At this moment I am taking a break from Christmas card production while listening to She & Him’s Xmas album and most of my shopping is done and all of that, I still don’t realize Xmas is here.

I originally had next week off for the holidays but I realized that Hollace didn’t so I changed it to the week between Xmas and New Years. I hope the weather is drivable since we will be spending the week visiting folks.

Last weekend was my 48th birthday. That number is starting to sound old. I am already starting to freak out about turning 50. Oh dang, how can that be? Seriously. My hair isn’t grey yet, just under the bangs on the right side. I still don’t need reading glasses but I am sure that will be changing soon. I don’t think I will handle that well. Also this year my periods are starting to get slightly irregular. As soon as those three things really hit, I will feel old.

Until them I am not. Do you know I have never gone in a liquor store by myself and maybe in one with someone else maybe 3 times. I am totally delusional to think I’m not yet 21! Maybe I should do that now that I am 48. Go in and buy a bottle of wine and be a wine drinker. That sounds older then I feel. Maybe get my hair cut short, I still wear it the same way as I have my whole life, younger then a 48 year old.

One of the mom’s that wait while our kids are in Japanese class assumed she was older then me and I assume she was younger then me. We are the same age.

For my birthday, Sherry came up for the day. She had homework to do so for the most part she sat on the couch to do it. She isn’t old either, she is doing homework for God’s sake!

When Sherry was done with her homework, we all went to Tsukasa for dinner and a little shopping while we were out.

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2012 might be an interesting year. I hope nice even numbers are insignifcant as I will be celebrating 20 years at Abbott next November right around the time the company separates into two companies. I hope I fare well here, but at this time no one has any clue what is going to happen to shared services like the art department.

RAW’s cake for the year. It is tradition.

We don’t really have a pushy family, we are all pretty laid back. I am sure if we weren’t something would of probably been done by now about helping mom figure out how to deal with grama or get her some help some how. None of us kids live all that close. i am the closest at 100 miles away.

Grama is 92 and is starting to look to be 100. She is all skinny and shriveled up. She doesn’t bother with her wig anymore. Her mind is slipping. She kept wondering who was going to take her back to her apartment and wanting to get a new rug for her apartment door because it is too slippery. She doesn’t walk anymore. Mom wheels her around. Because we were there she wanted to sit in the family room but the couch is too low and it is an ordeal getting her in and out of it. She keeps forgetting that she can’t get around too good.

Normally she sits in the old living room where my dad lives. He sits in his elevated easy chair watching his little TV being driven crazy by his old mother-in-law. He can’t get around too good either. He shuffles along with his walker. On occasion, my mom has to call 911 to pick either one of them up from the ground. My dad is in purgatory. It is sad for all.

My mom is the one who has to keep the peace and keep them all upright. She has always been anxiety ridden but I like to think she is coping the best as possible. Probably wishful thinking on my part.

I tried to bring it up this weekend but nothing came of it. If we were a more a pushy people, we could come up with something to help their sad situation.

Maybe I should at least make more an effort to go down there to help out on weekends. I first need to get over my fierce protection of free time. I am so damn selfish. I guess that goes on top of my New Resolution list to fix that.

The turkey dinner was typical, traditional. It was just the 6 of us, RAW, Hollace and me; mom, dad and grama.

After dinner dad went back to his chair for some football games, we put on a marathon of Roseann on our TV. Then RAW put on some Pumpkin Chunkers after dad yelled from the other room that it was on.

RAW for some reason thought he would sleep in the elevated and unstable easy chair in the family room for the night. I don’t know what was wrong with the bed upstairs. Anyway I was afraid it would tip over and he would land on his head.The real problem was every time he would get out of it, it would lurch forward ejecting him to the floor the other way. He was being passive aggressive trying to sleep in that chair with the noise of the TV and ejections, like he had no choice. Whatever dude, don’t add to the issues. He crabbily went up stairs to sleep eventually.

Friday he left early to go to Fort Wayne. Hollace, mom and me were scheduled to have lunch with Sherry. After lunch we stopped home to check on grama before we went to visit Aunt Bobbie. She was sleeping so we slipped out.

