Anyway, we left Akron Saturday for Westfield and stayed with Amy's parents. We took Maggie, that pregnant foster dog that we found over Thanksgiving, with us because we knew she was nearly ready to pop. She'd gotten huge over the few days before, and we didn't want to leave her with a petsitter like that.

So we hit Indiana late Saturday night, and spent Saturday, Sunday and part of Monday with Amy's parents. We had just gotten paid on Saturday and hadn't had a chance to buy anything for anyone for Christmas, and strangely Amy's parents demanded that we all meet Sunday afternoon to exchange gifts. This meant we had to buy like a half-dozen gift cards to not look like a total sham.

As we prepared to leave Amy's parents, Maggie started to give birth on Monday night. Four hours later, she had pooped out eight (yes, eight) puppies. Small dogs don't normally have that many puppies, and apparently Maggie was the exception. All of the puppies are doing well according to the vet we visited the next day in Muncie.

So, gratuitous puppie pictures, right?





We named all eight of them a couple of days ago. They are all placenames because I was really bored. Their names are: Adelaide, Boston, Colorado, Dakota, Fargo, Georgia, Houston and Indy (for Indianapolis). It was really interesting to watch them be born, not necessarily from that whole "life is beautiful" perspective, but strictly scientifically. It was interesting to see Maggie do whatever she had to do, and have these babies totally without our help. Humans don't do that anymore. Beyond that, these guys are growing like weeds. I'll be putting up more pictures very soon.

Muncie was, as usual, an adventure. It seemed like coming for Christmas was mostly a large inconvenience in some cases for both sets of parents, yet if we hadn't we'd been in terrible kinds of trouble. Oh well. Anyway, in Muncie, the highlights of the couple days were watching "Six Feet Under" while my mom slept and my dad worked. They're both pretty stressed with everything, so they were quite tense the whole time we were there.

Oh, and the day we walked in on Tim and his hoodrat friend smoking pot. Yeah, that was interesting, though my poor mom didn't pick up on it. And here I was, as a teenager, worried that my mom knew exactly what pot smelled like and then my brother smokes it in the house and she had no clue... See, as I've said, I have no problem with marijuana. It's not my personal vice, but I'm not opposed to using it. However, I am opposed to using it in a house where it's not allowed, where an asthmatic cancer patient lives while you're on probation and due for a drug test two days later.

The good news from the weekend were some presents (electronic compass, doggy backpack, ice cream/sorbet maker, family bible) and Amy's borrowing of one of mom's work laptops.

[Bible Sidebar: The original bible we got, from my parents, was a Thomas Kincade edition. You know, that stupid "Painter of Light" motherfucker who paints stupid landscape scenes with quaint houses, has a machine paint copies and sells them for hundreds of dollars in mall storefronts? Yeah, it had his paintings all through it. We had to take it to the Christian bookstore they bought it from and exchange it, because we both hate that Thomas Kincade guy. His paintings are terrible. They're all the same, and they're all nothing. I think people are mostly obsessed with him because he's so tame and so "family-friendly," although I'm not sure provocative art ever destroyed a family of onlookers. I mean, I really really really hate that guy, and Amy isn't impressed either. We ended up getting some other family bible instead, which is nice because we wanted one for tradition purposes, even though it's increasingly likely we'll never have kids which is the whole point. Meh....]

[Art sidebar: Amy and I have discussed this, and we're going to have murals in our house when we own one. See, what we're going to do is have various artist friends come in and paint anything they want in one room, as long as it doesn't involve genitalia or like really really gory things. I think that would be fun, right?]

Anyway, the weird thing is, now that we've been away for a while, Akron is definitely my home in my mind, and Muncie is now some sort of twisted, fucked up alternative reality when I'm there. See, it's like I regress to childhood and stay in my parents house and live off of their food, but then everything has progressed to this weird future state that's something like the alternate 1985 in Back to the Future where Biff had given himself the sports almanac. I mean, it really is odd.

Were we always this disconnected? Maybe so, but distance helps bring it back.

Now that we're back home, things are settling into a vacation-time routine. Amy'll have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off due to luck of scheduling, as those are her normal days off. Why didn't we go home those days? We wanted a Christmas of peace and relaxation to ourselves, not one where we're shuttling among 50 or so family members.

(And I think if I had gone to one more church service at a Church of Christ on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day that didn't mention anything about commemorating Jesus's birth, I might have puked. But that's neither here nor there.)

This way, we'll get to hang out on Christmas Eve, move the futon mattress onto the living room floor, gorge ourselves on freshbaked cookies and rice milk, and watch a variety of really fucking stupid Christmas movies. And probably listen to John Denver and The Muppets, which is by far the best Christmas album of all time.

That's right! John-fucking-Denver!

I like that kind of a Christmas better than one where everyone is obsessed with minute details of decoration and protocol. I like that Christmas better than an overly capitalistic one where things are shoved down our throats by inefficient retail outlets who have become dependent upon holiday shopping to make a profit.

I'm considering Festivus for next year, and I'm not kidding. See, it's not even the fact that it was on "Seinfeld," though I admittedly would have never heard of it otherwise. No, it's the statement made by Festivus, that all that stuff that people put so much stock in, to the point of cutting people off on the roads and ramming other people with carts in stores, really is just a bunch of bullshit.

I mean, if Christmas is to really be secular as some would argue, then what's the fucking point?

We'll be celebrating Festivus tomorrow for the first time, though not in our own home. As something we've been planning for nearly a month, we're going to a Youngstown Steelhounds hockey game, which is about an hour away. It's minor league hockey, kind of like Slap Shot where there are always fights. The promotion that night is Festivus, where there'll be aluminum poles, and then hockey players will air grievances and participate in feats of strengh during the intermissions.

We'll report on the results, I suppose.

So, to all of you, Happy Whatever-You-Decide-To-Celebrate, unless it involves animal sacrifice. I'm not down with that, G.