Christmas Report

I ended up having a pleasant, if extremely low-key Christmas holiday.

The week before Christmas is the darkest of the year, plus I had the stomach flu, plus everyone was still in school and had a million parties and end of year activities to organize, and the combination of all this probably wore me down more than it would have even a few years ago.

I didn't eat while I had the stomach flu for four days and lost nine pounds, which put me down to 216, which is the lightest I had been in many years. Since I recovered of course I have been eating a little more regularly and am back up to 220. However I have been having smaller portions, not having seconds, not eating late at night, so hopefully I will be able to keep this up and be able to hold at this weight or even work myself down a little more. Of course the big test is when I become depressed again, which will probably be within a few weeks.

New Year's Eve is still to come, and I am looking forward to it, as I always do, as the last gasp of Christmas. It has become fashionable to dislike this day, and I suppose it has some structural flaws, but in recent years I have tried to embrace it, have a little party at home, play some games. I suppose it appears more attractive once you have resigned yourself to a modest life in which nothing spectacular or scintillating will never happen, and can sense the approach of your own death. That clinging to Christmas for another four or five hours every year comes to have some appeal.

I am ridiculous in my adaptation of technology. I got an MP3 player as my gift this year. I have finally decided to give up on playing CDs in the car because almost all the songs skip after about five plays, and I am hoping this will work better. Also I am hoping I can download some podcasts from the internet and listen to them (I think you can do this) because this is something I simply do not have time to do at home.

We went to Odiorne Point State Park near Portsmouth on Sunday. We walked along the rocks by the sea for about an hour but then it started to pour rain (if you saw highlights of the Patriots-Buffalo football game last weekend you have an idea of the weather). They have a little science center there where we we able to take refuge. It is the sort of small scale museum I like, cheap (around $20 for all seven of us to get in), simple displays, not too much to take in. I think they had six fish tanks for example. They had two blue lobsters, which are exceedingly rare, one in 500,000 I think. They are the same species as regular lobsters, just a few have this coloring, which I had not known. I also learned that there used to be vacation homes all over the point where the park is, but the Navy seized them during World War II and built fortifications to protect the nearby Naval Yard. I'm not sure why the land was not returned to the former owners after the war but it wasn't. Evidently nobody very important had a place there. After this we went to Pizza Hut in the dark, with the rain pouring down, all of which took me back to my high school days in Maine. My wife commented that the same music was playing the last time she was in Pizza Hut--in 1989.

With all of our children if we do go out we usually have to go to pizza places because you can order in bulk (the pizza) and have them share it rather than everyone having to order his own meal. This works at Chinese restaurants too, though some of the children will only eat chicken fingers.

We have snow, currently about four inches with a top coating of slush from last night's rain/snow mix that is now frozen into a crust with the drop in temperatures--currently 8 degrees, going down to -1. We had a white Christmas, which we have here 90% of the time, though last year we did not.

My writing is really in a (distraction--completely forgot the adjective I was going to put in here) state. I am muddling, muddling, muddling through. Got to go for tonight. Happy New Year!