Tag: Family

Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know I’m a little bit late, but I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!  I don’t know where the time’s gone, but I really hadn’t intended to go so long without posting.  Then I started cleaning and my computer took a three-day vacation while I spent time with family and friends (and kleenex and cough syrup).  I still seem to be under the weather – I don’t know why I can’t shake this bug – but at least I found a little of my Christmas spirit before the big day rolled around.  After three days spent celebrating with family, I spent all afternoon yesterday sleeping in a feeble attempt to recover.  I desperately needed the rest, but I would have liked to get a few more things done around the house (like the mountain of dishes sitting in my kitchen).

Hopefully the end of the holiday season will mean a return to normal blogging for me, but possibly that will not happen till next week.  I’ll be hitting the road Friday with the fabulous Miss Tara for a mutual friend’s wedding festivities in the Great White North, also known as the Land of 1,000 Lakes.  Then it’s another family Christmas celebration on Sunday.  After all of that, I think I’m gonna need another three-day weekend just to recover!  Sadly, I’ll still have to work on Monday. *sigh*  Something tells me I won’t be staying up to watch the ball drop this year.

So in case I don’t see you before then, I hope you all have a terrific rest of the week, a wonderful weekend, and a fabulous start to the new year!  I’ll see you all in 2013, if not before!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Top 10 Reasons You Should Be at Home Instead of on the Road

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Well, the Class 3 Kill Storm arrived in the night and is even now shrieking outside my window with a passion even a banshee would envy (or possibly admire).  Since I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting to work today, I am snuggled up under my favorite down blanket while the boys play games and Seymour bakes Christmas cookies (I’m still sick – I have no business baking).

I’ve seen worse winter storms, but this one is truly nothing to sniff at.  I braved the weather to make a quick trip to the grocery store for chili supplies and go juice with a side trip to the gas station to procure some go juice for the snow blower as well, and it’s fierce out there.  I’m glad I decided to stay home today and not brave the weather all the way to work and back.  I’m even more glad that Seymour was able to turn around safely and make it back home after the snow plow he was following got stuck.  For the record, that was the third one this morning – two others went in the ditch just outside of town early this morning and the accident shut down the highway for a while.

But enough doom and gloom.

Time flies

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My little Tomcat at the tender age of fourPhoto by Kay Kauffman

My little Tomcat at the tender age of four
Photo by Kay Kauffman

My, how time flies!  Without my even realizing it, this little blog o’ mine has turned five years old.  That happened somewhere around the tail end of last month and I forgot all about writing my planned retrospective about my time in the blogging world.

Five years.  My, how the years have flown!  I started blogging about six months after my divorce was finalized.  I wanted to write passionate political spiels of great depth and insight; I wanted to pen fantastic short fiction that was sure to catch the eye of someone important, that elusive one right person who could make all my lifelong literary dreams come true; I wanted to create a wildly successful blog that would spawn book deals and syndicated columns and who knows what else.

In short, I had high hopes.  I was young, bright-eyed yet jaded.   Possibly I had delusions of grandeur.

Just one more thing

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I’ll be posting about my talk with the students at Reinbeck Elementary School soon.  Yesterday and today have both been pretty long days, though – Cricket just can’t seem to shake this flu bug.  In the meantime, posting may be a bit sporadic.  I imagine everyone’s schedules are in a bit of flux this month, so I hope you’ll all kindly bear with me.  I should be back to normalish soonish.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

‘Tis the season to be jolly and joyous!

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Muppet_christmas_carol

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I really need to keep reminding myself of that.  Maybe one of these days, it’ll sink in.

It took me all afternoon, but I got my Christmas cards addressed and sent off to all our friends and family.  Well, I put them in our mailbox and put the flag up, anyway.  I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with the boys tonight before they went to bed.  I’ve been listening to Christmas music all week, and we decorated our office yesterday afternoon.

And yet?  Yeah, my Christmas spirit is still MIA.  If anyone finds it, will you please send it home?  I kinda need it.  Thank you.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Christmas spirit – or lack thereof

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I’ve been trying to get in the Christmas spirit this weekend.  After all, it’s a new month (December!  How the heck did that happen?), and Christmas party season is already in full swing.  I’ve attended three so far and the month has barely begun!  But I’m not sure that my Christmas spirit has yet found me.  In fact, it seems to be more and more difficult for me to locate with each passing year.

I’m having trouble figuring out why this is.  When I was younger, Christmas was my favorite holiday.  And I don’t just mean when I was a kid, either, which shoots Seymour’s theory of all play and no work in the foot.  The music, the food, the happiness that seems to fill the air and everyone around – I love it all.  I love the decorations and Christmas trees and the hot apple cider that the Hardin County Auditor’s Office puts out for visitors to the courthouse every year.  Most of all, I love spending time with my family, especially the people I don’t often get to see.

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Chapter 9 is done and I feel fine

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So I’ve finished Chapter 9 and am well into it with Chapter 10.  But due to a migraine of epic proportions, my writing and computer time has been all out of whack the last couple of days.  Thankfully, I’m finally feeling better.  Yay!  Just in time for Thanksgiving on Thursday, when I will hopefully avoid food coma but probably not football apathy.

Oh, right, you wanted a story snippet, didn’t you?  How silly of me. 😀

Michael considered his father.  He was not now, nor had he ever been, the most open of men.  In fact, he had often wondered what his mother had seen in such a buttoned-down man, but clearly she had been privy to information to which he was not.  This chink in his father’s armor had shown him a whole new side of a man he thought he knew as well as himself.  He liked this new side of his father much better.

So there you go!  A little insight into the Briant family.  Happy Tuesday!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

One of those days

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Yep, today has been one of those days.  It all started on Monday.  Cricket and Thumper started a new daycare on Monday and as I was talking with their new babysitter for a minute before I left, one of the other kids came running up and wrapped herself around the woman’s legs.  The poor girl’s eyes were goopy and crusty and generally icky-looking.  Of course, that’s if you looked closely, which I didn’t until the babysitter, we’ll call her Melanie, mentioned it.  “Oh, don’t worry about Kimmy’s eyes,” she said.  “She’s had this eye infection since she was born and no one knows what it is, but her parents are gonna take her back to the doctor and get it checked out.  It’s not contagious; we’ve never had a problem with other kids getting sick.”

Okay, I thought, unconvinced.  Cricket has his mother’s immune system.  What in the world does that mean, you ask?  It means that I catch everything and since we have four kids, all of whom are in school and/or daycare, it means we are exposed to a metric crap-ton of germs in this house.  If the kids come down with something, it’s only a matter of time before I catch whatever it is they have.

Pink eye, I hate you.

Mawwage is what bwings us togevah today…

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I said in my post yesterday that twenty-four was a banner year, but twenty-five ranked right up there with it.  We spent the better part of the year planning the wedding and the honeymoon, getting details worked out and being generally happy and excited and everything else that is good.  At Easter, I was confirmed in Seymour’s church after completing the RCIA program.  That was one of the biggest decisions we had made thus far in our life together; his family is devoutly Catholic and mine is Presbyterian.  My family didn’t seem very happy about my decision to convert, but it’s not like I was changing religions or something.  I simply changed my denomination.  After all, Catholics and Protestants do worship the same God, do believe in the same afterlife, do read more or less the same Bible.  It’s not like I joined a cult or something.

However, the difference did pose an interesting question…