HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!!

The Christmas miracle kitty is home! And I got a camera! With its own cord! I love the holidays.

Solstice and Perry

Every winter Solstice, my family gathers in the living room by the lit fireplace and eats cookies, receives an ornament, and writes poetry about the year gone by. It's nice, rather quaint tradition, and according to my mother it originated when I was little, because right before Christmas is when toddlers start to go a little bonkers. Solstice is a nice quiet holiday to calm down. My little brother wrote short three-lined poems with the last lines as questions, my little sister did an acrostic and writing couplets, my mother wrote an eerie winter poem, I wrote poems about the Amnesty Inc. pen that I kept breaking and our tree angel, and my dad wrote a narrative poem about how he gave $20 dollars to a needy man with the requirement that he spend it on his infant son, and then later saw him buying diapers. We each received an ornament and enjoyed s'mores.

Then, Wednesday morning, I called the cats for breakfast and Perry didn't come. I finally found him in his hut by the window, but he showed no interest in eating. He vomited several times and meowed whenever anyone tried to pick him up, so my parents took him to the vet. The vets thought he had swallowed thread or floss, so my dad drove him to a specialty vet an hour or so away. Then we went through our usual business, watching the telly, trying to write this blog post (it's been three days), and cleaning. (My room currently leaves much to be desired.) So they went into surgery, opened up his stomach, and lo and behold. . . PERRY HAS A HOLE IN HIS INTESTINAL WALL! It was something he was born with, but that did nothing to prevent my mother from removing all the tinsel and obsessively picking up fragments. All in good reason, of course. Perry is recuperating and is expected home today--we hope. If not, we go visit him with chicken baby food.

Happy Holidays!

The Great Telly et al

As you all may have heard, I have a new television. I find this very exciting (free cable for a month!). I have not watched television at my home in three whole years.

Us watching television on the first day:
Me, Laura, and Peter: *watch television*
Laura: Ah! This is different!!!
Me: (calmly) No, Laura, it's not.
Laura: But it's all weird!
Me: Laura, when was the last time you saw this show?
Laura: Uhhh....
Me: Precisely.
Laura: Hmph.
Me: Just watch it, Laura.
Laura: *watches silently*
Laura: Ha! Aha! Look! It's different!
Me: Psh! No it's . . . *looks closely* not...no! I mean, yes! It is different! Aw, it's all 3-Dy.
Laura: *nods smugly*

The story of how this came to be is rather funny. Laura and I were banished to the dining room to play Sims. Laura likes to make dysfunctional families. She started off with a mother, a father, and a baby named Virgina. Then they had another baby, a boy, named Maine for the state--but she forgot the e, so his name is Main. Bored with the game, Laura divorced the parents but then made them remain friends. The mother then married a ready-made character: Christopher. The mother's name is Christina. No confusion there, of course. The dad, a misspelled Ghram, continued to sleep in the master bedroom with his ex-wife and her new husband, who soon had a baby girl named "Saraphina". Laura then put the toddler Main and the infant Sophronia in the same room as the teenage Virgina so that she could wake up every hour or two to change diapers/feed/snuggle/play with them. Laura also wanted Virginia to have a boyfriend, but the highest person with whom she was very close was her old babysitter, the kleptomanic non-aging gold digger Davie. However, right after Ghram's marriage to Jamie (now all the adults sleep in the same room), a vain snobby doctor who required us to add another bathroom for her, I made Virginia break up with Davie. Directly afterward Laura aged up Saraphina and Main, so that they were now, respectably, toddler and child. Unfortunately, since one of Christopher's dreams had been to "ask the newspaper boy to hang out", he came to our party, too, which was at 9am, and stayed, playing with our dollhouse, until 12am. Such as it is.

Anyway, Laura and I were disposed of while Peter played on the computer. Which is. . . ? Right by the television. So, while my parents loudly removed our old television, received the new one, unpacked it, and hooked up the new one, Peter played games. He even once looked at my mom as asked her what she was doing. "Working on the television." "Oh." He then commenced to resume playing on the computer and did not look up again until Laura and I were dancing around gleefully. His only comment was, "Where's our old television?" Such is the magic of technology.

Off to buy gifts! (I haven't bought any yet. :-o)

Guilt: is not refreshing. Stupid nonexistent proverb.

Does anyone remember that time I accused you lot of going on vacation without a computer? And it was (widely) true? I now realize how annoying that is. (No, not me, the non-electric trip.)

In school I made a plush penguin. It's blue and pretty cute. Of course, since I had to go on my trip, all I did was drive home from school, "HeyPetetakethisandfamilymissyoulove
youwherearemybooksonfashionablefeminismandAgathaChristieohthereseeyabye--",
drove to my friend's, walked around, and then drove for a good long while. More on that later. (Very, very long posts this week.)

So I text home to catch up and find that Peter has named my neat cute penguin Senor Penguin (again, photo cord) and takes him everywhere, from breakfasts of sardines to forgetting him in bed/in the couch/at the mercy of Perry. I then came home at 5:12 to find the much loved Senor Penguin pilled and smudged, but he did accompany Peter everywhere, so.

How's that for the (grateful) Christmas Spirit?