Good morning, yon Bitches. I'm sitting here, bleary, trying to fight off some sort of ick that I just don't have time for. My mother descends tomorrow (she's flying through Minneapolis-- HA!) and I have a shitton to do before then. Including wrap her presents.

She's probably going to be disappointed and yet... I find myself not worried about it.

So sorry about the other sickies and all the travel woes. I think we need a Buffista holiday that would take place like in... February. On Buffista Island. With nice moderate temperatures and no travel issues.

She's probably going to be disappointed and yet... I find myself not worried about it.

One of my favorite mantras, especially with family: why would you expect things to be any different?

I am cranky over boy stuff. Vortex, as if there was ever any doubt, is the total bomb diggity.

It's gray, the office is tomb-like (down to the chill--and I'm not usually that sensitive to cold), and I want to curl up under a warm cat and go to sleep.

I'm not sick but I wonder if my manager would let me go home unenthused.

One of my favorite mantras, especially with family: why would you expect things to be any different?

Took me a long, long time to learn that one. Used to be that I was the one who held Christmas together in the family-- getting the tree, decorating, planning the huge feast and basically working myself ragged and not only did no one care, they kind of went out of their way to tell me how much they hated Christmas, how it was such a pain, and in other words, be total Scrooges. And still... I tried. I had more traumatic Christmases than any one human can begin to imagine, part of it probably due to my own stubbornness that I Would Make Christmas Great and Change Their Minds.

Finally, one year, I snapped. Just decided they'd beat the Christmas right out of me and I wasn't going to care anymore.

You should've seen the reaction that year. They were kind of stunned when a couple weeks before Christmas there was no tree, no plans for a special meal, no questions about gifts or teasing comments about what they were receiving. And when they asked and I responded with "Don't know, don't care," you should've seen the faces. They'd depended on me for their Christmas spirit even as they'd beat it down with their own sourness. And they acknowledged that they always enjoyed the day itself-- that it was always better than they were expecting it to be. To be faced with the possibility of it not happening was pretty hard on them.

And I didn't care.

My mother, of course, told me I was being selfish, without ever once acknowledging she'd been the primary culprit. (Of course not-- that would require self-awareness of which the woman has absolutely none.)

But I still didn't care.

Since then, I've hit a much better balance. The people around me contribute, I try not to get my expectations up too high and realize that we're never going to have a Norman Rockwell Christmas, and generally, we end up with a really pleasant day.

We now have tickets for Christmas Eve, to Dublin. There was just no way to get G home to Boston, so he'll be in Dublin with me.

In 'I didn't have a hope in hell anyway' news, Dublin airport has been closed since lunchtime due to snow, so my flight wouldn't have gone even if Heathrow weren't a shower of gobshites.

Christmas use to be pretty tense for me, due to Mom's predictable disappointment in whatever I'd do and Mom and Dad's holiday squabbles. While I won't say I'm glad they're not around for it, Christmas will probably be a lot less fraught.

Had a hell of a morning, even before I got dressed. Hubby takes our housemate to work about an hour before I get up. There was a shitload of snow last night. My alarm goes off, and Hubby wasn't in bed (he normally comes back when he gets home). OK, I think, maybe for some reason he just didn't want to come back yet. I get up, I go to the window to see if the car is there. It's not.

The bad adrenaline sets in. I'm picturing him just caught in traffic, slid off the road and waiting to be pulled out, crunched around a tree in a non-injury but car incapacitating smash, trapped among a dozen cars that have slid together because Utah drivers are idiots, laying under a sheet somewhere because the emergency responders are trying to save the ones they can . . .

Not a happy time.

Half an hour later, I hear the front door, and before he gets one word out completely, I snap, "Are you all right?"

He blinks in confusion. "I've been shoveling the walk."

"When did you get home!"

"About half an hour ago. What?"

In other words, he pulled up just after I turned away from the window and spent time contemplating horrors.

Fortunately he was very sympathetic to my subsequent fit of tears and shakes. I think a bad network install is not going to seem like too bad a thing.

We're getting cell phones, dammit.

Connie, I can totally see how scary that would be. If you are not going to use them much some of the pay-as-you-go phones are really cheap. I got a $20 trackphone that doubles any minutes you buy, so I now pay $20 every 140 days to keep it going. Only 140 minutes for that so an awful price per minute. But I don't use 140 minutes in 140 days, so works great for me. And if you currently don't have a cell phone and don't plan to use it much, then this sort of thing might work for you. These deals come and go, but I'm sure you can find something of this sort. And if you decide that as long as you are getting cells you might as well use them there are tons of contract phones that are a bit more a month but include all the minutes you could want, even unlimited if that is what you need.

[edit] And focusing on the phone, because when dealing with something like that my instinct is to find something I can 'fix'. But really do totally get how traumatizing that was. I'd have been terrified too.

Jars, I know you are upset, but you do not want to fly if they are cosing airports. My father was a pilot for much of my life. Pilots like to fly -- if they don't want to be up in the air, you don't want to fly.

DH is not into Christmas. So I do more or less what I want to do. the hard part for me is I end up sending gifts to his family and my family. but that is the only pressure, so I can deal

I would have been terrified to , Connie