Hi there, blog! Long time no see!

I know I've been a bad little blogger. I've been busy! Mostly I've been doing the following:

1) Playing Scramble (Boggle) on Facebook. Yep, I'm Facebookin' these days. When I'm not playing Scramble, I'm either reading irrelevant updates from people who never spoke to me in high school, or I'm creating ironic Facebook Groups. It's a big time-suck.

2) In-lawing. Hank's folks arrived last Tuesday so there's been lots of family time. However, since I hate all holiday activities and Hank's step-dad is blind with some leg injuries, mostly it's been just the two of us staring at each other in the house while the ladies went shopping for Christmas colored lipsticks or whatever the hell they were doing.. You ever try to have a staring contest with a blind guy? I have no idea if I won or lost. We've been busy trading stories. He's full of world-traveling stories while I spin a mean data-wrangling yarn.

3) Being a grinch! God DAMN I hate the holidays. I was complaining about this very thing to Daisy's piano teacher the other day (who I am CRUSHING in Scramble) by telling her that I was playing my part in Christmas culture by adopting the Grinch role. She explained that in the Grinch story he doesn't stay a grinch. He comes around by the end of the story.

Dammit. I even make the Grinch look like a sentimental old coot.

4) Playing games. One of Daisy's Winter Present Tree Day presents was the game "Pandemic", because kids love games about global outbreaks of infectious diseases. You know, for kids!

Ok, although Daisy has no particular affinity for Avian Flu, she does really enjoy activities where we all work as a team rather than compete against each other. Even though we have a video game or two like that, we didn't have any board games that worked that way. One of the main characteristics of Pandemic is that it's a completely cooperative game. Either everyone wins and the earth is cured of the deadly diseases, or everyone loses and humanity succumbs to global epidemics. It's a team effort. Pandemic turned out to be a really well-designed game and we had a good time with it. Many thanks to Matthew Baldwin and his excellent review of the game at his blog, Defective Yeti.

We also played Apples to Apples, which holds up well as a family activity, assuming your family likes to argue and lobby on the behalf of ridiculousness as much as ours seems to.

5) Dishes! Man, with extra people in the house, I spend an inordinate amount of time doing the dishes. It really cuts into my staring-contest-with-the-blind-guy hours.