Hope everyone had/is having/will have a great holiday. The blog here is not. The comment spam has continued to the point where I’ve closed the comments and pings for now. I won’t have time for two blogs for the next few weeks anyway, so any blogging I can do will be at Blogger, where word verification has stopped the spammers, at least so far. I’ll revisit the whole thing in a few weeks.

Today was the day to get the office gifts finished once and for all. This is a category of Christmas shopping that drives me nuts. It’s not a cut and dried kind of thing. It’s hard to know where you draw the line for office gift exchanging. The only thing you can be sure of is, someone who you haven’t got a gift for will give you one.

That wasn’t too big a problem for the last few years. I was the receptionist and everyone gives the receptionist something. The receptionist is not expected to reciprocate in most cases. As of late Wednesday afternoon I stopped being the receptionist and am now in the accounting department, at least temporarily. This is all good. It involves a raise and an office for as long as it lasts. But I’m completely out of synch in the gift category.

I don’t mind giving up the Christmas gifts that the receptionist gets, except maybe for that really nice American express check that one of them gives me each year. Overall though, I’m over gifts, especially if it means that I don’t get the silverplated snowman tray from one particular supervisor for a third year in a row. Nothing says, “I don’t give a shit.” like silverplate, unless it’s the same silverplate gift as the year before. I can’t use anymore spa gifts either. I don’t use them at all as a matter of fact.

I don’t think I did a great job of choosing gifts for my co-workers either this year. It seems like my brain is on hold this year. Or I just didn’t have it in me to keep going to places until I saw just the right thing. I hereby resolve that next year I will figure out who gets gifts and start looking for them by August. Or even better, order them over the internet.

In between holiday tasks I’m redesigning my son’s band’s site and trying to reign in this baby shower. I promised to start the new project for the old client right after the shower. And of course, I have to learn the new job. Personally, I’d be more than happy to just hang out in my little corner of the world and blog. I need to get less of a life.

If you remember where you were when you heard, then it was probably one of those sad occasions that rocked your world. My husband had started to work and heard about it on the car radio. He turned around and came back to tell me. I was in the livingroom with the baby.

Now that baby is a musician himself and is heading north as this it written to spend another winter on the road. That leaves his mother to contemplate the bad roads conditions he and the other band members will have to brave in their old van as they drive from city to city, sometimes in the dead of night. Always on too little sleep.

John Lennon had paid those dues long, long ago. He’d gotten past the stage of dying of self-inflicted wounds, too. Who would have guessed that he was going to have to pay for his stature as a generational icon with his life?

So, we went to my brother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing along my mother and sister and huge quantities of food including an Un-Turkey. The Un-Turkey was for my sister. She felt we should bring the whole thing so she could share. Every year she’s sure someone else will want to try it. Every year, no one does.

Upon arrival we learned that a relative was hovering at death’s door. It was an aunt of my husbands - the families lived next door to one another until Florida sucked them in. We thought she’d come through a recent surgery just fine, but there were complications. It was a sad but classic case of “The operation was a success but the patient died.” They took her off life support the day after Thanksgiving. And it really was sad. Her husband, children and grandchildren are going to miss her very much. It was way too soon, too.

We spent Monday and Tuesday commuting between work and the wake and Wednesday was the funeral. Returning to normal life I found the following:

- In two days 72 message had appeared in my spam folder. That’s in the e-mail account that I use and check every day. I’m afraid to look at the others.

- Some as yet uncounted (and undeleted) spam comments have been posted to this blog. This is becoming a constant annoyance. I don’t have time to moderate in a timely manner and I certainly don’t have time to deal with this. It makes me think that maybe I should just do this whole thing on Blogger.

- I have a newsletter to take apart and post parts of to an organization’s site. Also still working on the band’s redesign. I think I’m onto something. Now I have to put it together in a less rough draft.

- Huge piles of laundry accumulated. Clothing multiplies in the hamper, but then makes itself scarce when you’re looking for something to wear. There is no way we could worn the number of items that were in the hamper. In fact, I don’t think we own that many.

- My holiday to-do lists have grown to frightening proportions. I have to attack them this weekend. They’ll probably attack right back.

I have to confess something. The thing I like best about the holiday season is when it’s over. I don’t have time enough in the day to live my normal life at the pace I would like. Providing holiday cheer is really too much to ask.

So, semi-hiatus has probably begun again.