Christmas Eve

Seems like every time we shop for groceries, Em asks for Easy Cheese. And I always say no. But Santa, he'll come through.



I also got her the Bras & Broomsticks trilogy, a set of books she's mentioned almost as often as Easy Cheese.



Mo was easy: I got her a camera. She's always trying to get mine, and since she broke (inadvertently) my last one, I haven't been willing to let her use it. She hasn't taken nearly as many pictures as I would have expected, but I think she's partly getting used to the idea that it's her own camera, I'm not going to take it back.



Santa left us a note thanking us for the Peanut Butter & Pickle Sandwich as well as leaving us with socks, pants, carboy haulers (the dude thinks of everything) and candy.



I got some artwork from my kiddos, including a couple of Mo canvases I'm going to look into framing.



The candy, in the case of the girls, was left in metal lunchbox type things: Pirates of the Caribbean for Thing One and Sesame Street for Thing Two.







Then we went to my Mom's house for dinner and presents. Including, of course, my calendar, which went over well. As did my coup: a flight lesson for my bro. He's mentioned an interest in planes and learning to fly a couple times when I've run on at the mouth about rockets. It was more than I could swing by myself, but Mom and Dad went in with me and he's got a pilot's log and an hour of instruction coming to him. He will taxi, he will take off, he will maneuver the plane. The instructor does the landing part. And no doubt makes a sales pitch for the full course of lessons to become a licensed pilot.





Which is a thing people do, though not cheaply.

I think part of the appeal for me was the idea of giving a present that hadn't been stuck on a wish-list, but was something the recipient would truly enjoy. Part of it was, hey, I have no real interest in being a licensed pilot, and even I would dig the chance to take a taste like that.



I did spend some time coveting the camera my bro got from his father in law. When I bought my Canon last June (because Mo had broken mine, like I was saying, and because I'm an enormous baby who just can't breathe without a camera) the Powershot A570IS was about as good as it got without getting into crazy money. There were models I liked better, but they were in the $500 range.

I saw my brother's camera a few weeks back (in the store, not his actual camera), and did a double take. The SX1000 Powershot is a megapixel larger in the CCD department, but what blows me a way is it has a 10X zoom lense to my 4X. That's incredible for a pocket camera. And it runs about $50 to $75 more than what I paid last June for my camera.



Of course, I know, in six more months, there will be a camera that makes it look like chopped lever, probably for less money.

A good time was had by all. Except maybe Sam, who hid behind the curtain the whole time and hissed and growled when we tried to make him get in the Christmas Spirit. But he's always been as weird as he is hairy.



My only complaint was it was over too fast. I got the glut of holidays last year as we synchronized with my ex's brother, meaning it's her turn this year. I admit I got a bit spoiled, having them Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and so on.

Actually, I have a butt-load of pics to share from Christmas Day, too, but I'm not going to be getting them online tonight.

Calendar

I've been kicking the idea around for awhile. Maybe a couple of years in its primitive form, but for at least a year in terms of really wanting to do it right.



And working for a small commercial printer, I'm in a better-than-average position to do a family calendar that looks relatively professional without spending a fortune. Not for free, but doing something like this at cost is a pretty sweet deal.



But I procrastinated until it was almost too late. Almost, mind you. One of my tasks was to get as many family birthdays and anniversaries as possible, to include them as holidays on the calendar. Since I hadn't the foggiest notion when most of these events happened, I had to start gathering this information. And then there was the matter of the photos.



I bought my first digital camera not long after my ex and I separated. When it got broken last June, I felt like I was drowning without it and bought a replacement a few days later. Storage is cheap, so I tend not to delete pictures even when they're lame. I've always been this way, really. As a kid on a family vacation to Yellowstone, I took literally hundreds of pictures with my little 110. I remember all my paper-route (or lawn-mowing or whatever I did for the money) went for film and developing that summer. Somewhere in my house, I still have a four or five inch thick stack of pictures of mountains and trees that don't make me feel anything like the actual mountains and trees did.



