Okay, somebody want to tell me why I just found a piece of string in my tea? And it didn’t come from the teabag, I’ll wager…On the other hand, better deal with it as this is the last cup of tea I’ll be able to enjoy till the end of the week.

Yessirreebob – tomorrow I hit the road on the biggest bus trip I’ve yet nabbed: UNH animal science program is touring Northeastern dairy farms. Our southern extreme is Copake Falls, NY, our northern extreme is North Bennington, VT, and our western extreme is Stamford, NY. If I pass your hometown or even your house, I’ll remember to wave. Just do me a favour, OK, and tell me if I’m going to run into a low railroad bridge somewhere down the block? I’m gonna be driving an 11’9″ tall coach bus, and I really don’t want to make a convertible out of it in this weather.

I mean, it’s gonna be disgusting tomorrow. Since when can weathermen predict the weather, but I hate having to take my chances with mixed precipitation. All you southerners and southwesterners, start countin’ your blessings you never have to drive in this slop! I’ll be lucky if I don’t hit any traffic caused by an accident, much less get into an accident myself. *knocks on desktop wood* As it is, with my luck, I probably won’t be able to get to sleep until 2:00 in the morning, when I have to get up at 5:30. Thank God for Dunkin’ Donuts - they can keep me going like a steam locomotive on three hours of sleep.

You’ll have a daily record of events to look forward to when I get back – probably in Very Secret Diary format and probably containing numerous entries smacking of overheats. For I’ve rarely driven in such mountainous terrain, and with a bus that’s prone to getting hot under the collar in that kind of country, I do hope everybody gets used to taking cool-down breaks every couple of hours. Ahhh, but what’s this I hear about a pool and a bowling alley at our hotel on Wednesday night??? Woohoo – that alone would be worth the incessant stench of cow pies at all those dairy farms!!

And with that, a fond farewell to the lot of you. God willing, see youse on Friday night.

I can smell that beef stew…with my waking nose…and God knows it’s a welcome change from wallpaper glue. Then let us be rid of it! Let us devour it posthaste! Gad – this is getting serious. I think I’m actually LOTRed out! This is what happens when you ask for the TTT EE for Christmas, your folks want to watch it every other night… *sigh*

Right, New Year’s. Law & Order rerun, then FOTR, then Times Square on ABC with Jaegermeister and herring. Hurrah for a Larkish New Year.  Luckily New Year’s Day was considerably more exciting: lunch out, then a bit of rock-climbing at the Nubble Lighthouse in Maine. Quite inspiring, I have to say. For shame that there’s nobody living in the lightkeeper’s house – they could just confuse incoming ships by turning their porch lights on and off at night. Bwaha – wouldn’t that be a blast?  C’mon, tell me that wouldn’t be a blast.

Farewell, 2003. Thanks to you, we made more history than Julius Caesar. One more year that my sister’s father-in-law will never shut up about. Yawoo!

Gargh, so much for a prioritised daily task list, with a wall to paint, wallpaper to hang and snow to shovel…Well, I’ll start with the laundry. And some writing. And some music. And some art. And…oh, bugger. That’s one prioritised list down the drain.

Piss and moan and moan and piss, that’s why they call me Chris.  Well, believe it or not, I don’t have anything to piss and moan about today – not that I’m…well…pissing or moaning about it. *ahem* Actually, to-day was quite the to-do day, which made me gladder than ever to get out of the house before the folks started bitching about Christa…I mean, really, are they so determined to be at odds with her that they’ve completely forgotten those pleasant conversations they had with her last night? That she just happened to furnish them with their first grandchild five months ago?  Geez. You know, if they’re going to be this short-sighted, I’m going to refer them to an optometrist. Or better yet, refer the optometrist to *them.* And then be way the hell out on the other side of the country when my dad starts cracking optometrist jokes a la “Grumpy Old Men.”

AHA!!!

That is a thank-you note in the Xanga toolbar…unless my eyes are cheated by some spell!

Now, let’s see if I can hack…errr, wait, lousy choice of words…let’s see if I can manage a few twists and turns here and create a blog for all seasons (and do so on a newly upgraded computer, I might add ). Better yet, self, let’s try to have it up before we depart on overnight tour next week for New York area. See, this is where a laptop might be a mixed blessing, but to us Rangers, laptops are just one more article of excess baggage. I mean, how can you sit in the corner of a smoky little pub and do nothing but stare at that short curly dude while your IM window is pinging and banging every three seconds?

