Celebrating….

So I’ve been trying to remember what it is a person does when he isn’t working on a book 10 hours a day, then blogging, running a fundraiser, and mailing t-shirts for the other six hours he’s awake.

Sarah informed me that what a person does is go get a Christmas tree. She informed me of this very firmly. Several times. With increasing levels of frantic need in her voice. Getting a tree was very important to Sarah. She made it clear that if we did not go pick out a tree, together, our relationship would suffer irreparable damage.

So we got a tree. We did this pretty much the very day after I posted the last blog. It made me feel like a big man lifting it up and tying it to the roof of the car. Oot watched me with muted awe, amazed that I could lift up something so big.

I sawed off the bottom, which is more exercise than I’ve had in months. And while I wasn’t that excited about it at the beginning, the tree is actually pretty awesome.  It makes the house smell piney and nice.

We also made gingerbread men to hang on the tree, because Sarah wanted to, and I owe her because I’ve been neglecting family-ish things pretty severely over these last several months.

I’ve never decorated a gingerbread man before, but I was pretty sure it was supposed to go something like this:

And so that’s the first one I did. Then I tried to do a Santa, but it really sucked. Then I got bored.

You see, I have a strong contrary element in my personality. Plus I have a real problem when it comes to strictly adhereing to genre guidelines. So my next gingerbread people were more… meta.

I’m especially proud of this one:

To me, his expression really conveys the mute horror and existential doubt occasionally brought about by the holiday season.

At first Sarah expressed a little mute horror of her own at my cookie decorations. But there are only so many cute gingerbread people you can make before it starts to grate on you a little, so eventually she got into the spirit of things and made an emo gingerbread man. I made one too…

I think they’re in love….

After that, just a couple days before Christmas, our car broke down. Sarah was actually driving it down to our mechanic because the clutch was behaving oddly, and it died about a mile before she got there. Transmission was utterly shot. They can fix it, but it will take a couple days to get the parts.

By the time we got the diagnosis on the 24th, all the rental places were closed. And you can’t rent a car on Christmas. And in Stevens Point you can’t rent a car on the Sunday after Christmas either.

So the precious few days I’d been counting on to catch up with my shopping were spent car-less. And since I couldn’t shop, I spent some time playing Fallout New Vegas instead.

Merry Christmas to me.

pat

P.S. In a related Christmas Miracle, the Kingkiller shirts showed up on the 24th. My assistants are off for the holidays, so I had to borrow a car to move them over to the place where we do the packaging. Yesterday I slogged away for about 10 hours to get as many of them packaged up as I could. I really owe the folks at the post office something nice for putting up with me….

So rest assured, t-shirts are on the way as quickly as I can get them out the door.