The contemporary equivalent of that big stack of 4x6 prints is an external hard drive that has 28,502 pictures on it. That's an exact number, by the way, I'm not exaggerating for effect. And out of that stack, I needed to find twelve awesome shots of my daughters. One to put above each month.

Of course, if this isn't your first visit to Lobster Land, you already know that I could probably come up with twelve awesome shots from a single day. Not every single day, but there are days that would put a good run at it. So I launched Adobe Bridge and started combing through all these folders. When I found a shot I knew I'd want to consider, I copied it to a folder of prospective photos. These were then opened in Photoshop for a closer inspection. A few were culled at this point, but at the end of the search, I had 144 pics that were definite keepers.



What to do? Make a twelve year calendar?



I took a collage approach, and tried to keep pics with their respective months. Not always, but in general, if it's over October, it's a picture that was taken in October. This helped cull the list a bit, actually, because it made me chose between hero shots. I tended to prefer the newer photo if I was eliminating one, but not always. The 'grass angels' pic on the cover is one is from May of 2006.

In terms of holidays, I started with wanting to make sure I didn't miss any legit holidays. After I added Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, I started wondering about Muslim holidays and the next thing I know, I found a couple of web sites that list every holiday ever imagined by a fringe group or trade organization. So I included them. Well, not all of them, but National Goof Off Day (March 22) and Dance Like a Chicken Day (May 14), Repeat Day (June 3) and Repeat Day (June 3) all made the cut. As did Presidential Joke Day (August 11), Race Your Mouse Day (August 28) and National Beheading Day (September 2).



I didn't make up a single holiday. Why would I? January 10 was already Peculiar People Day, so even if I wanted to make things up, the work was done for me.

By now I'm cutting things close. Burning the midnight oil trying to get everything just so. And I knew I needed to go back through and proofread myself for txpos.



I'm not sure how many hours I have in this little project. Easily twenty or more. And I could have done more. As I printed it (on Christmas Eve), I noticed some photos that needed serious color correction. But fixing them would mean going back two steps to before things were flattened out for printing (transparency effects like drop shadows wreak havoc if you don't flatten them, which is sometimes a time consuming effort itself).

Then I had to cut them down and bind them. I'd made the calendar 15" wide and 11" tall, not realizing our spiral bind punch only goes to 14". Ooops. It was too late to change the size of the calendar, so I centered it up as best I could and let the spirals end about a quarter inch before each end. It still works, it's just not as elegant as I would have had it.



Oh, and drill a hole to hang it by, and finally wrap it in plastic because the handling I had to do to finish it was bad enough and I didn't want it getting scuffed any more before it gets to the grandparents and aunt and uncle it's headed to. And to my Ex: I didn't think until I realized she'd sent presents with the girls for me from them that I should have done the same thing, gotten them presents for their mother. If I'd realized I was going to make one of these calendars for her as well, I'd have included her birthday and the birthdays/anniversaries for her side of the family. Still, it's a scad of pictures of her two favorite people on earth.

And really, I take all these pictures and I blog them, but it's good to have another way to share them. Like with my Mom who has never seen this blog because she doesn't own a computer; doesn't even understand why someone would want to.



I might do this again next year, but I'm not going to wait so long to do it. I'm just like the panic-stricken customers we get in the shop wanting to turn their holiday cards in an hour because they didn't realize Christmas was coming again this year. So, I'll make sure and note exactly when this Christmas thing is happening in 2008. I'll just consult my handy Honyock Calendar. Let's see, Christmas...December 28. Damn, I knew I needed to proofread this thing.

'Twas The Night Before The Night Before

Santa makes an early run.  How does he figure out how to make sure and get the stockings filled on Christmas morning when Christmas morning is a moveable feast?



Maybe it's better not to think too hard about it.

