Happy Holidailies

At the local drug store, in order to pick up your prescriptions, sometimes you have to wait in line. They have cleverly marked the place where the line is supposed to start, and is often the case, the line then forms up the aisle closest to that mark.

That aisle happens to be the one with the large display of barrier products – an assortment of vaginal jellies, sponges, and of course all manner of condoms.

The other day we had to swing by the drugstore to pick up the latest pile of prescription refills for Richard, and the better-living-through-chemistry pills for me, and it was early enough in the evening that we had to wait. In the line. In the aisle next to the display of lubricants and condoms. Because I was bored I just happened to glance over toward the condoms and noticed that someone had, for some strange reason, placed a little display of stuffed beanie type bears right next to the condoms. And then I looked closer, especially at one particular bear, which had some writing on its chest. Four little letters, to be specific; letters which you would have to be living under a rock not to have seen (and if you are me, rolled your eyes excessively at) in the past few years.

These are the times that make me glad I always carry my camera with me. Oh yes indeed.

Happy Holidailies

“Is it time to go home yet?”

“No. It’s not even 10 am. Unfortunately.”

“Can’t we call it a snow day?”

“Well. It’s not exactly snowing. This being Sacramento and all.”

“True. But somewhere in this country there is snow, right this very moment.”

“So we should have a snow day to show our support?”

“Exactly!”

********

“Um. Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well. Your eye is all red.”

“Oh. Well. Uh. You see. I was brushing my hair out of my face and I…um.. poked myself in the eye.”

“You poked yourself in the eye?”

“Yes.”

“With what, a pen?”

“Um. No. My finger.”

“I see.”

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“No. But I can hear you laughing.”

********

“There’s a sign on the door to the men’s bathroom, saying that it is out of order.”

“I noticed that. Any idea why?”

“No. I was here over the weekend and it was working just fine.”

“I happened to notice the doorknob is missing. Maybe they’re doing some kind of hardware swap?”

“Or maybe it’s the *door* that’s out of order and the toilet is working just fine.”

Happy Holidailies

At church every year we do a food fight, which is where the congregation is divided into two teams who ‘compete’ to see who can bring in the most food for the local food bank. This year they asked my knitting mom and me if we’d be the team leaders, and do it as a knitting theme. We tossed around a few ideas and at first we decided we would knit 1 inch per every 10 pounds or 10 ounces of cereal (the food banks really need breakfast cereal so to encourage people to bring that, we count ounces of cereal the same as pounds of other food). But then we switched the rules and decided instead we would make one scarf for every 100 pounds (all scarves to be donated to the local shelters), and we encouraged other knitters and crocheters in the congregation to join in.

The food drive’s been going on for a few weeks already and it’s usually pretty successful, regardless of how the teams are led. But all of this is a lead up to explain why it is that this morning I dragged Richard up in front of the church, and my knitting mom brought her little grandson, and the two of us gleefully decorated each of them with scarves – nine for my team and ten for hers. Which means that before this morning we had nearly 2000 pounds/ounces of food/cereal for the food bank, which is pretty awesome. And after sorting and weighing all the donations after the service, I’ve got 4 more scarves to make and she has 3, and we’re nearly to 3000 pounds total, which is even better.

It has been a very knitting sort of day, actually. It started with the scarves, of course, followed by meeting a friend in Vacaville at a craft store because she wanted some advice and recommendations on picking out yarn to make stuff for her family for Christmas. So we wandered up and down the yarn aisle and I was very, very good and bought no yarn at all (even though I was awfully tempted once or twice) but instead helped her pick out a whole basket full. And then we came back to my house, where I walked her through casting on, and also how to bind off and weave in the ends, and loaded her down with several sizes of circular needles to try, and my copy of Stitch and Bitch because it has very useful pictures and tutorials, and a skein of yarn for practicing casting on and binding off, and a set of tapestry needles because she’ll need those for the aforementioned binding off, and I am hopeful that I did not completely overwhelm her with information and that she will have fun finishing off her basket of colorful scarves-in-larval-form.

