elcome to 2007! What an awesome year! What's that? When? Yes, I see. How long? Oh.

Merry Christmas! What an awesome holiday! And 2006 is looking sooo good! Did everyone survive intact? I'm afraid I don't have any fun stories of weaponry or bloodletting to embellish the tale of our extended family get-together. There were some fun touches of relentless self-promotion and materialism, which thankfully just throw into stark relief the fairly kind and laid back attitudes of the majority of the family. One or two peoples' annoying habits make everyone else look downright pleasant. Yay for relative norms! (pun intended)

That's a touch harsh. I really do enjoy seeing everyone together, especially as my cousins start to get older. I realize I'm an annoying know-it-all around them, so I'm trying to reduce that behavior. Our age differences were significant years ago, but are starting to smooth out now, and the need for one-upsmanship should be disappearing too. Hopefully I'll learn to shut up a bit more often. As for the aunts and uncles, each time they're together I see more of the dynamic and interplay as it relates to their shared parents and their divergent life-choices. I don't think you could plan a stranger range of characters. You really don't choose your family. =) Sally and I spent Christmas eve & morning opening gifts to each other, pretty much all alone and loving it. She got me a sweet robe and some flannel pants and some fancy cocoa from the French town of Tar-Get. I got her a coat and llama sculpture and the most recent season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (DVD special edition, yo). The last gift was pretty much for the both of us, due to our highly refined (read: tasteless) sense of humor. I even came down to the office and uploaded our Christmas photos THE SAME day. Go clicky clicky.

For Christmas dinner this year, Sally and I continued eating our elephant (which is of course done one bite at a time). From about 5:00pm to Midnight on the 25th we were at the church, shoveling out all the plaster we took down over the last few weeks. It was incredibly back breaking, dirty stuff, but we really needed to have it done for the 26th, which is when they were supposed to pick up the dumpster. We rigged up a makeshift chute from the upper window down to the dumpster, and it's arguable whether it made things worse or better. The chute backed up at one point and broke in half under the weight of the plaster, and I'll admit some frustration crept into my ranting screams. We were also pumping out vast quantities of dust during the process, and the wind was taking it towards our neighbors. Sally came up with a good solution using a tarp to cover the whole chute/dumpster mess. It reduced the problem, but I think we still owe our neighbors a few tokens to the local car wash.

In the end, we prevailed. One more bite taken, and a few more steps closer to doing construction rather than destruction.

I hope everyone else had a good Christmas, and you got to see all the loved ones you could handle.