Ho, ho, ho!

This is what Christmas Eve should look like. Snow sparkling on the ground like diamond dust when the moonlight hits it, twinkling stars and flickering street lights like candles in the cold night air, a blue-ish silvery glow from the snow and the cold and the winter wind... Maybe some carolers trodding through the snowy streets singing sweetly and filling the night with song... (ok, that's a little too idyllic even for me)





Unfortunately that's not what I'm going to see out my window tomorrow night. What I'll see looks a lot more like this. Oh, is that the roofers? Nope, just Santa Claus. Damnit.






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So, my parents went to a concert last night. Now that my brother is in college (second year - I still can't believe it, in my head he's 3 years old) my parents seem to go out a whole hell of a lot. They're at the movies every weekend and they go to concerts and shows and out to dinner. I think it's great, but it kind of weirds me out. My mom still complains about my dad every chance she gets, and my dad still ignores her the best he can and tries not to say anything bad about her. But the thing is - they seems to get along better. That's a very good thing. But anyway, I'm getting off track. They went to see a concert last night at the MCI Center. As I'm still recovering from the nasty cold that befell me earlier in the week, I went to bed before 10:00. I was just settling into what I'm sure would have been a lovely dream about junk food and half naked muscle-bound mechanics (don't ask) when my cell phone jarred me back to reality.

I see it's my dad calling. "Hey, Dad, what's up?" No response. "Uh, Dad?" Then I hear it - the music. I hear music in the background and I think his phone must be in his pocket or something and he hit a button and accidentally called me. So, I call him back to tell him to lock his keypad. It's rung twice (with his fabulous "Monday Night Football" theme song ring - yep, I kid you not) before I remember that he has a clamshell phone and the buttons aren't exposed - he totally called me on purpose and stuck the phone out to make me listen to whatever it was that I heard on the other end of the line. "Hey, Mis, we're at the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert and it rocks, listen!" And then there was the music again. I listen for a whopping 5 seconds and hang up, crawl back into bed, drift back to dreamland, when he calls 15 minutes later... again. "Dad! What do you want? I'm sick and I'm asleep!" But of course, he's not listening, he has the phone outstretched for me to hear the wondrous sounds of electric guitars and operatic voices. Oy vey, padre. So I turned the phone off and went back to bed.

I called him this morning and all he could talk about was how awesome the show was and "didn't you love the sound of it? Wasn't it great?". He really was just that excited about it, so I can't fault him. It was kind of cute to hear him so jazzed up about something, but next time I'm trying to sleep off a cold I'm turning my phone off from the beginning.

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Kristie sent me this today and it's so funny and sad and terribly appropriate that I snorted with laughter when I read it. It really is sad, but c'mon people - you can't protect yourself from everything.
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Google is getting festive with their page header as usual when a holiday rolls around. For the last couple of days the little critters have been getting closer and closer to plugging in that cord... I'm only assuming that by tomorrow they will have plugged it in and the Google will light up. That will be awfully cute.