I hit this point every year, where my thoughts start to center around all the folks I haven’t seen or talked to in a long time, or that I just don’t talk to enough. People I miss, and some people I wish I didn’t miss so much. Maybe you know who you are, maybe you don’t (I haven’t always been the greatest at letting people know I cared).

To all of you… happy holidays. Many hugs. Be safe, be sane…. remember that you are remembered.

So this year Bill’s christmas present to me involved… a plane ticket to NC to see my mom and sister. I hope to god he doesn’t try to top this next year, ’cause I have no idea how anyone *could* top that. Four days wandering around Asheville, Forest City, and the area in between, and just having a lovely time of it.

I do miss the days when my whole family lived within an hour and a half of me, but if nothing else, the trip forced me to *not* work for a few days. Seems I have a problem with the not working thing. Yesterdays project involved scrubbing out the bathroom. Today I dusted and re-organized my bookshelves. Both projects have been staring me in the face for weeks, but the daily grind of wake up, go to work, come home, work on pieces for the march show, go to bed…. repeat on waking - I never find the time to do those “little things”. The last few days have given me the breathing space to not just “not work” but the get some of that “other work” done. I’m loving it.

I find that I *adore* christmas shopping online. Easier than slogging through downtown Paramus, and getting the deliveries is almost as much fun as Christmas itself. And now that my familiy’s spread across the eastern seaboard and into the rockies, gift shipping is a lot easier too. (As opposed to… last year was it… when I bought my sister a present and forgot to send it to her for six flippin’ months.)

Every year, Bill tries to go completely overboard with my christmas present(s) and I (usually) manage to talk him down to something reasonable. (Threats of bodily harm are often involved.) This year he got around the “no big presents” rule by presenting me with a new, faster CD burner and a DVD-RW drive. I can now back up *4 gigs* of data on a single disk.

So yeah - he gets official super cool santa points for the year.

::Pokes head out from under mountain of work::

Oh. Hello out there. Not really trying to ignore you all. Deeply, frightfully buried in work right now. Haven’t even gotten a chance to play around with CS too much. Bah. Becoming fairly maudlin while listening to the evening rush hour block o’ christmas songs one of the local stations has started running. Have successfully avoided even *thinking* about christmas shopping, in spite of living next to Paramus.

Have fallen so far behind in my blog reading that I’m unsubbing from newsfeeds left right and center, just to take the pressure off that I have to be keeping up with everything.

In other news, it is really flippin’ windy out right now. Keening, *howling* wind making sad noises at the windows and creeping under the doors and just being loud about town.

So I’ve got the head cold from hell going on. My sinuses cleared up yesterday (mostly) and my throat only hurts a little. In fact, I’m only a little lethargic now. so what’s the down side? No voice. Just this tiny, scratchy, cracking, joke of a sound. Any idea how hard it is to make a telemarketer go away when you’re yelling and he still can’t hear you?

Even worse, I still had to take sales calls at work today. If I yelled and *really* enunciated, the customers could hear me. This is probably why I went from just sounding silly this morning to not being able to produce anything above a whisper now. Really hoping that a good night’s sleep fixes some of this. We’re short staffed and heading into the busy season. Even knowing that I have half a voice, they can’t avoid giving me the calls. There’s just too many of them coming in.

So, seeing as I can’t speak but can move, I figured I should do some cooking. Note to self - cooking when one can’t smell and can barely taste anything is a hit or miss game.

So can we take down the outdoor decorations now? You know the house I’m talking about, there’s one in every neighborhood - the overdone yard that causes traffic jams because every damm driver slows down or stops to gawk at the profusion of lights and statuary. I don’t care about indoor decorations. I didn’t bother with them this year, and if someone wants to keep their dying tree around until march, it’s not my problem. But please - get rid of the damm light up lawns.

And the music. No more christmas music. I am officially tired of it and will not want to hear any more of it until next november at the earliest. I am blocking out the third helping of “Felice Navidad” coming over the radio with my earphones firmly in place and Apoclypicta’s rendition of Sandman streaming into my brain.

So the yearly holiday brouhaha is just about over. And we really did have a white christmas - which I had to drive through. Ick. Having once made the mistake of going into Paramus on the day after christmas, (Oh, the horror) I am staying happily inside today with my farscape S1 DVD set. (From Bill - and I am having so much fun with it.) Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll poke my head outside and see what the after christmas sales have wrought.

I tried not to, but I still got sucked into the trap of not feeling like I’d done enough in the gift buying department this year. It’s hard not to feel inadquate, especially when driving through Paramus and seeing all the big chain stores with their huge marketing campaigns. They all seem to say, “If you love your family, you’ll buy them stuff. Lots of stuff.” Corporate greed playing on the insecurity of holiday shoppers.

And it doesn’t help to *know* that you’re being manipulated by some guy with a marketing degree - especially when I usually angst over what I get people anyway. It’s like knowing the fashion world is seriously warped and out of touch, but still comparing myself with impossibly perfect models. (and coming up short) You know it’s a ridiculous trap, but you fall into it anyway.

Another year came and went. I had a very nice, quiet New Years with no alcohol and no unplesantness. And no one’s bathroom got desecrated via alcohol poisioning. Maybe I’m getting old, but I liked it.