Genevieve
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	The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam...

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Xmas, New Year's and everything else
2004-01-22 - 1:50 p.m.

Forgive me Diaryland, I have not penned. It has been almost two months since my last entry.

At the gentle urging of the Good Baron Balynar ("update or something, damn you!"), here is the stupid update already....

I've been busy, well freakin' duh!

The end of semester, holidays, and beginning of the semester have truly gotten away from me. That's my main excuse. I try to get D'land time at work over lunch breaks, but even those have been occupied. The last thing I want to do is plug into the computer at home, no matter the freedom of the wireless. So the concept of 5 hours catching up on diares is incomprehensible. Sorry guys.

So, what has been happening? I'll attempt to compromise between a catch up saga and jumping right into the frivolous now.

We spent Xmas in Florida visiting my folks, sisters, nieces and one of my faboo brothers in law. It was fun, relaxing, enjoyable, I ate too much, blah blah blah. :) I confess that I am playing favorites with my nieces. I have true second child preference. This could be because the eldest is 4, and a pain. I'm sure she'll grow out of it. This could be because I am the second child.

Of small note is that my Grandmother on my father's side passed away at 1am on Christmas Day. We knew flying down that her time on this earth was limited to hours. We went and saw her on Christmas Eve and told her it was okay to go, and that we loved her. She had been suffering from Alzhiemer's for quite some time and all that remained of her for the past 4 years was the sparkle in her eyes. My dad was with her until the end. We had a small immediate family memorial service while we were down there, a bigger family memorial service and interment of her ashes will happen sometime this summer in Wisconsin.

I meant to update after Xmas, but honestly couldn't find a good way to say this. We also got to go visit my remaining grandmother twice when we were down there. She too is suffering from Alzhiemer's and now giggles a bunch and sings "Jesus Loves Me" when prompted, and that is all. This too saddens my heart, but at least she is in a happy place.

wow.

so...

We came home on the monday after xmas and spent time doing laundry etc. and discovering home again and then boogied on down to Mike and Kirsten's new place for New Year's Eve and remaining as slave labor afterwards. New Year's Eve was a blast. We helped peel wallpaper in the house that was a decorator's nightmare. It is lookig much better now. I am a compulsive wallpaper peeler. Put me in a room with bad wallpaper and I get itchy fingers and start picking at the seams. Sadly I am horrible at the follow-up removal of the underlay and glue. (Sorry Mel!) I took the paper off in the foyer, most of the 30' hallway and part of the guest bath. I also got to work on my pool game. groovy!

I had a blast at Twelfth Night for the most part. Obviously the part I didn't enjoy was the court and post-court allergy attack to some unknown thing that made me crash out and miss the post-revel. eh. I also didn't terribly enjoy being called on the Monday night before for a project due by Twelfth Night! Slack-Nar! You are so lucky I like you. And you owe me big.

But I did love braiding folks' hair, and passing around candy to the good little polling responders, and other friends too, general socializing, and finding the blue smiley cup for the K. Blue and Smiley, hard to resist. All in all the day was not half bad. However I didn't truly wake up from allergy haze until Monday morning.

And now we come to approximately now-ish. Not too long ago Alan snapped and bought an LCD projector for the basement and its theoretical distant home theater plan. It arrived last week and I came home to find him playing around with it and seeing parts of Dressed to Kill upside down on the basement wall. Wednesday night he brings home a home theater system for it; speakers, DVD/VCR, etc. So we get sucked in to the extended version of the Two Towers until almost midnight...

I should mention that the basement at this time was the dumping ground for all the stuff we didn't use in the other rooms of the house and/or the stuff we were too lazy to sort through and purge. That we would mostly be me by the way. So after a few movies on the 8ft screen sitting in the old office chair, papa-san or glastonburys we had to do something. This weekend I finally sorted through 8 or so boxes of essentially crap. Paper crap, old school notes crap, lots of crap that I moved into the house. I now have 3 boxes to keep, 3 boxes of papers to recylce and one big bag of trash that went out today. Ah, organization.

After a side trip to liberate an old loveseat from Q's garage and some more tidying we now have seating for 5 in our basement with the large screen and surround sound and all sorts of goodies. And it can be hooked up to a laptop and we can trace designs on theortical wallhangings for Pennsic camp, in theory. Not what I had planned to do with my free weekend, but it is good.

And lastly, in my life I am surrounded by absolutely brilliant folks. I count as my best friends a rocket scientist, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer, a security engineer, a clinical psychologist (almost), a lawyer, a couple of truly talented artists and several computer geeks. It is understandable that I have to rely on my paltry sum of charisma to not be swallowed in the great knowledge that surrounds me. Dumb it down: my smart friends make me feel truly dumb and ignorant at times. But I had a small moment yesterday.

One of my coworkers is Russian and her 13 year old daughter's teacher asked the kids to bring in 6 artifacts from or representing Louisiana, with 3 days notice. They've never been there, much less have good ideas of things that could represent the state. Luckily for her she brought up the project over lundh and got me to thinking. I ran home afterwards and collected twelve things from around the house for her daughter to choose from. I wrote up a list of interesting facts to kinda go with them. For never having lived in Louisiana I think I did better than your average josephine on the subject and made the little girl's day. It's very rewarding when I can bring together a bunch of seemingly worthless knowledge for a purpose. And I completely forgot that I have a picture of a former Miss Louisiana somewhere too. :)

You asked for it. You got your freaking update. Balynar, there will be a quiz.

And I haven't read hardly any diaries either. It's not that I don't love you, I just haven't loved you guys in that way in a while.

Lastly, Happy Chinese New Year, Year of the Monkey! w00t!!!

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