Christmas
It's the start of a new year, but I'm still exhausted from December. I didn't really get any journaling done, but that doesn't mean it was uneventful. In many ways the month has just left me speechless.

First off, I did see the gastroenterologist. He basically told me not to worry too much about the tummy pain I've been having. He made a really mundane guess as to what the real problem was, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit he was right. I've had two close relatives with colon
cancer in the past few years -- one of whom died. Can you blame me for a bit of paranoia?

I've been off work for the past couple weeks. You'd think I'd have had plenty of time to relax, but things have just been non-stop. Perhaps it's a case of Christmas interruptis.

Christmas Eve was a big production for LWSRN and B (formerly R) and me. LWSRN decided that B would have lamb for dinner and asked me to pick up a rack of lamb. I bitched a bit about this, partially because I'm vegetarian myself, and partially because a rack is such a pain. I suggested she try a leg instead. I guess she didn't have any idea how much meat she was asking for in the first place. B and I took care of making dinner and LWSRN didn't see the leg until I pulled it out of the
oven. She was shocked. It turns out she hadn't intended to have any of the lamb herself and we were just cooking for B. In the end, B took the whole thing home with her. I just had ravioli, which was a luxury for me, since I usually stay away from starch of any sort.

It was a quiet night, both their daughters were off with their fathers, and we'd all decided to put off our real Christmas until New Years Eve. LWSRN spent the night and Christmas morning was one of those weird experiences for me. There was a tremendous amount of dissonance. The two
of us just treated it like any other morning, and it seemed so wrong.

We spent a bit of the afternoon with L's family and sat on the edge of the vast sea of presents that they always exchange. We brought a few gifts and received a few gifts, but as much as L's family is still mine, they're not really, and this still wasn't Christmas. We escaped and visited a few friends of LWSRN's who were having a party that evening. We sat and talked and drank a bit until people started to leave. It was nice, but the day was not what I'm used to for Christmas.

The next day we took a quick run down to Monterey to visit other friends of hers who were visiting from Europe. Maybe we should have stayed longer -- overnight just made the whole thing seem so busy, and didn't give us any time to ourselves.

"Christmas" itself didn't arrive for a few more days. The morning of New Year's Eve just kind of snuck up on me. I think by the time it happened that I'd been waiting for so long that the excitement had just drained out of me. Of course, that also meant folding the whole New Years Eve
thing in to the same day.

Ah well. The past couple days have been the first one's I've had to myself. I can't say I've done much with them, but maybe that's the point.