Penultimate-Mas

I had the girls Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day this year (divorce teaches you to share and take turns in ways you'd never manage while still married). And with relatives travel schedules and whatnot, that meant the honyocks opened their Christmas at Grandpa Calvin's on the 23rd.



Twas the night before the night before Christmas, right? Well, okay, the afternoon. Em went with her favorite cousin and the grandparents to a big holiday musical while me and Mo hung back with the younger kiddos and my stepsister and her hubbie.



Mo liked her presents, but she liked the box of old Happy Meal prizes and miscellaneous cast-off toys from the closet even better. She goes through this box every time we visit there, and she tries to steal the junk out of it. She'll sneak it to the car, or slyly (right in plain sight) smuggle bits into coat pockets like I won't turn those pockets out before we leave. Which I always do, but it doesn't stop her trying.






It's not that the stuff is so precious, but if she empties the junk out of that box (and probably, eventually, clogs up my plumbing flushing it away, or pries the air vent cover off in her closet and stuffs it in my duct work), there won't be a junk box to play with.



Plus there's that whole annoying limit-setting part of parenting.



I couldn't figure out quite how the VeggieTales dance board thing worked when we got home, but me and Mo had fun building stuff with legos while Em did a sleepover with aforementioned favorite cousin and her new American Girl doll (Julie, the 70s chickie).

Yep, I'm an Antique

Okay, so I went to Christmas Eve service tonight and they had this kid do a folk interpretation of 'Do You See What I See?'

And he was very good. Played a ukulele (looked to be a nice one, at that) as accompaniment.

That mood-casting ability the greats have, this kid has a bit of that. The ukulele is such a simple instrument, most people think of it as a toy, but he had the audience eating out of his hand.

Anyways, when I saw him take the stage, I wondered, 'Does Arlo Guthrie know you raid his wardrobe?'

That, by the way, is a reference to a movie I would bet $50 the kid has never seen.

And speaking of references the kid wouldn't get, I approached him after the service. I figured the Arlo impersonation was intentional. He kind of looks like a young Arlo Guthrie, and there was a time when I'd have tried to affect the exact same mode of dress if I could have gotten away with it.

'Arlo Guthrie called, he wants his hat back,' I told him as I shook his hand. He said something like 'that's what I hear.' An older guy (which is to say someone approximately my age) said something like 'that's what I've been telling him.'

I told him I seriously enjoyed what he did and then thought to ask, 'You do know who Arlo Guthrie is, right?' I might as well have asked him how many Gerald Ford albums he owned. Hadn't heard of Woody Guthrie, either, though he recognized 'This Land is Our Land' from grade school. They taught the song to me in grade school, too: they gave up on repressing it by persecuting the pinkos who would sing such a thing because it's so much more effective to make it the kind of thing you'd be embarrassed to know.

I tried Googling to show you a picture of the hat in question, first on Arlo, then just in general. I think I must be mis-remembering the Arlo shot, the one I thought would have it, he's wearing a derby. His dad wore a similar hat, I think. Kind of like a felt rangers cap, but not quite. Probably has a fancy name I'm not finding.

As I told him he ought to check out Arlo, he'd probably like it given what he seems to be into, and while he's at it, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Utah Philips, etc., I recognized a look on the kid's face. Not because I'd ever seen it, but because I'd put that face on myself. When I was a teenager. When some old fart would suggest things I might dig...

Damn. I am truly old now.

Lights

With the rotation of holidays in the custody agreement, this was pretty much my last chance to drive around with the girls looking at the Christmas lights before Christmas. I'll have them some Christmas Eve, but there's other plans afoot that night.



I knew it had started snowing, but it seemed like the plows had been out awhile and the roads ought to be okay. Which they were as long as you drove sensibly.



Of course, I realized when I got past that point of no return, your safety depends on everyone else driving sensibly as well, and on the last Saturday before Christmas, don't bet on that.



