happy new year.

2008. still no flying cars, world peace, lunar vacations, or autonomous house-cleaning robots. geez, humanity, what do you have to say for yourself?

resource follow-up.

i didn't get a single thing i asked for.

unless you count Super Mario Galaxy, which i specifically told my sister to get us.

(it's a hell of a lot of fun, btw. and significantly easier in the 2-player co-op mode than in single-player. although there are levels that are fucked up enough, it brings his skill almost all the way down to mine. miyamoto-san, i bow to you)

after i announced that i didn't get anything i asked for on christmas evening, my sister braved the boxing day crowds to go get me a utensil/gadget holder, in stainless steel. you can't really call a container made out of steel a "crock." just doesn't sound right, for some reason. now i have an extra drawer in my kitchen, yay.

still no sign of a septuagint.

rainy boxing day.

there's something very sad about christmas lights in the cold rain the day after christmas.

holidays.

happy, merry, and so forth.

for my christmas gift, discover card emailed me my bill.

i think we need to invent some kind of major holiday for, like, february or something, so that after new year's, we're not all depressed waiting for the sun to return and weather to get better.

although at my new job now, i get MLK Jr day and president's day off this year, so there will be some little breaks in the drudgery.

food w/ family in an hour. i hope everyone is having a happy holiday today, and best wishes in the new year.

more ice.

so we did lose power yesterday. luckily, the bakery didn't, so we went there for breakfast. then down to the mall so i could do some christmas shopping (ugh!) and he could park himself in barnes&noble and study for his calculus final tonight (more ugh!).

luckily the power came back because now my car's battery is dead and i'm working from home again. a little hard to RDC into your work computer if there's no power to your router/cable modem/etc. and also computer, although i would at least get a couple hours on the laptop.

stupid car.

he's got the AAA card, so i have to wait for him to get home so i can call them and get someone to come out and give me a jump. we don't even have jumper cables. blerg.

hooray for tea.

survival lessons.

the office closed at 1pm today because the school district closed at 12:45pm because everything is covered in ice.

watch the trees get iced over and the branches slowly sink...

ooo, the lights are flickering. and i hear sirens.

didn't i do this 10 years ago? yeah. the jan 1998 ice storm. shut down the city of montreal for a solid week because the power to the city's resevoir went out and there was no drinkable water. i later heard it took some people in the outlying areas 9 days to get electricity back and they were building tents of blankets around fireplaces until the mounties came by distributing generators.

that time, i was playing a videogame on my computer and didn't even notice the power went out because the laptop switched over seamlessly to battery power.

darn. no games for the mac.

well, if i survived that one, i ought to have no trouble with this little bit of ice. we even have wood for the fireplace.

resources.

why does every quickly-preparable and convenient food have to be eaten in a bowl? cereal (hot or cold), soup... well, ok, mostly just cereal and soup. but i eat a lot of both of those.

i am in possession of only 6 bowls. these are used at a frightening rate, especially when we are both sick (like now, for instance).

my revised christmas list:
a gadget crock
a septuagint
more bowls

fail.

no novel for me this year.

why? i'm not sure. i certainly had more going on this year than the previous 3, and also i started the month pretty creatively dry and in the grip of a pretty major depression.

the depression, i'm glad to say, has started to lift a bit. it will probably come back in a month or so.

as strange as it sounds, probably beginning the month on vacation damaged any novel-writing ability as well. while i was pretty relaxed, i was concentrating on other things, and i only wrote one day's worth while on vacation for four days. not an insurmountable obstacle (i started over the third day of the month last year), but a daunting one, nonetheless.

oh well. there's always next year.

and of course, there's three other rough drafts to edit and/or finish *grin*