Christmas Passed and Christmas Presence
Christmas Day festivities...
Brunch
We woke up Christmas morning, got in a few quick showers, and blazed over to my parents' house on roads we hadn't seen so empty since the height of The ScamdemicTM back in 2020.
Then Athennia, Kelly, and my parents cooked brunch while Steve and I basically sat around and did nothing.
Athennia and I are always so appreciative when Olivia helps our daughter learn to read :)
See this dog? His name is Spot... and my God, does Spot run fast."
Athennia discovered how to replicate Cinnabon cinnamon rolls...
We popped 15 of those bad boys in the oven; but, when we took them out, it was apparent that some sort of mitosis must've happened in there somewhere on the way to "...until golden brown"...
...by a factor of 1.06667?
...Is that biblically accurate?
We iced 'em up for a white Christmas...
...And then we devoured as many as we could...
...And, yeah: Merry Christmas, taste buds. I can safely say we'll never need to pay for Cinnabon ever again!
Christmas Passed
After brunch we adjourned to the living room to exchange gifts, and presents were being passed around and flying in every direction.
Riley had asked for cash (probably so she could score her next hit of cinnamon rolls); but Kelly also wanted to give her a present she could actually open, too...
And Liv and Hannah gave me another groundhog for my unofficial collection...
Liv and Hannah got plenty of presents...
But most of us also seemed content to employ Liv as a mule to run our presents back and forth to each other...
We didn't pay for priority shipping though; so Liv took a little longer than expected to get our gifts across the room to our parents...
Hopefully the wait was worth it!
Or maybe they'll just trade the thing for a hit of cinnamon in a seedy back alley somewhere.
My parents gave me (among other things) a bunch of artwork by a guy named Cody up in New York...
Kitten and I gave Liv and Hannah some kinetic sand...
And eventually our gifts for Kelly and Steve made their way across the room...
Kitten found Steve a collage of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' album Californication (Steve's farovite album by his favorite band), and we got Kelly a gift certificate to her spa and nail place.
And we got Christmas ornaments for them as well...
...Or tried to, at least: Some schmuck on Etsy charged Kitten $20+ for this "Red Hot Chili Peppers" Christmas ball that turned out to be four strips of electrical tape that looked like a pre-schooler had applied them...
...And the first Krispy Kreme decoration we ordered for Kelly arrived all blurry from a shoddy print job.
So...
If you want something done right, you've gotta do it yourself! And I spent a couple hours on a Friday night back at the beginning of the month, designing two new ornaments from scratch so we could have Hallmark print them on sturdy pieces of metal.
Kitten and I were totally pumped when those things finally arrived!
But hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
Speaking of which, how the hell does this hacker keep getting through everyone's defenses year after year?!
Schastlivogo Rozhdestva, Koley!
RUSSIAN says...
Ha-HA! I are haked a family Christmas for a fourth consecutive year, and nobody are even suspecting it!
Koley are get such presents this time! Now we are see what happen.
A children are always make excellent pawn: Kids are work cheap and not pay close attention to a surroundings, so a haker are pay a kid to deliver the present and nobody are even know how it come from Mother Russia!
Such smile! Koley are always love the Popeyes :)
But money are tight at a current time until RUSSIAN hake a bank or a Bitcoin :(
You are always avoid a surveillance at all cost: If you are absolutely must need to show a face on the camera, you are make a blurry so you are maintain the anonymity!
Are give unsuspecting kid a next present for delivery...
Another Popeye? Are must be Koley lucky day!
Koley not resist a greatest hits!
Full Popeye survival kit. RUSSIAN only steal the iodine tablet...
Are never underestimate a depth of human greed: If you are give a free gift, are maybe only one man in a thousands are can resist. Are not even suspect a Trojan horse!!
...Here, Mommy... this is from some shady guy across the room.
Ah, yes; now you are see how easily a mission are accomplished?
Blessed Yule, Koley! A present look like a Dunkin? But RUSSIAN are Trojan horse the Popeye instead! HA-ha-ha-ha!
I Hope This Doesn't Succubus...
Kevin says...
Even though Riley has something awesome coming for her birthday in just a couple weeks, I wanted to get her something she wasn't expecting that might help her expand her horizons...
