Happy 2nd Day of Christmas....

I'm blearily blinking in the cold, hard flourescent light of my office trying to deal with life. The run up to the holidays was such a madhouse this year with work and everything I never really got the "Christmas spirit". Looking at the current schedule, I figure I'll get around to getting in the mood around 12th Night. ;)

Even with all the kerfubble the whole thing went very well, starting with the firing off of the Yule log in the fireplace right before we started opening presents and ending with watching the anime series box set brought by my eldest son.

Someone told me that teenagers don't do the crack-of-dawn present thing. When is that going to happen for me? My 19-year-old younger son was up every 20 minutes all @&$%)@ night, and the whole gang was up by 8am. No rest for the wicked - not even the extremely wicked.

Game-wise we opened up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, NiGHTS, Need for Speed, and Mass Effect.

On top of the games, my eldest boy got some stuff he needed for deployment, a gift card for some other stuff I know he needs but I didn't know how to buy, and a book on how to be immature. It contains, among many other priceless gems of knowledge, detailed instructions for the making of armpit noises. This was tested out immediately upon opening. ;) I figured it might come in handy in case he starts to forget now that he's grown. My younger son got a new shirt and tie for work, some tools for his new mad scientist workbench, and a cushy new blanket for his bed he wanted.

The girls got these cool hematite magnetic necklace-thingys that you can wrap up into all sorts of bracelets and stuff and they stick together, the cushy new blankets they wanted, and books. A couple new series I know they were looking for and the paper collection of their new favorite webcomic. I was doing a quick check through my security logs after Thanksgiving I found they'd been hammering this poor guy's archive so I went and got them the books. To top them off, the main character wears this extravagant scarf, so I knitted them one to go with them. They were totally suprised. They cheered when they opened it.

The kids got me a Dilbert book and a special edition of "Real Genius". My monster-in-law got me pajamas and a Starbucks giftcard, my mom made me a whole new set of kitchen linens and fridge magnets. And she sent me seven quart jars of her best homemade jam (six of them made it - shipping heavy glass things from Alaska is a chancy business).

There was a whole lot more here from the Grammas and in general. Between my mom, my monster-in-law, and my grandmonster-in-law the kids make a pretty good haul.

We topped off the day by staying up to a really ugly hour of the morning watching an anime series. But we were having fun, and "work tomorrow" has little weight against "they're all growing up way way too fast" at times like this.

We're still not done with the Christmas thing. My BIL and his girlfriend are coming over Saturday to finish off, and the kids are chasing down some of their friends who were gone that they didn't get their gifts to before they left. I've got three more boxes of stuff that has to be finished off and sent.