Time. Marching on. Thank all that is holy.

By golly, is that the time?  Time to sit down and consume all my remaining outlandishly overpriced and calorically overdense foods before reentry into reality tomorrow morning?  Yes, it is time, apparently, since I sat down to blog with a crusty roll (less crusty than a few days ago) the last wad of pâté (I am so hoping Blogger can read pâté as pâté and not pate because, ooooh, ICK!) small slices of dilled Havarti, half a cheese danish and a chocolate caramel nut thingie (name of which escapes me but this goody will NOT escape me).  And an eggnog with rum, natch.  Sadly, this year I couldn't even keep up with my previously set standards for eggnog consumption because this year I was too busy to drink.  Yes, strange but true, we haven't restocked our eggnog from Costco for three weeks, and that is not like us.  Over the past few weeks I have countless times found myself failing to urinate when the urge occurred, only to realize that hours have passed before I finally decided I could pull that off.  Now you may hate me for this, and I do apologize, but I lost four pounds in December.  Before you throw something heavy at my post, do remember I am actually overweight, and fair is fair - someone has to lose pounds in any social circle because the number of pounds compounded between any group of people is a constant, shifting back and forth between the folk according to a fairly complex mathematical statement that if I revealed, you'd have to kill me, so my lips are sealed.  Will you feel better when I tell you that not one person set foot in my house over the holiday season?  Not one?  Not my sister, my niece, my aging parents, my bestie, my other lesser but still beloved friends, not even a neighbor (they left their shit on the doorstep and ran).   So I have to eat the food now, before the break ends, because no one else did.  I don't think people meant to ignore us, I think I only invited people who were unavailable, or so I like to think.  My bestie was in Puerto Rico, my aging parents are too decrepit to climb three stairs to my front door and so prefer we gather as a family at my sister's house, and everyone knows people with kids don't actually have friends. 

So what did we do from that point about three weeks ago until now, when I finally did three loads of laundry and put it away in the same 36 hour span rather than allowing it to mound on the window seat amongst the toys and handmade, glitter saturated Christmas decorations (glitter, as you may know, is Satan's dandruff, and remember the Satan / Santa conundrum, then add laundry and I think you'll see what I mean).   Well there was the shopping, and the wrapping, and the sickness, and the illness, and the wrapping, and the shopping, and the unwellness which delayed the shopping and the wrapping.  Anyway, the aging parents decided to go for broke and check into a nursing home and a hospital simultaneously two days after we had a child with a serious illness which requires the maintaining of a constant normal blood sugar barf her way through the night, Christmas night (bringing our percentage of children who barfed on Christmas to a respectable 50% of the four children in the household).  If it were me, and I were three years old, I'd be pretty upset to find vomit in my hair and my naked parents running around rapidly doing laundry and making me bathe in the middle of the night, but she handled it with all the grace a three year old can muster when she hears "good job, honey, you got it in the bucket!!" 

We did have fun.  We did have lovely gifts, some loud and some not, and some that brought great joy to their new owners.   We fully and finally realized just how much work my dear departed dog was doing to keep the floors clean - having now noticed that the rate of increased mopping is causing the kitchen floor tiles to buckle and rise up (the sort of uprising which leads to an all out revolution, eventually.  I know other parts of the house are planning insurgencies and I am turning a blind eye to the rebels, like many a colonialist before me).

The de rigueur photo post is coming . . . the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future are coming . . . and possibly so will I when you tell me this whole rigmarole going on repeat is at least nearly one year away.