austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

Candles in the window

Christmas just doesn't start as early as it does when you're a kid, or when you have kids around there to make sure it starts early. We slept in until the late morning at least, possibly noon, and exchanged cards before going downstairs to see who else was up.

Because of the press of events, not helped by bad weather, in the days leading up to Christmas we weren't able to get to the pet store and buy our rabbit any special treats, though bunny_hugger's mother was happy to give him some extra fruits and such. The mouse, too, didn't get anything particularly special. We've resolved to make good on that when we're able.

Opening presents takes longer than it does when you're a kid, too. While everyone had pretty much resolved that it was going to be a leaner Christmas than last time, there were still a healthy number of presents among the five of us, including one with the shiny, curly ribbon that bunny_hugger and I have been giving in gifts to one another for years now. Her mother particularly was kind enough to give me a scarf, which would complete the basic weather-proofing that I should have done a year plus ago, at least if I hadn't lost one of the gloves she'd knitted last year. bunny_hugger gave me a cheap pair of gloves that'll keep my hands covered while her mother works out whether she can knit a replacement.

I snuck upstairs a couple times, in the hopes of catching my family on the phone, something I was too shy to do the previous year. I caught my parents, who were rather confusingly in Harlem, with my brother-from-Massachusetts and his girlfriend and their child and I didn't really understand this because there had been some confusing volley of plans and changed plans about what they were all doing. At one point I had understood my brother and family were going to my other brother, the one in Maryland, for Christmas, and then my parents would go down for New Year's, with Maryland brother going up to his in-laws on the weekend in-between. That was apparently horribly out of date.

Anyway, they were having a good time, and were glad to hear my voice. Good, that.

Trivia: The 11 January 1672 issue of Transactions of the Royal Society includes a paper describing the construction of Newton's reflecting telescope. Source: The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time, Jason Socrates Bardi.

Currently Reading: Walkers On The Sky, David J Lake. This has an awfully interesting setup with a deep space colonized world with dim memories of Earth, etc, and whole rivers of force fields in the sky on which people build cities and sail ships, plus gods above and Morlocks below, but, then it goes getting plot all over this great setting that should've been one of those slow, talky, artificial-city movies of the mid 70s. Also it's got this synthesize-an-oppressive-religion-for-the-descendants thing that he also used in The Right Hand of Dextra, which isfdb.org suggests is part of a common series or at least common universe.

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