It was a toss-up between Make Yourself by Incubus or Mer de Noms by A Perfect Circle, and I decided to opt for Incubus because I think she'll find the lyrics a lot more relatable at this age.
And of course I put together a little note and introduction, to hopefully get her interested in giving the album a listen!
Ages 34 and Up?
How many grown-ass adults does it take to complete a simple children's puzzle?
Christmas Presence
Eventually we packed up our new gifts and headed home—and I wrote a bit of code while Kitten took a nap—and then... something kind of weird happened.
So, I use an app called SyncThing to clone any photos or videos I take on my phone over to my computer—since that's where I'll be working with them, organizing them, editing them, and backing them up.
I just have SyncThing dump any new files into a directory called "Sync" as soon as I take a photo or video, and I deal with the files in that directory on a regular basis—moving them to where they need to go and such, with the exception of a few dozen stragglers that just sit in there indefinitely because I haven't decided what to do with them...
Now, as I'm sure everyone who's touched a computer at any point in the last 20 years knows, when you open a picture in a directory full of other pictures, pretty much any modern operating system will give you the option of thumbing through all those other pictures in a slideshow of sorts.
So, whenever I come home from some event where I took a bunch of photos, I'll inevitably come into this folder to check out how they all turned out. And as you can see from the screenshot above, the first image in the directory is a pic from some dumb YouTube video that Kitten and I watched before bed back in early November (because I thought the subject matter was funny, and I wanted to remember it at the time)...
So, still with me? This is the first image in the directory—which means that, whenever I come into the directory to look at any new pictures that I just recently took, my computer will assemble a slideshow of all the pics; and if I scroll through all the new ones, I'll eventually get looped back around to this bimbo again—and I'll know that I've reached the end of the new pics.
Now... all that is to lay the groundwork to explain how, when Kitten woke up from her nap on Christmas Day afternoon and asked how all my pictures turned out, I popped into this directory and we scrolled through all of them together—with me naturally expecting to eventually hit Bimbo here once we got to the end.
But instead—even though I'm at a complete loss for how it could even be possible—we hit this picture...
This is of course a picture I took of my dad's gravestone on 01 November when Kitten, Riley, and I went out to Gettysburg to explore Devil's Den and visit my Aunt Jill and Uncle Terry...
This picture has not been in this directory since the first week of November.
And, at any rate, this was just one picture out of about 250 that I took that day... so, the odds of something glitching and this particular picture just happening to be the only one affected are... I don't even know.
I'm sure there must be a logical explanation: After all, there always is. But even still, this is one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me, and I'm at an absolute loss for how to explain it.
But wait; there's more!
An hour or two later we started thinking about what to do for dinner, and Athennia mentioned that 21 Chinese Kitchen was open for another 45 minutes.
And Riley and I can pretty much always go for Chinese food; so Kitten and I hopped in the car and drove down the road to go pick it up.
We watched the guy chuck all our stuff in the bag: entrees, sauces, fortune cookies, napkins. We thought nothing of it...
...Headed home.
...Dug in.
Toward the end of the meal, Riley was the first one to grab a fortune cookie...
...Opened it up.
...Something about being a shooting star or some crap like that.
Then Kitten grabbed her fortune cookie a few moments later...
...Got the same exact fortune as Riley.
So then I reached for mine—noting as I did so that the guy at the restaurant had apparently given us a fourth cookie as well.
I still had a couple bites of dinner left to finish, but I claimed my cookie anyway—leaving the fourth one sitting there in the center of the table.
Then Kitten reached out and grabbed that last one...
...Opened it up.
...And found... nothing.
An empty fortune cookie—which of course happens from time to time, and there's nothing particularly noteworthy about it except that maybe the recipient of that cookie feels kind of cheated and everybody laughs about it.
But on top of the incident with the pictures just a little while earlier, it kind of felt like the universe was saying, Yeah, so there's a fourth person here at the table... but that person doesn't exist in the future in the way that you other three do; so there's not a fortune in that fourth cookie.
I don't know.
Kitten says I should just accept the "gift" for what it was and not question how it could have happened.
But that's not the way I'm wired; so I'm still trying to figure it out :)
In any case...