Musings of Christmas - 2006

Just a moment to jot down a few quick thoughts at the tail end of a Christmas past.

• Christmas Eve
• 10:00 pm All the kids are finally in bed (including miraculously Kiah, who had stayed up late the night before and had taken a Tylenol PM earlier) and the work of Santa begins as we go gather gifts from all the hidden locations throughout the house and set to work filling stockings and arranging presents.
• 10:30 pm I begin working on putting together the easel and end up putting 8 of the screws in backwards, using my pocket knife to trim wood so a couple of pieces will fit and getting out the cordless drill to drill a couple of new holes as the pre-drilled ones didn't line up
• 11:30 pm finish putting the easel together and head off to bed to unwind and relax
• 12:00 am Sofi wanders into our room upset with a bad dream and I go put her back in Miles room (Stac's parents were sleeping in her room) and lay down with her till she is back to sleep.
• 12:45 am I fall to sleep.
• Christmas Day
• 4:40 am Sofi starts waking and wants to go open presents
• 5:30 am Kiah comes up and wants to go open presents
• 6:09 am Kiah returns saying : "You said 6:15", we start getting up
• 6:15 am I am downstairs ready with the cameras and Miles throws up all over Sofi. Joy!
• 6:20 am after changing Miles, Stac, the kids and her parents make their way downstairs and we begin opening presents.
• 6:55 am Miles has major diarrhea and I make a trip with him up to the shower.
• 8:00 am its all over and we are eating Shirley's cinnamon rolls that they dropped off the night before
• 8:30 am I fall asleep on the floor on my arm till it hurts
• 9:00 am I can't sleep on my arm anymore and go up stairs and get a blanket and pillow
• 11:15 am I wake from my morning nap, Stac's folks are still sleeping, Sofi has just fallen asleep and Stac has just woken up.
• I spend the day, while hanging out with family, reading Sting's autobiography Broken Music, given to me as a Christmas gift two years ago by Shari Zollinger. I am struck by the poignancy of his tale, ponder my own mortality and that of my estranged parents and grandparents.
  
• I spend time trying to clean up the disk of our 225 gig hard drive on our main computer, which only has 1 gig free. 125 gigs of photos and 58 gigs of music take up the bulk of the space. I worry about backups and I ponder the importance of seizing the day, as I view scenes that at the time I lived and now can no longer, such as hiking in Briones. Carpe Diem!
• 1:03 am the day after, I jot down these few thoughts and trundle off to bed.