24 December 1997: A White Christmas!

Wednesday, 24 December 1997:

A White Christmas!

Last night I had people over to play Magic. We have one guy, Zoe, who has some incredibly powerful decks, mainly because he has at least four of each multicolored land, and multicolored lands go for about $12.00 a pop on the resale market; they've been long since discontinued. He has many other excellent cards, too. So it's a real challenge. Of course, the rest of us often seem to be cursed with bad luck in playing these days.

Regardless, we had a fun time, and Matt and I did win a couple against Zoe and Mike. And our victories were hard-fought, and perhaps the sweeter for it.

I finished The Armageddon Rag last night. What a great book! A satisfying ending, too. I highly recommend it - assuming you can find it, as it's been out-of-print for some time. I've been looking for it for years, and it was worth the wait.

Epic is perhaps a little on the stingy wide with its vacation time; we have to work half-days on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and we have a ceiling of 3 weeks of vacation per year. Hopefully that will change at some point. Anyway, I did have to go into work this morning, which was especially hard since there was no hot water for the shower this morning. (That's the first time that's ever happened here; grr!)

Afterwards I ran a number of errands - buying cat food, person food, and waiting for this week's comics to come in. They finally did, and I was pleased to see the latest issue of Castle Waiting has arrived. Good series! There's also a semi-sequel to the excellent Kingdom Come out, called Gog, with great artwork by Jerry Ordway.

When I got home, I put five Beatles albums on the CD player and set it to "shuffle". While listening to those, I logged on and looked up various information about the football playoffs. I'm only a (very) marginal football fan, but I'm probably going to join a playoff pool at work because I want to see if some of my statistical analysis (learned from being a baseball fan) can be put to good use. We'll see. It looks like I'm going to pick Denver to beat Green Bay in the Super Bowl, by a field goal.

This evening I went to my friend Karen's place and we sat around and talked, and played Scrabble (I won, narrowly), and went out for a walk. It turns out we're getting several inches of snow tonight, so we will have a white Christmas tomorrow. I can't remember the last time we had one, although maybe I just haven't been paying attention (there is precedent).

Whoops, it's after midnight, so I guess it's a white Christmas right now!

I have no big plans for Christmas - except to sleep in, a task which I should probably get started on. I've been very low on sleep lately, and have had a real hard time dragging myself out of bed in the morning. I really need to catch up during these off-days we have coming up.

Like I was telling Karen: Maybe we have the urge to do something special for Christmas (or other major holidays), but there's a lot to be said for taking it easy in the comfort of your own, familiar home. Which is just what I hope to do...

Michael Rawdon (Contact)