We had gotten on I-35 to head up to Olathe: there's a neighborhood there that famously overdoes the holiday lights. In Northbound lane, we saw the cops had arrived at the scene of a pileup. Four or five cars spun in various attitudes and angles, with crumpled hoods and whatnot. In the ditch, in the road turned the wrong way, etc.



But in order to turn around and go home, at this point, I still had to drive all the way to 151st on I-35, and the road back was staked up with cars waiting behind the accident. Ambulances were coming up the shoulder past the two columns of cars.



So, in for a penny, we went ahead and drove through Sleepy Hollow.

I took back roads coming home, thinking to avoid the mayhem of I-35. Forgetting, until I was again committed to a course of action, that the back way is both hilly and windy. I worried about someone crossing the center line into me, and then I caught a weird bit of snow (the way it berms at the edges from the plows) and was nudged toward the center line myself. No one coming the other way, and I was going slow enough I was able to correct before I actually left my lane, but it was enough to underscore what an idiot I can be.

The Sound and the Fury (of Holiday Shopping)

Okay, while we were getting Em's specs, we hit the food court at Oak Park Mall and did a bit of Christmas shopping.



Neither girl wanted to wait in line for hours to sit on Santa's lap. Which I guess shouldn't be a relief since it's a sign they're outgrowing fat, bearded bastards (probably including me).



The food court was loud like an artillery range. I figured Mo would melt down. Or, the way things have gone lately, just have a seizure. But she did great. I got pizza from Original, the girls got Sonic. And after eating pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down, Mo (and for the uninitiated, she rarely speaks in sentences) looked right at me and said, 'Thank you, Daddy.'

Opportunity to Grow

Today was the first anniversary of when I was fired from a gig I'd had for a decade. And that I was damned good at, if I do say so.

I was traduced by a child I'd mistaken for an adult. The betrayal was then reinforced by a sociopathic Ken Doll who had been itching to get rid of me for about five years because of his own insecurities. And by a CEO who treasures the fear of his employees, who says 'terminations are a good motivator.'

Oh, and by the fact they were about to try outsourcing my gig to India. Which didn't work, but the mentality of the so-called leadership at TradeNet is such that if they didn't try stunts like that, they wouldn't know if the job was actually worth more than $4 an hour.

Yeah, I'm still bitter about it. Even though I'm in a much better gig in a lot of ways, it wasn't a change I chose. The euphemism I remember from my management days was 'given an opportunity to grow.' Would that all people who think shit-canning someone on false pretense with no unemployment and no severance can be called an opportunity to grow would be given the chance to spend more time with their families.

Cheaters

Em got new glasses.  Two pairs, though she's only interested in wearing the big, boxy Tina Feys.



She was encouraged to get a wire frame pair for the backups (it was a two-fer deal), partly because with the fickle ways of fashion, the boxes could go from being überhip to über-don't-do-it (as such glasses have been for most of eyeglass history).



Of course they look great on her. But then, what wouldn't?

Yuck

The dark underbelly of my gig as a graphic artist is when I have to clean the film processor.

We don't do much film these days, most of it's direct to plate. But the big press takes metal plates and we don't have a metal platesetter, so that's film and stripping and burning.



The film processor is waiting in line at the Antiques Road Show, but it still gets dirty. Meaning the film coming out of it gets all scuzzy and useless.

So I wear my grubbies in to work and spend half the day taking the thing apart and scrubbing parts and taking parts apart and scrubbing their parts and then trying to figure out how it all goes back together. With minimal parts leftover.



We don't use this camera anymore, though. It's still there because it's the technological equivalent of Confederate Bonds. Nobody else is shooting shit on a camera like this either, so there's not really a market for used Kenros. Your old 35mm camera? Meet its 18 inch counterpart.



I still love the thing, though. If I had a place in my home (such as the foyer of my dream loft), I'd want it there, first thing you see when you walk in. But alas, it's just a shelf for storing the imagesetter's film on...