mess.

it snowed on thanksgiving. as predicted, it rained on christmas. now it's new year's eve and we have sleet and snow. stupid weather. i hate winter.

more holiday.

merry christmas!

happy hannukah!

a day late on both of them. oh well.

now for more coffee.

so much food.

i shouldn't have bothered to bring lunch to work today. on the tabe in the lunchroom right now is sitting: bagels, donuts, 3 kinds of cream cheese, a tray of homemade cannolli and cream puffs, banana cake, homemade fudge, and a tray of meats and cheeses with honey mustard.

so much food!

happy holidays.

someone sent me a link today to a story about a cnn poll that asked if people prefer "merry christmas" over "happy holidays." quite frankly, as someone who celebrates multiple holidays this time of year, i'm finding it hard to care.

but i mean, really. there's, at a minimum, thanksgiving, christmas, and new year's. and there is hannukah. and kwanzaa, which is a manufactured holiday of a more recent era, but it's still a holiday. my family celebrates both christmas and hannukah. i don't see why it even matters.

the problem with taking a too-inclusive stance is that it becomes disrespectful when you're just throwing everything around without taking time to think about it, like when my brother's high school last year put up "happy hannukah" signs after the holiday was over, and "happy tet" signs, which isn't until february.

quite frankly, i just think we've come to a very depressing state when merely trying to be polite has to be politicized.

hardware.

i am now the proud owner of a Seagate 160GB SATA 7200RPM harddrive with an 8MB cache. and my second install of WindowsXP in 4 months. why, do you ask? because on monday, i was playing dungeon siege, and as i closed the game and heard my old harddrive swap out the memory, i heard a clank.

harddrives making clanking noises are Bad Things.

tuesday, i heard some more clanks, and then windows froze.

wednesday, i went out and bought a new harddrive and a sata controller.

well, this machine is just shy of 4 years old, so i guess it's about time for things to start dying. sigh.

in anticipation of a newish machine, it has a new name now. Medea to Iseult to Phaidra and now Aeth. i know, i know, i broke the pattern. Aeth happens to be the name of my protagonist for my nanowrimo project. but hey, it's my machine.

biting my tongue.

"more snow tomorrow," i said. seven fucking inches! eight? who knows. way too much. stupid weather.

if i was a proper blogger, i would have pictures of our winter wonder-freaking-land to post here. obviously, i remain a defective blogger, because i don't. hmf. take it from me, it's white. and cold. really, really cold. you can't take a picture of cold anyway.

oh sure, you can take a picture of the expanses of snow and ice glittering under the pale winter sun, which shines weakly from a dead grey sky, but that really can't convey in any useful manner the absolute bone-chilling temperatures you're suffering as you wait for your stupid digital camera to decide to auto-focus, or the bitterly cold wind that freezes your fingertips and steals your breath away as it pummels your body.

my goodness, that was one hell of a sentence.

the snow is pretty, though.

we have achieved cookies.

chocolate chip, this time.

well, more or less. i don't think it's normal for the cookie to come away, but leave the chocolate chips stuck to the cookie sheet, is it? i'm really not meant to be a baker, i think.

also, more snow tomorrow.

snoo.

it has snowed twice now. this isn't a promising start to *ahem* "meteorological winter."

on the other hand, my search for new sneakers can be put on hold because now i'll be wearing my boots for a while. why do most places carry all of about 2 different walking sneakers, both white? what kind of sense does this make? hmf.