Speaking of blessings for next week, what a stroke of luck to encounter Jeff the mechanic this afternoon. Sounds like, for a jolly decent change, I’m endowed with a bus that won’t be a bloody nuisance to drive.  Aww yeah, whether ya want it to be or not, life is GOOD!!! Now I gotta prove it. Well, maybe I’ll get a head start tomorrow by doing something with my dad’s grouchy car. You know that automobiles have a way of protesting their treatment, don’tcha? Dad’s car would be in ideal shape, except that it suffers from Driven by Excessively Cautious Old Crank Syndrome.

Look out, gear box, here I come!!!

I’m not going to ask how, I’m not going to ask why, and I’m not going to ask when it’s going to be over. It’s altogether plain that I’m doomed to be the odd man out at family gatherings till the end of time. I don’t even know why I go to the dang things anymore – maybe for my nephew’s sake, I dunno. Most all of us have probably made some remark on how splendid it is to be with your family during the holidays; well, let me ask you, what kind of splendour are you talking about when they don’t even notice you’re there?  Aah, the hell with it. Leave them to their right-wing nut-cracking and pointless (not to mention endless) prattle. Gives me more time alone with the Man Upstairs, which is what I’d rather be at the next family gathering.

Gathergathergathergathergather…

Even if she is Father Basil’s youngest daughter, why does she still get to go hurtling around the church screeching at the top of her voice? *sigh* It’s like, HEY! I’M WORSHIPING HERE! Just once I’d like to be able to give my thanks to God for the day and the life that I have, without a tier of screeching little kids disrupting every brain wave. Bring ‘em back in when they’ve cracked their first decade, thank you very much.

One last thing before I go to bed: props, respect, and chocolate-chunk cookies for anybody who remembers to capitalise ‘Balrog’ from now on.

Okay, so last night I ranted and raved a little about people who hate everyone and everything they see. But what is one thing that I do hate? Thinking that I’ve finished my coffee, only to pick up the mug and discover that there is in fact still a half-inch left in the bottom. I guess my BDU pants will be going in the wash tonight…

And another thing that I’m not especially fond of: sites that take forever and a day to load (though that’s half my own fault because I don’t bother to upgrade my modem), thereby freezing every function on this smug-looking box except for window shrinkage. I *do* fully plan to get this thing upgraded while I’m away in the hinterlands of upstate New York the first week in January. Which, by the way, should be just in time for a new-hotness premium blog to be up…

Yeep – poor Mellie – if I gave her a dollar for every day that I neglected to write to her, she could rent her own apartment for a year. Shoom-shoom, I’m off!

Grr.

Can somebody be so kind as to explain to me why I keep getting the same blasted page whenever I’m trying to browse other blogs? Wait, don’t tell me…Internet Exploder! That’s it, ain’t it? Well? Ain’t it?

*yawn* Okay, I’m wiped. I’ve spent about five of the last forty-eight hours actually lying under a flannel-lined featherbed cover, soaking up what little warmth is left in butt-cold New Hampshire while I stroll through la-la land. Bah, I’d probably get more sleep becoming my alter ego (read: Aragorn ) and backpacking aimlessly about. Well, Christmas Day was bright on all fronts, even if we have watched the extended edition of TTT twice in as many days. (Good as it is, I’m just ready to watch something different before the weekend draws nigh…) Other highlights: Clive Cussler’s latest novel , several new pairs of socks, a new pair of jump boots that I’ve been needing since the year of the flood, and one of the best of all, a “Still Not King” T-shirt.  Cussler…man, he’s getting cheesy in his old age, but damn, the guy is an inspiration. Couldn’tcha just see Viggo Mortensen playing Dirk Pitt?

My mom, predictably, went pretty much bonkers over getting “Miss Congeniality” and my dad…well, let’s just say if you can coax a reaction out of him for anything, such as automotive repair manuals, you’re more than welcome to pat yourself on the back. I’m just glad all three of us got to enjoy ourselves. It’s a far cry from where we were a couple of years ago: going to see my sister’s in-laws for both T-giving and X-mas, feeding our faces for about an hour, and then all drifting apart in an ocean of different conversations while yours truly got to be the castaway. I’m tellin’ ya, it was a lucky break if we all got out of there by 10:00 pm for the 1.5-hour drive home; I’m tellin’ ya further, it got to the point where I no longer looked forward to Thanksgiving or Christmas. It would’ve been preferable to spend both holidays alone. I do, most sincerely, thank God that things changed last year and we didn’t leave home.

Now, why else do I thank God for enjoyable holidays and family unity the last two years? Because God doesn’t have a whole lot of people thanking Him for these things, He just receives these superficial thank-you notes from people who got their Christmas bonuses in the nick of time so they could run out and shop their procrastinating asses off. Seriously, folks, when did Christmas stop being about Jesus Christ and start being about trading posts and talk-show hosts? Why has Advent been replaced by “shopping days”? When did spirituality take a back seat to materialism? Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that…err, wait, wrong speech.

