Well, the holiday break wasn’t quite the triumphant return to blogging/exercise/filial-website-development that I’d hoped. It was plenty enjoyable, though, with an awfully nice stretch of time spent in Cazenovia and what has to be considered a successful New Year’s — certainly it was an improvement over last year’s edition, if only because the bodily fluids spilled at this party were merely couch-threatening rather than life-threatening. Honestly, though, even the Mystery Puker acquitted himself well: that semi-comatose young man and his Brother With The Enigmatic Accent left sheepishly and cooperatively, but not before handing Charles $60 for “cleaning costs”/hungover New Year’s Day dinner. Well done! If you asked Emily Post about the best way to go about regurgitating in a stranger’s house, that is exactly what she’d tell you to do.
This year the special Party MVP award goes to Dave and the Governess, who were there at the front lines and quick to deal with all the unpleasantness. Someday, when life becomes more like the Lord of the Rings movies I watched over the weekend, there will be alabaster statues of you, next to the ones of Courtney, Radley, Becks, Ficke, and all the other New Year’s Party heroes from the Fourth Age of Men.
As for the Christmas holiday — well, I was hopelessly, embarrassingly spoiled. The two most egregious single pieces of loot: a new Weller soldering iron from my sister and her boyfriend and, from Emily, a Bosch jigsaw that I’m hesitant to look up on Amazon lest I find myself horrified at how much she spent. I’m pretty excited to start making (hopefully progressively-less-) ugly wooden boxes once the temperature in the garage becomes tolerable. In addition to those I also received really lovely, thoughtful gifts from Emily’s mom and sister, my own mother, my dad, and really everyone who puts up with my nonsense. I am feeling quite grateful and more than a little sheepish about it all.