Part 2, Christmas Week

The Christmas tale continues. Here's the first installment.

TUESDAY: Christmas, of course! We woke up at 9 and moseyed downstairs once my mom had passed us. We don't do Santa much anymore, as the Brother is going to be eighteen in a few weeks. My mom does fill the stockings with little gifts, though, like wind-up toys and Christmas candy (Daddy fills her stocking with Lindt chocolates and scented soaps). Inexpensive fun things. This year was kind of lame because Daddy was down watching TV when we woke up, and then we sat around waiting while my mom put breakfast in the oven and they watched MORE TV- and not even something Christmasy, they were watching a robot movie. Grr. But they stopped when Mummy and I finished making breakfast and we opened the stocking gifts, all wrapped in tissue paper. Then, as breakfast cooked, we started the other family presents-- I gave my sister a scarf, my brother a book about numbers, my dad a bottle of special olive oil and my mom a little cosmetic bag for her purse (she needed one, her old one broke) and an organic candy bar.

My parents gave me lots of stuff-- this is what they do instead of buying me stuff I need or want at other times. So I got a Leatherman tool, and plush microbes from ThinkGeek (syphilis, malaria and mono), and Age of Mythology for my computer because I am a myth geek and have wanted it for years but couldn't afford it. And I finally got a new hair dryer to replace the one that broke. Shrewd's making me a scarf but she's been sick and couldn't finish it in time. I don't mind, though. The Brother gave Daddy a collection of Agatha Christie movies, including The Man in the Brown Suit, which is a movie that Daddy taped off the TV years ago, but which was then accidentally taped over by Shrewd. Daddy loved it and was disappointed as hell. He was thrilled, as was Shrewd, who is FINALLY out of the doghouse.

Soon breakfast was done. Christmas breakfast for us is almost as big as dinner. The traditional family Christmas breakfast is an egg casserole (part veggie and sausage, part sausage only, part veggie only), cinnamon rolls hot from the oven, homemade tea breads and fresh-squeezed orange juice. We finished presents after breakfast, then cleaned up the wrapping paper so that the house would be ready when Ryter arrived.

Ryter came soon after, and we talked and helped with dinner until it was time to eat. Dinner was tenderloin with peppercorn sauce and stuffed scrod with Newburg sauce; sweet potatoes, my mother's famous cloverleaf rolls, peas, broccoli, shrimp cocktail, sweet baby carrots and probably something else I forgot. It was wonderful, as my mom's cooking always is, even without the traditional popovers Shrewd usually makes (she was too sick to handle food safely).

Ryter opened my gift and I opened his; I gave him a T-shirt of Emperor Constantine Paleologos and he gave me a collection of Phillip K. Dick novels. My parents also gave him some maps of the White Mountains for hiking in the spring, and he gave Daddy a bottle of rum, for general over-21 consumption. The Brother and Daddy played with their new mini RC helicopters.

After we cleaned up from dinner we played Trivial Pursuit (Daddy and Mummy against the Brother, myself, and Ryter) and my team lost miserably. They got lots of easy questions. We had pie and cheesecake for desert and split up, Shrewd playing with her brand new laptop (boy did she need it), the Brother and Daddy playing Scrabble and Mummy setting up her new vacuum cleaner from my grandmother, while Ryter and I hung out, watched some Bones, and then said our good nights.

It was a marvelous Christmas all around.

"I and my decapitated popsicle will now retire upstairs, THANK YOU VERY MUCH"

So I have discovered that it's very hard to drive home when you're crying for the last 45 minutes of the hour-long trip.

And now, I'll make you wonder, and start at the beginning.

Let's see... My Day, by Basiorana. After a quick trip to the gym and a shower, I headed over to the school to meet with my old guidance counselor, who was thrilled to see me, showed me the image of me she stitched into her quilt (the little tiny pencil in my hair was priceless), then gave me information to pass along to Shrewd and the Brother about jobs while offering nothing for me.

Figures.

Anyway, I proceeded to drive up to Dover for my therapy appointment, and after that, headed over to Ryter's. I was driving along a long, straight stretch of road at about 50, 55 mph in a 35 mph zone and I passed a cop. Thinking, Aww, damn..., I slowed and kept going, watching as he did a U-turn and followed me to the highway on-ramp, whereupon he turned on his lights and I immediately pulled over.

I got a warning. I mean, he put me into the system and nothing came up, I'm sure, so I got a verbal admonishment and was sent on my way. I've been driving kind of slow since then; I was always kind of proud of the fact that I'd never been stopped by a cop for anything and that's no longer the case, which I find mildly depressing, but I didn't get a ticket or even a written warning so that's good, at least. Ryter mentioned that he'd noticed the Durham police are able to devote much more time to catching speeders once school gets out, so I'll be especially careful this summer.

I met up with Ryter, anyway, and we went to go get stuff for his new lizard tank. He's getting a bearded dragon, got it approved by his landlady and everything. He's really excited, it's cute. He's going to name it Jesus (Hay-SOOS, not JEE-sus), for Jesus shall be his name (He said it, not me...). We got the tank and all, stashed it in the back of the car securely, and then went to get more climbing wood at another pet store, a few towns over. We had just passed the exit we would have taken to go back to his house when the skies opened up in terrible, torrential rain. Ryter decided we might as well keep going, and I didn't object.

We got to the parking lot, headed in, and a few seconds too late Ryter noticed that the lot was flooded. He realized this because his car was in a very, very deep puddle. Like, caulk the wagons and float across kind of puddle. After a few tries, the car moved and he parked. "On three, we run," he declared, and on three, I sprinted out of the car and over to the covered sidewalk, where a man was waiting to inform me that the front bumper of Ryter's car was currently floating in the waters of the Giant Puddle of Doom.

Much rain, bumper-fetching and bumper-cramming-into-the-back-seat later, the water-swept part was secured in the car, and we went to the pet store. Shoes squishing, I also stopped by Fashion Bug to grab a dry shirt for when we got back to his apartment. And, on the way back, it started to hail, too, so I was suddenly petrified I'd come back to see my car damaged or something. And, tornado watches, flashes of lightning, nonstop thunder... Yeah, not so fun.

Plus we got back to his apartment and the power went out, which displeased him greatly. But we set up both the terrarium and his bookcase, then went out and bought a chess game in a lull to occupy ourselves (he checkmated me in three moves, then in four moves-- I fail, but hey, I voted for Pretty Pretty Princess), but as soon as we got back, the power went back on.

None of this has anything to do with why I started to cry on the way back home, though. I'll go into it more when I'm not so tired, but suffice it to say that I'm very frustrated for my inability to ask for things I want. Need, yes, I'll ask for that. Want, not so much. It's driving me crazy.