Just returned from our excellent little Christmas getaway. We left right after church on Christmas Day, and have been in a jacuzzi suite at our favorite motel in Santa Cruz, which was so very wonderful. Staying there for two nights at the very off-season rate was our gift to each other. We are somewhat waterlogged, but happy.
The part of the room that isn't a bathtub big enough for two is decorated in vaguely Miami Vice decor, with deep pink crown molding. There's a bad print of an excessively pastel seascape painting over the tub...and, oddly, the exact same print over the bed. I guess they got a deal on them.
We ate very well, and wandered around downtown Santa Cruz in the morning. We walked to the boardwalk towards the evening, and got in a couple of rounds of bumper cars before they closed, and then went to the arcade for Skee-Ball and a bunch of video games from the mid-80s. The boardwalk had a few rides open, but was mostly boarded up, slightly foggy, and pleasantly creepy.
Mostly, though, we just sat in the big tub and read magazines (Mental Floss is my new favorite), had some big conversations and some silly ones, and hung out together.
Gracie is very happy that we're home. She missed us.
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I can't believe Advent is almost over. I've been kind of dazed, still trying to get my head around TheRev leaving.
Wasn't it just last month at the women's retreat that I was saying that what I really wanted was for things to just stay frozen for a while, to draw a little line around all the great stuff in my world and keep it safe and maybe even static for a while? Yeah, that's really working out. Sigh.
Still, I think this is what the fullness of time looks like; sometimes I can hear tiny little clicks as more and more things click into place. At any rate, there's something different about the way I'm handling the uncertainty right now. I'm not rushing to try to smash it down, I'm just kind of sitting with it, with a weird notion that I'll be able to handle whatever is going to come next. This is not like me. At. All.
Tonight was the Christmas pageant. I'm easy. Give me a herd of angels with tinsel wrapped around their heads, and a bunch of kids in various animal costumes crawling around the church, and I'm hooked.
I think that part of the lure of the pageant is the secret hope that something will go hilariously, adorably wrong, like the year we had a toddler clear out the empty manger, sending straw flying up in the air while everyone tried to stifle their giggling.
The script this year was called Not So Silent Night, and it involves a courtroom drama after the shepherds in the fields are arrested for noise voilations. I instantly began calling it Law & Order: Special Messiah Unit, which probably amused me more than it did anyone else.
If you need an earworm, I recommend the Three Wise Camels. If you don't need an earworm, well, you were warned.
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I've been walking around like a zombie all week, only instead of feasting on the brains of the living, I'm swiping cookies from the nursery school parties. Other than that, it's the same blank stare and shuffling gait.
Aside from the fact that I'm once again totally failing at Christmas by any sort of secular yardstick that includes buying a metric buttload of presents, the main thing that's messing me up is a new development at St. Ned's.
TheRev is leaving for a new job at a church in Virginia, and will be gone in a month. So now we get to spend 2006 finding a new rector, which is right up there with invasive colon surgery and the IRS on most people's list of favorite things to do.
Except that it's really clear that the Holy Spirit is totally at work here, so any sort of extended freaking out seems inappropriate. Seriously. Most of my anxiety is related to really minor stuff, like hoping that the new guy will find me hilarious enough to overlook the fact that wild monkeys have apparently thrashed my new cube. But St. Ned's is going to be fine. Yes. I'm a big grownup here. Yes.
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Gracie encounters the Christmas tree for the first time: The spinning is what's really messing with her head, I think. She wants to be underneath it, but keeps getting startled by branches coming at her slowly. She'll probably like it better when the base is turned off, but I think she's being very brave. What a tough kitty!
I had forgotten how much I love my tree. It was much easier to put it together this year, since I could vaguely remember what I did wrong last year (everything).
Also note the vintage felt tree skirt I found recently, which features Jesus in the manger AND some excessively blond angels ("so kid...where are your parents?"), gussied up with a shitload of sequins. I'm guessing Bucilla kit. I had planned to swap the eyelet trim on the edge for something more fabulous, but clearly that's not happening this year.
so a priest walks into an office with a chainsaw...
I'm pleased to report that St. Ned's participated in the annual celebration of Take Your Chainsaw to Work Day yesterday. I can't wait to hear how everyone else celebrated!
Wait...no one else chainsawed their desk yesterday? Perhaps I should back up.
So we finally got my new cube built (yay!) which left us with the issue of disposing of my old desk, which was a massive old L-shaped number with horrible ergonomics that weighed a ton and was slowly collapsing under its own weight. Consider all the possibilities for this in your head, and see how long it takes you to get to a CSI:OfficeMax dismemberment scene. Yeah, it wasn't my first response, either. But it couldn't be fixed and TheRev wanted it gone, so the next thing I knew, he was firing up the circular saw and hacking it into easy to carry pieces for the dumpster. The chainsaw actually came later, to break down the bigger chunks. I stayed in my cube and reminded myself that we're right up the street from the hospital.
I finished knitting Dennis' Kureyon sweater. It's not sewn together yet, because as soon as I finished the second sleeve and got the rest of the pieces out, Gracie was all over it. Here's a picture of her making sweet sweet love to the unassembled sweater: She likes to suck on blankets and wooly things, while turbopurring and making pushypaws.
I can't believe she has only been with us for two weeks...it seems like she has always been here!
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I'm doing some Christmas-related crafting this weekend. Because I just can't help myself. I have three different colors of glitter and a bunch of paint and I'm going to use it. People who don't know me and therefore aren't getting an ornament are welcome to click here to see some of the results. People who do know me Shouldn't. Click.
I might get the tree up tomorrow, or at least get out the giant tubs of ornaments and decide what the decapitated elves will be up to this year.
I'm so love/hate with Christmas. I'm already getting cynical and resentful, and I haven't even been to Target yet. I'm not really sure how we got from the Incarnation to An Entire Seasoon Dedicated to Depressing the Living Shit Out of Everyone, Everywhere. Well, except for places where they don't know it's Christmastime at all. And that's your song bomb for today. You'll spend the rest of the afternoon singing feeeeeed the wiiiiiiiirlllled and you won't even know why. There's a song that has not aged well.
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