And then I pondered the fact that there are only two weeks until Christmas so I scribbled out a list of stuff for Richard because he is the one who writes our yearly Christmas letter, and then it was right back to the knitting. First I made pom poms out of sparkly green yarn and then I finished a pair of socks, and then I had a little fun with my ball winder (have I mentioned how very much I adore my ball winder?) and created a lovely little pile of perfectly cylindrical skeins of yarn, and then I cast on for the body of the very last snowman that I will ever have to make (this year, that is – alas, there are many more snowman in my future but those do not need to be done until next Christmas) and then I tried to work on yet another food fight scarf, but Sebastian sat on my lap and as I have recently discovered, he possesses the uncanny ability to make me fall asleep at any time of day or night just by curling up on me and it is very hard to knit when you are dozing off and in danger of poking yourself with sharp sticks. So instead finishing the last damn snowman I ended up sitting on the loveseat surrounded by three cats who kept purring at me and sapping my will to move or do anything remotely productive, and watched Grey’s Anatomy and pretended that I have oodles more time to get all my gift knitting (plus three more food fight scarves this week and who knows how many next week) done before Christmas than just two weeks.

Happy Holidailies

I woke up this morning to the distinct realization that there was a Crisis going on. This was because both Sebastian and Rosemary were busily pacing back and forth across our pillows, purring as loudly as they could and sometimes yelling. I was more than a little annoyed because at the time it was barely past when I usually get up to feed them their breakfast, and it’s not like they were starving, what with two full bowls of kibble available to them. But then as I staggered out of bed and passed by their food dishes I realized that in fact, a Crisis had occurred. The bottoms of both food bowls were visible and there was barely any kibble to be seen. Oh, the horror.

This eventually led to the discovery that we were also practically out of their food, so while Richard headed off to go to a writer’s group brunch, I headed off to the vet to buy them a new bag of food. And then while I was in the area I did a little bit of Christmas stocking stuffer shopping, and proceeded on to Vacaville to go to CostCo and stock up on giant bags of rice and cereal for the church and work food drives.

My parents spent last week in Williamsburg, Virginia, so I met them for lunch and my dad brought along his laptop so I could see all the pictures. It sounds like they had a marvelous time, and I am even more certain that this is someplace Richard and I need to go, one of these years. Then it was off to the theater to purchase tickets for the Narnia film, since I was the only one of the group of us going who had the free time to get there beforehand so we could avoid any lines or crowds. I did this as well because I know that if one is prepared and gets tickets in advance and arranges to meet with plenty of time before the film, this will guarentee there are no lines or crowds at all, and of course I was right.

The movie is amazingly well done. I haven’t read the Narnia series in far too many years (in fact, now that I think about it, I likely have not read them since junior high), and I deliberately did not read the books again before going to the movie because I did not want to be distracted by making silly comparisons. But from what I remember (and from what others in our group remember of the books) they managed to remain quite faithful to the story. The four actors who played the children were perfect for the part, especially the little girl who plays Lucy, the CGI was moderately well done (it was a bit jerky in places, but nothing so bad as to be unforgivable) and the woman who played the witch managed to portray cold and evil brilliantly.

After the movie we swung by a friend’s house to meet her new little kitten – a fuzzy little calico with an adorable patchwork face, who thought that hair was a prefectly acceptable toy, and that her own tail was edible. And then we came back home and spent a small amount of time sorting through the box of Godiva chocolates I got last night, using the handy cheat sheet to figure out what each piece was, and we each had two pieces of chocolate for dinner, just because we could, and sometimes that is the best part about being an adult.

Happy Holidailies

This year for our office holiday gathering we went to The Melting Pot, which is a fondue restaurant. Richard and I have been there a few times before, and my boss and his wife have done fondue a number of times with their family, and I think maybe one other person there had had fondue once in her life. But for everyone else this was a brand new experience. And it was a pretty funny one because we are the most indecisive bunch of people when trying to pick a place to go for lunch during a workday, and here we were, faced with a list of choice a mile long. I think everyone was a bit overwhelmed, so, since I am such the shy and retiring type (ha!) I finally decided to play cruise director, and we picked three cheese choices, and then three cooking choices, and then finally three entree choices, and by the time we’d made it through all of that and were ready to choose three chocolates, we were all so full and relaxed that no one really cared as long as chocolate somehow magically appeared on the table in front of us in some form or another.

