Remodeling, V 2.0

After a heartfelt plea from a reader, I've abandoned the white-on-black color scheme. Though I've never seen the problem reading light type on a dark background, I know a lot of people do have an issue with it--and believe me, my eyes aren't getting any better either, so I'm going to take the side of empathy here.

In other news...

Non-Chicagoans, bless your hearts, don't know what we're up against here.

I'm sitting here with my windows shut, and even though this is TOTALLY not Chez Gladys and these windows are actually GOOD, I can feel the wind squeezing through every crack. The wind here has, for the past 18 hours, been positively INSANE. We had wind gusts, according to the news, of 63 mph. Oh--and it's less than 20 degrees outside, too. So...(skips off to the Wind Chill Calculator) that's somewhere in the area of -2 degrees wind chill (assuming 20 degree temp, 45 mph wind). And that's saying nothing of the whole trees-blowing-over, power-lines-down issue. There are several major construction sites not far from my new home; I can hear a lot of flapping tarps and wind-howling-through-fence sounds, and one loud crashing noise which fell very clearly into the category of That Really, REALLY Doesn't Sound Good At All. I wonder whether the tree in the backyard of Chez Gladys survived--I always wondered what, exactly, was keeping that thing vertical.

The one major Hallelujiah moment of the day: realizing that I, in a show of forethought totally unlike my normal holiday proceedings, had completed my holiday shopping YESTERDAY. When it was still 50 degrees outside. :::pats self solidly on back::: If I'd had to go out today and take the bus or the train or the anything to go shopping...you know, I love my mom and all, but--just to face the facts here--it wouldn't have gotten done. There are some things I don't handle well, and having to go out in vile and unnecessary weather is one of them.

Instead I stayed in, slept late, edited Wikipedia for a while, made cookies, and ordered myself a pizza. As I said, I'm really, REALLY not feeling this holiday; I'm going to Mom's tomorrow, for Christmas Eve dinner, then spending the night and driving home first thing in the morning (to feed the kits--this fresh-food-instead-of-kibble plan has certain drawbacks) and then back to Mom's, to go to dinner at my aunt-in-law's.

The outrage of all this? I have to be back at work on Wednesday--in fact, I have to be back to work EARLY on Wednesday, since there's a project I'm working on which needs to be complete by Friday. We don't even know for sure if the project is going to happen--there are certain technical and managerial obstacles in the way--but on the off-chance it does, I'm supposed to be at work at 8:30 AM the day after Christmas. That doesn't seem quite cricket, but...oh well. At least THIS Christmas, I HAVE a job!!

I think I would feel better about Christmas this year if it wasn't so....obligatory. I'm expected to participate even though I don't really care to; I'd feel better if it was optional, if I had the chance to say "Hey, you know what? I'd rather not, this year." It's selfish, really; I have to keep in mind that time is passing, and nobody's getting any younger. At least one of the people who will be at dinner at my aunt-in-law's on Tuesday won't be there next Christmas; a friend of her family was diagnosed this past fall with terminal cancer, and he has maybe three months left. And who knows what the next year will bring to anyone?? I keep thinking of my mom's friend who passed away last January; she'd spent Christmas with her family, too, and then a month later she was gone. Nobody expected that.

I guess I'm thinking a lot about this sort of thing lately. (Who, me, depressed? Surely you jest.) I think about one of my old grade-school friends who, every Christmastime, used to have Nabisco Holiday Jingles cookies in her lunchbox from...it seemed like Halloween through Easter. We drifted apart during high-school, and I hadn't seen her for years; then, a couple of months after JP died, she was killed in a car wreck with her grandmother, right before New Years'. I think about her at this time of year...and of course, JP; and of course, my dad.

Dad was the one who would go all-out to get the weird, off-the-wall Christmas gift, the one that Mom couldn't for the life of her understand why you wanted it. The Laser Tag game, or the Douglas Adams box set, or the giant-size 1983 boom-box radio with dual cassette, or the Commodore Vic-20 computer...those were Dad-gifts, to go with Mom's more-practical, more-normal gifts--the dollhouses, the sweaters, the board-games, the warm winter boots. When my dad died in 1987, I gave up asking for technological gifts; no point confusing Mom, or making her feel obligated to do something she didn't enjoy. (Fortunately, I'm at an age where practical gifts are also much-appreciated; in fact, the KitchenAid mixer from two Christmases ago just mixed my chocolate-chip cookies, so: viva practicality!)

People ask me, "Isn't it strange, just having the holidays with you and your mom?" And in a way, it's not...this is how it's been, really, at least since Grandma and Grandpa died; but in a way...yeah, it kind of is strange--in the sense of "it feels like things are not as they should be." In a way, I take some of the blame for this; wasn't I supposed to have provided a husband and some kids to these proceedings somewhere? When I was in college, I always saw my late-30's self with a husband and a couple of kids--you know, like my cousins have. And then...well, things happened. I hadn't completely given up on the husband-and-kids side of things, even after JP died...honestly, I don't think I formed my final opinion on the whole parenthood issue til after CR left. Put it this way: I would have GLADLY had JP's kids; I would have had CR's kids reluctantly. After that, and maybe after looking back at how I treated my own parents...yeah, no. I can at least spare myself that experience. But it makes the world look a lot smaller, around Christmastime.

I'll be all right; I always perk up once the Christmas-ing actually gets going. Meanwhile, I hope all of you have a great holiday; I appreciate all of you, quite a lot.

(Okay, so I'm sitting here, blogging and watching the news on Channel 7 (the local ABC affilliate). They were about to cut away to a remote story about the wind, and as they cut, the anchor suddenly screams "WHOA!!" and there's a loud bang. They do the remote, and you can hear the remote anchor ask "What happened?" as they roll the audiotape. When they pull back from the remote, the anchor looks SHOOK--and he says "You might have heard, right before we went to our story, a loud noise in the studio...well, here's the reason why..." He cuts away to a picture of a CAR, which has crashed into their studio!! Their studio is at ground level on State St. and Lake, and apparently somebody lost control of their minivan and went through the window!!! It's the damndest thing--you just KNOW this is gonna make one of those "news bloopers" reels somewhere. I hope nobody was hurt, but...see, I LOVE it when stuff happens on live TV. (Now they're saying it might have been deliberate...hoo, man! This is wild.)