Had a wonderful Christmas weekend with my fantastic wife and family. Xmas Eve was spent eating turkey, stuffing, seven-layer salad, barbecued green beans, cherry jello mold, and sweet Swedish bread. Xmas Day started later than we usually do (Janet and I got to the house around 10:00), and we spent a leisurely morning eating banana and cranberry-orange breads and unwrapping presents. I was pretty overwhelmed by everything I got, which was quite a bit more than I was expecting. The highlights: two paintings of cranes my grandmother picked up in China years ago (which will be going up at the Two Cranes Press offices, just as soon as we get them reframed), a South Park Motion Lamp (with sound!) from Kristin, a Eureka Maxima Bagless Vacuum from my parents (yay! we can finally vacuum the apartment again!), and the best present ever, of all time, a 40GB iPod from my incredible and thoughtful wife. While I'd been hinting (in a totally non-subtle way) at wanting an iPod for a while now, it was mostly in jest, and I figured it would be something I'd get for myself after a big fiction sale or something, so it was a huge surprise when I opened it up yesterday morning. I have the best wife in the entire world.

After the shredding of wrapping paper and putting away of gifts, we munched on appetizers, various kinds of crackers and tortilla chips, cheeses, cajun crab dip, salsa, and cream cheese with lingonberry jam. We called family members, laid around, took naps, read some in the books we got. When it got dark, we drove over to the Celebration of Lights at Alltel Pavilion:

We also took a drive by the home of the owner of our local top 40 radio station, who always decorates the crap out of his house and yard, with so many disparate things, like dinosaurs, UFOs and aliens, penguins, South Park characters, and a dune buggy occupied by Bugs Bunny, the Grinch, and Snoopy. He even had a fire engire with a giant Taz head in the grill. Freaking awesome. After we got back, we ate some of the pumpkin cheesecake made by Janet a few days before, and watched It's a Wonderful Life.

This morning, we awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground, and Janet and I settled into our usual Sunday routine: after sleeping in, we watched home improvement shows and Ebert & Roeper on TV while snuggling on the couch, and she even made some apple-cinnamon muffins that were just fantastic. I hooked up the iPod to my iBook and downloaded all 618 songs from iTunes into it. 2.46 gigabytes worth of songs (both bought from the iTunes music store and ripped from my existing CDs), and it all transferred to the wee little iPod in less than five minutes. Incredible.

An aside: Barnes & Noble is having a special after-holiday sale, and because I'm a member of the discount club, they announced it to me three days ahead of the regular public. There are books from 50% to 80% off, and while I think this was nice to give us a head's up before everyone else, I'm giving you the opportunity as well. Follow this link and browse to your heart's content. There are 10,000 titles discounted, including The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll.

Tonight, we'll be doing an early celebration of my Dad's birthday (his actual b'day is on Wednesday), so that my sister can join in the festivities while she's here (she flies back to New York Monday afternoon). So between then and now, I'll be getting the application packages for the doctoral programs I'm applying to in good shape. I've finished filling out the actual applications, and now have to include writing samples, letters of recommendation (of which I have gotten all of them), and a personal statement of purpose. I thought it might be fun to start off this statement with an anecdote about learning to read, but have been advised against that. But it's a cool story, so I'll tell it to all you nice folks in a later entry.

I hope your weekend has been as glorious as mine.

Now Reading:
Flytrap no. 3

Stories Out to Publishers:
7

Books Read This Year:
66

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
34