The entire dinner was a lot of fun. We ended up just getting up and milling about the table for all three courses, because we all wanted to try everything and it was just easier to do it that way than to try to play musical chairs, or move very hot pots of liquid goo around without spilling. Everyone got into the whole thing with great enthusiasm and we all ate far too much, but that is the way of things at a fondue restaurant. There was a lot of chatter and laughing, and one of the partners pulled out gift bags which held marvelous surprises, and each of which had a gift certificate for dinner at someplace nice. The bag I chose has a box of Godiva chocolates which I am almost afraid to open because then I will eat it all (yum!), and a gift certificate to The Slocum House, which is an extremely nice restaurant in Fair Oaks to which Richard and I have never gone. Amusingly, that’s where one of my coworkers and her husband go every year for their anniversary, and the gift certificate in her bag was to The Firehouse, which is where Richard and I go quite often for our anniversary, and at first we decided to do a swap, but then we came to the conclusion that obviously this meant we were fated to try new things, and everyone got to laugh at us because we immediately began swapping recommendations on what to try at each place.

People talk about how awful office parties can be – with people getting drunk, or having forced secret Santa gift exchanges or horrible white elephant games, so I guess I am very, very lucky. I like all my coworkers and I like my job and we all have fun together, even if it does sometimes take us two hours to decide where we want to go for lunch, and maybe there are annoying office neighbors and maybe some days I would cheerfully murder the damn pigeons who have decided to roost outside my window and Will Not Shut Up, but I wouldn’t trade any of it because when compared to all the horror stories I hear other people tell, I have it pretty damn good and I am thankful.

Happy Holidailies

Today at work I got an email from my boss asking for help getting a report finalized. Since I had most of the pieces available to me, I started putting them all together, and while trying to insert chunks of previously formatted Excel into a Wor document would make even the calmest person swear like a sailor, that was not remotely the worst of the whole thing. The worst was dealing with the dozen images that also needed to be inserted – except, of course, that the images exported to nearly 30 mb if I put them into jpg, Word refuses to play nicely with tif files (which was my only other export option), and trying to open the tif or jpg files with my usual graphic editors basically caused my entire computer to freeze up and make me do more than one manual reboot before I finally realized that it just wasn’t going to happen.

I eventually ended up opening the stupid files in Paint, saving them to gif (because it’s the only way I could think to compress them into something that Word would actually *recognize*. I run weekly processes on some of the remote servers that take quite a while, but at least with those I can be doing other things while they’re running. In this case, however (and I learned the hard way, boom, crash went the computer again), the only thing that would work was for me to open the files, save them in the new format, and then sit back and twiddle my thumbs for the several minutes per file it took to do all this because the process gobbled up nearly every single available bit of memory on my computer and nothing else would work.

Have I mentioned lately just how much I really adore Microscoffed?

Anyway. To counteract the grumbling, I give you an Azzie story. Azzie, for those of you new readers, is a very fluffy black cat who is sort of a perpetual kitten even though he is now six, and would likely lose a battle of wits with an overripe cantaloupe. Think Nermal (from the Garfield cartoon) – wide eyed and hopelessly adorable, but really, really dumb.

A week or so ago we were sitting in the breakfast nook eating breakfast, and Azzie suddenly got all excited and jumped onto the window sill. Turns out he’d found himself a fly, and even better, he managed to catch it. He bapped it around for a bit, until the poor fly could only sit on the window sill and buzz weakly, and then, ready to give it his mighty death blow, he stepped forward in anticipation, and to his great surprise, the fly disappeared. He could not find it. He kept backing up and lifting up his front paws and looking at the sill underneath until he nearly fell off the edge, but still, no fly. I had my suspicions, especially considering how he kept shaking one paw every time he’d lift it, but I was laughing too hard to do anything about it until a few moments later, when he finally gave up the search for the lost fly, and came over to sit on my lap, and then got really, really annoyed with me because I wouldn’t let him until I had removed the mangled fly carcass from between his very fuzzy toes.

Happy Holidailies