How I Spent My Winter Vacation (so far)

It’s been quite a holiday so far. So far, I guess, in that the main events are well past us and the house is mostly cleaned up again. We managed to get through the Christmas Eve party and Christmas day dinner with no real casualties. J-Bro bowed out from the dinner as he wasn’t feeling well as was quite apparent from the previous evening (three of his children and three of his grandchildren, not to mention his ex-wife, all came to the big Eve Event.) Everyone seemed very grateful for KG’s work and generosity in putting on the (really) big show. They ate and drank like fishes, and were in turn quite generous with us and the kids. My brother John (not J-Bro) bought all of the wine/liquor and left us with an embarrassing quantity of it. G-lo brought grandmother’s red cabbage and kohlrabi, and a nice lemon cake. We asked everyone to please direct any gifts to the two girls, not to us, and they dutifully did so. Teen girls need love too and at previous events such as these, it seemed the girls didn’t really show on anyone’s radar. That changed this time. Everyone went home yesterday, I drove Sam down to Fredericksburg (oye, what traffic!), and so I spent last night sort of decompressing. I don’t go back to work until next Wednesday so I expect to be pretty well decompressed by the time that occurs, but I do have a few things to do before then.

The Limoncello was a hit. Many knew nothing of it but we included a thoughtful explanation on the bottle and while much of it may not ever be sampled, it was a sweet little gift idea and will look good on KG’s entertainment blog.

For Christmas dinner, we all had nametags with a day of Christmas on them. Before dinner we all sang the 12 Days of Christmas, one day at a time by nametag and counting down. It is a tradition in KG’s family and now looks to be a tradition in ours as well. Hey, I guess that’s how traditions work.

It’s all been a lot of damned work though, and not just for me (is there a facetious emoticon?) KG got through the ordeal with virtually no trauma (amazing enough when considering some of the personalities involved) but she was pretty over allocated for a while. What a champ she is! She took her leave on Wednesday to run up to New Paltz to visit her sister and the kids and will return today after dropping Ronnie off at her Dad’s in Brooklyn, probably even more tired from the travel. Me? I’m feeling better today, mostly.

I say mostly because while trying to clear some spyware on KG’s PC yesterday, I messed up her the machine and it will no longer load Windows, even in safe mode. I mostly backed it up before I did it so her files (except her .pst from Outlook) are safe, but I need to get the post office file from her old drive and then buy her a new machine today. The old one was a loaner from my office and was pretty well past its prime anyhow, so as long as the .pst is recoverable (I guess I’ll mount the old drive as a slave on another machine and copy it off) the net outcome will be generally favorable (except that now KG will have to learn Vista on her own as I know almost nothing about it and then have to learn Office 2007 as well (I can help with that.) It may annoy her a bit.)
So, at least I don’t have to put out the 1500lbs of garbage today. I have another day to try to locate and buy some carbon offsets for it.

Christians and Pagans was about G-lo and J-Bro and much of his family coming to our party. He’s a Presbyterian minister and is forever trying to insert his vengeful, jealous, patriarchal deity into our lives, and G-lo uses religion like a weapon, the guilt from which to better control the world. The rest of his family turned out to be pretty secular, but if only by association with the holiday, there were some iffy overtones.

Heroine was just that I was feeling tired and disassociated, as if, I suppose, I were on heroin, but I like the version of the song on her album and Dar Williams is kind of my heroine these days.
The good part of Christmas is that we all got together and had a good time and got home safely with no apparent issues.

So, I’d better get to it.