Why didn’t anyone tell me that the Brian Setzer Orchestra did a jazzified version of The Nutcracker? This is *perfect* working music!

The “bad guys” (whoever they might be and whatever we might be calling them today) do not win when/if we are afraid to shop, or when/if we stop fighting them. They don’t win if we die and they don’t win if we stop pasting flag magnets on our cars.

The bad guys win when when they make us act like them.

And they’ve won.

Next year, will we let them keep winning?

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.)

One of my biggest flaws in real life is that I’ll drive a point to death and then jump up and down on it some more. Because I don’t want to inflict this particular part of myself on the world at large, I find myself not posting as often as I used to, because I can’t think of anything to say that isn’t a retread of the disgust and dissillusionment I’ve felt with the world at large, and my government in particular, for the last three years.

It’s not that I don’t have hope that things will eventually get better - but I think things are going to have get a great deal *worse* before they do. Better and more impassioned voices than mine are screaming (and satirizing) daily, pointing out the godawful mess that we are in. When in my heart all I can muster is a “me to” - why pollute the web with more useless noise?

So, it snowed a little on Thanksgiving and that was cool, but it was a light dusting that was gone by noon the next day. Today, I woke up to a solid inch outside. This is only odd since I haven’t seen a real sticking-around NJ snowfall before January in a long time. I remember the occasional white christmas when I was pretty young but I can’t recall anything but chilly and soggy christmases for a long time.

So happy white stuff outside my window this morning? Pretty cool. Of course, this also means that I’ll be sick and tired of the stuff by New Years. (I usually find it charming until early-mid February.)