Christmas Vacation

I'm taking the next week off to chill and try to reconnect with what's important.

I hope y'all get to do the same. Have a great holiday.

He's the bravest little Hobbit of them all.

Apparently, New Line Cinema kissed Peter Jackson's hairy ass made up with Peter Jackson, who will be making not one, but two prequels based on The Hobbit.

In celebration, I give you The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. It is not for the faint of heart.

Thank God it's...you know.

We got our power back on last night, for which the entire Bauhaushold is thrilled beyond measure. Man, what a crazy week. Scratch that--what a crazy couple of months! Fainting, food poisoning, NaNo, Killer Ice Storms and massive blackouts...it's no wonder I'm exhausted. And now we've got snow headed our way, with a lot of people--family members included--still with no power. Between that and the fact that I can't remember the last time I saw sunshine, I'm going to stop fighting it and give myself permission to feel a little down.

Blogging is going way down on my priority list until the end of the year. I'm gonna rethink, regroup, maybe even redesign, and start afresh in January. Until then, expect posting both here and at Growing Up to be sporadic, or possibly even non-existent.

I'll probably keep up a little better with the writing blog, and with my Live Journal. Feel free to friend me over there if you want to read all my personal blather.

I hope y'all have a good, warm, safe weekend. Maybe send some prayers and good thoughts over here to the middle of the country. We sure need it.

Twenty years of wracking my brain finally laid to rest.

Today I finally tracked down the title of a movie I've been trying to find out for decades. Of course, most of my "research" consisted of randomly trying to describe it to people and hoping they'd remember, which wasn't as effective as it sounds. I did this with my husband when we first started dating, and he was positive it was Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, but I was just as positive that wasn't it.

After reading yesterday's Vine over at TN, it occurred to me that somebody, somewhere on the Internet must have tried to track down this same movie at some point. That began hours of obsessive searching through 1970s horror titles and synopses (to the detriment of my NaNoFiMo word count), until finally I followed a link to The Flick Chick, where on the second page I found my not-so-holy grail of movie titles: The House of Seven Corpses. I'm 99.9% certain that this is the movie. It was the dead cat that cinched it for me.

When I was an impressionable grade-schooler in the early eighties, my dad and I had a regular Saturday night ritual of watching the local "Creature Feature" together in the dark. A lot of those movies were pretty forgettable, but this is one that I remember scaring the living crap out of me. I don't even know if I could finish watching it, I was so terrified. Of course, now that I'm all grown up and jaded, I'm sure it will inspire more giggles and groans than anything, but even so, it is now at the top of my Netflix queue. And that's one less mystery that will keep me awake at night from now on.

Old Man Winter hates us.

Ever see that Y2K episode of King of the Hill, wherein Hank stops at Mega-lo-mart to pick up a fuel filter and gets overwhelmed by hordes of hoarders stocking up for the impending apocalypse? That's pretty much what it was like when I braved the ice and falling trees yesterday to venture out to Wal-Mart to buy a flashlight and some extra batteries. Both of which, by the way, were completely sold out by the time I got there. After weaving my way through crowds of shoppers whose baskets were brimming over with bottled water, canned foods and the aforementioned flashlights and batteries--and just how many flashlights does a single household really need, anyway?--I managed to get out of the store and, about a half-hour later, out of the parking lot, after which I had to hit three other stores before I finally found some D-cells for our Maglite.

So, winter decided to puke up its icy innards all over our part of the state over the weekend, destroying a small rain forest's worth of trees and causing the biggest power outage in state history in the process. Our house has been without power since late Sunday night, and estimates are that we'll be without it for another week, at least. Of course, my workplace still has power, and thankfully so does my gym, so I was able to take a hot shower and get dressed in a well-lit locker room this morning. My husband and the rest of my family aren't as fortunate. But they don't have to go to work, either, so it's a fair trade.

We actually made out pretty good in this storm. Most of the trees in our yard are either broken or completely knocked over, but all of the falling trees and limbs missed the house and our vehicles. Most of our neighbors weren't so lucky, and are dealing with everything from dented car roofs and broken windows to caved in garages and trees of the non-Christmas variety taking up valuable space in the living room.

'Tis the season to count our blessings, for sure. I guess I could whine that I'll miss the season finale of Top Model and a new episode of Supernatural this week, but I'd probably be better off shutting it and just being grateful that we have an intact roof over our heads and a working fireplace and plenty of canned soup on our shelves. You only really appreciate the basics in life when you're forced to go without the luxuries. Moreso when you realize how many folks out there can't even count on the basics. It's both sad and cliche, but also true.

I'm not going to post "NaNoFiMo" 13 times.

But that would be the reason there is no Thursday 13 today. Or why there was no pretty earlier this week.

The boyfriends will return soonish, though. It occurred to me the other day that I still haven't given Boreanaz his due. And I've completely neglected Jack Davenport. That's a crime against humanity right there.

Seriously?

Some dingbat at my company just forwarded that age-old hoax-spam, the one promising that Bill Gates will give you a lot of money if you just pass it on, to the entire global address book.

That really takes a special kind of stupid.

Merry Christmas from Best Buy

Serenity Collector's Edition for $8.99.

I think I forgot how to blog.

I think I also forgot how to do Christmas. I seem to be in denial that the Christmas season is here. I have yet to make a single list, for gifts, cards, or otherwise, and no idea what I'm going to get anybody, or for that matter even what I hope to receive. I don't have any Christmas knitting projects going because I'm still working on that dagnab sweater I started way back in July for my sister's birthday (this is why I don't often do sweaters). Christmas exploded all over my mother's house, with red and/or green and/or twinkly colored lights and/or faux-pine garlands and bows and wreaths and/or nativity sets and/or shiny Santa figurines everywhere you look. But upstairs, our part of the house is such a chaotic mess that the only reason any Christmas decorations are up is because we never got around to taking them down from last year, and they've pretty much faded into the background of our perception by now.

And the thought of Christmas shopping makes me want to crawl into bed and sleep until St. Patrick's Day.

I wouldn't say it's holiday depression or even ennui--it's just not sinking through my thick skull that Christmas is here already. It feels too soon. It feels like summer just ended. It's still relatively warm here, even, at least for the most part. All of this Christmas-ness surrounding me feels surreal and out of place, and it's making ME feel surreal and out of place.

Maybe this is just what happens when you keep your head buried in your own novel for all of November. Maybe I just need to go get a peppermint latte and listen to some Christmas carols and watch Rudolph and drink some 'nog and get acclimated to the fact that 2007 is practically over already. Maybe I need to go home and plug in the Christmas lights that have been hanging unlit all year.

I mean, it's December already, you guys! When did that happen?