Christmas vacation 2006, part 2

*sigh* I know, I never blog. I’m going to have to come up with some strategies to get myself to write more.

Anyway, to comment on my sister’s comment from the last entry: There is no way I would think you are less entertaining than Michael. You’re our substitute for TV, remember? 😉 But you have to admit, we did spend a lot of our time by ourselves doing our own things those first few days.

I came up with a theory over Christmas that systems, such as families, develop patterns of behavior that incorporate all their members, and for the system to behave the way we expect it to, all the members have to be present, at least in a small system such as our family. That’s why when one person in our family is gone, the house seems so much quieter, even if the person who’s missing isn’t especially loud. For our normal feeling of (relative) liveliness, everybody we usually expect to be there has to be there.

So, the rest of my vacation. Dinner with Heather was good. I think I managed to ask the whole range of missionary questions that I usually wonder about. And we gave her some contact info for one of our other missionary friends so they could possibly collaborate in some way. I love connecting people like that.

That night I stayed up till 4:30 doing some audio editing. RumTumTugger, one of my TheologyWeb acquaintances, wanted me to record her singing happy birthday to Johnny, another TWeb acquaintance, because she wouldn’t be in Paltalk that night to sing it in person. But while she was singing it, she paused just before Johnny’s name because she didn’t want to accidentally sing my name or Brandalf’s, who was also in the chat room. This, of course, was too good not to parody, so I recorded some more of the conversation and made an “alternate” happy birthday song. It was so much fun. I laughed a lot while making it. And people on TWeb liked it too, so I was happy.

On Christmas Eve we went to church in the morning and in the evening. As usual my brother and I were greeted with the typical Southern enthusiasm by people we barely knew, but there was less of that this time, thank goodness. It was interesting to look around at people I grew up with and to see how much older they looked. I don’t get to Texas much, so I only see them once a year, if even that often.

Christmas day was good. Abbie’s friend Kimberly, who moved in with our family after graduation last summer, spent the morning with us. She said that’s the most presents she’s gotten in a long time (ever?), and I was happy we could be generous with her like that and treat her as part of the family. I got mostly books, which is always good. They were from my Amazon wishlist.

Abbie had ordered a book for me too, but it didn’t arrive until a couple of weeks after Christmas, -.- so instead she gave me the Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition. 🙂 Then I ordered the other two with an Amazon gift certificate, and back in Illinois I’ve been watching them with my LotR friend Tim. It’s nice to have an excuse to have him over, since he’s usually so busy and I rarely get to see him. We’ve been talking a lot during the movies, so I like to say we’re doing our own commentary track.

This is long enough for now and I want to eat lunch, so I’ll get to the rest of the vacation in another post. And there’s plenty more I have in mind to write about. I really will try to do it soon!