Okay. Anyway. The only true ”bah, humbug” of Christmas is that it’s been commercialised right through the deck. Call me old-fashioned, but on Christmas Eve, I vastly prefer standing in church for an hour to standing on line in a department store for an hour and then some. Props and respect, praise and song! Hoots and hollers, peace and joy! Kudos to everybody who has not and is not likely to lose sight of the reason that we even have Christmas to begin with.

Damn you, Charles Dickens…

Bah, listen to me. I sound like one of those misanthropic uber-critics who hate everything and everyone they see and want to let the world know about it. Wait…what’s that? You think I should stop hanging out with people like that and stop reading that crap on their web sites?

Damn right I should.

Still not King.

Now we are six.

Six viewings of ROTK, that is.

‘Tis great to have a mother who’s a LOTR fan, because taking her to see ROTK makes an ideal birthday present (even if she was cringing during the Pass of Cirith Ungol and Shelob’s Lair). Only trouble is, one gets so damn busy with Christmas shopping that one forgets her birthday just HAPPENS to be the DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS…

Yay for inexpensive gift shops in the next town over. 18 hours to spare, w00tness!!

Well, at least everything tastes better today. Maybe it’ll help if I cut down on the popcorn during the next dozen times I see ROTK…

Ahh, here it is, the wee hours of Christmas morning. Lord alone knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight, but I fully plan on doing little more tomorrow than watching the extended TTT within minutes of unwrapping it. (In case you’re wondering, I couldn’t help noticing this one gift whose dimensions are a precise match with those of the FOTR DVD case…  Bwaha!) Well, Pippin…er…Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good write!

Well, isn’t this fun.

My circulatory system is sopped with diesel fuel and I didn’t even realise it until today.

I thought I was just tasting things, but a cup of coffee, a bottle of beer and a mug of tea don’t all lie. Well, they do if they were shipped from the Boston area, but that’s beside the point. Today I tasted metal in everything I drank, and hell if I could figure out why until I remembered what happened at work: the fuel pump shut off too late and I got diesel all over my hand again. Yech!

So, yeah. In the last four years, it’s happened God knows how many times, and now it’s seeping into my veins and making itself known on my tongue. Love to see what the bosses say, though…probably the same thing they always say, “Suck it up…” Sorry, gang, but you can’t seriously expect me to suck up a health risk unless you want to be staring down the barrel of a lawsuit. At least provide neoprene gloves to us, for God’s sake. In the Almighty’s master plan for the universe, where is it explicitly stated that the University of New Hampshire must willfully and unceasingly shaft its employees by making them do everything themselves? Next thing you know, I’ll have to pay all of my overnight trip expenses out of pocket. You know, I’ve got half a mind just to tell them if they want any more help than I’m already giving them, they can go call 60 Minutes.

Well, I guess I’ll go see if all that metallic crud will make me turn stiff as a board in this weather. Film at eleven.

Okay, who’s been tinkling on the toilet seat? Honestly.

Something interesting I just noticed: what is it with Bernard Hill and heroic death roles?

From the captain of the Titanic to Theoden King, that man does tend toward epic death scenes, it seems. Yes, as you’ve probably guessed, I’m coming off of ROTK viewing #5.   And if the folks want to go see it tomorrow or Wednesday…now we are six. Okay, so call me a raving Tolkien lunatic, but it occurs to me that seeing ROTK six times in as many days will leave one either possessed of a profound understanding of the world of fantasy, or just plain dead to the world.

Aah – either one works.

By the way, thank you, PJ, but we already knew Denethor was a pig without that vivid depiction of him feeding his face.

OK, so three days since I last updated this thing and I’m at a loss what the hell I’m going to write. Shall I mention people who deluge me with a torrent of IMs when I’m trying to work? Naah…oh, work, yes, yay…never a dull moment during the holiday season, and always a cramped leg. Piffle! Does somebody want to use that federal grant wisely, and grant us some transit buses upon which you don’t have to stand on the friggin’ brake pedal to hold it still? Sheesh. My back is killing me just after tonight. Oh, how I thirst for that week-long dairy tour in January – lovely long week of freedom and a bus that won’t be a nuisance to drive (theoretically). Have you ever just been ready, willing and desperate to get away for a week? Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. It says, YOUR VILLAGE CALLED – THEIR IDIOT IS MISSING.

And can ya tell I’m ready to bug off of IM now? Yesh, yesh. One downside to repeated viewings of Return of the Still-Not-King is that they’re not conducive to late-night showers. So, I’m off to see the wonderful wizard of hot water and flannel bedsheets. Bye-and-bye!