It has been awhile since I visited Aunt Bobbie. She seems the same even though she was 80+. Her biggest medical issue seemed to be the carpel tunnel surgeries she had earlier in the year. Her real issues and stress has been her son Tom who is medically a mess as well as worthless.

We rushed back home because grama is going to wonder where mom is and start wandering around. Sure enough we walked in as she was rounding the corner in the kitchen looking for us.

Around 7pm, Hollace and I headed back home to enjoy our typical hermit-like weekend.

I decided taking Mondays off were better then taking Fridays because it makes my Sunday nicer knowing I don’t have to go to work the next day. I know it just postpones thing to Monday night but Monday is already Monday so it isn’t a big deal.

All this dread of work isn’t really dread. I love my job and sometimes think having time off is more trouble then it is worth making coming back harder.

I think next on my list is to sit quiet and mediate or think or come up with ideas for my day. Hollace comes home at 2:30 so I have 4.5 hours to savour this time. That means, no Words for Friends and no Facebook. No other things I can do when others are around like reading that Steve Job book which I already did for an hour this morning anyway.

I originally made a car repair appointment for this afternoon after I couldn’t get a good time for Tuesday after work but after talking to RAW, I changed it to Tuesday morning and take the train in. He didn’t want me to mess up my day off. He understood the point of my day.

Well there you go. It is time for that quiet reflection or meditation or doodling or taking a picture of a cupcake. I am done with the writing portion of my day.

Speaking of darkness, we change our clocks back this weekend so it will be really dark too early. Hopefully we will regain some light in the morning.

The brake light on my car are all screwy. Last week some woman motioned to roll our window. She said our brake light is stuck on. By Monday it seemed ok again. Today i noticed that it was stuck again. If I keep the headlights off, the brake lights would work ok. But it was getting dark so it was obvious that the dashboard were dark. Until I hit the brakes and the dashboard lights would go on! It is all screwy. I made an appointment on Monday to get it fixed but it is my day off and I don’t want to waste my precious day at the Hyundai.

still not all that use to this new iPad keyboard.

I got another Apple product, it is still getting pathetic. I now have an iPod nano for a watch.

At the same time as I opened up this web page I opened Lynda.com to see if there was any new tutorials I could fall asleep to. I am not saying Lynda.com is boring, it is only going on 1 a.m. and I know that is what is going to happen.

Like I aluded to in the post before this, I am finally with the world of iPhones. Now its time to sell the iPod. I don’t know what to do with it. A couple people on FB feigned interest until I reiterated that is a 64Gig and will more then likely charge more they they were hoping. Yeah, they could of gotten a deal if it was a 16 Gig but it wasn’t. Probably won’t be able to sell it. I suppose I am a fool if I don’t try. I will try to sell the flip video cam as well.

Well that is all I wrote tonight.

I only have enough space where I keep my photo albums so the oldest one then moves out when a new book gets started. The oldest books were in a bookcase in our bedroom, really RAW’s bookcase. I never really liked that space. When I went to move the new old book there I decided I could find a better place for them in my zen den, office, computer room room. Of course I had to look at them and reminiscence to when Hollace was a baby.

The new place is the cabinet in my room. In that space was a box that held a bunch of mounted B&Ws from college. Most of them garbage. I threw away half and kept the rest for now at least. I then reminiscenced to my college days.

Saturday was the eve of the 10 year anniversary of 9-11. I felt nostalgic to read my old journals from back then. I had them printed in a binder. Apparently 2 days before 9-11, I took Hollace to the grocery store with a big bowl on her head. I also spent a lot of time trying to learn Lightwave 3D much in the same fashion as I am trying to do with Cinema 4D. Some things never change.

I won’t get into what happened back then here. I noticed in that binder that the printed page ended April 2004. My current blog (this one) goes back to December 2004. I started thinking it would be nice to collect 7 fricken years of blog postings and print them out. What the hell am I thinking LOL!

Of course this project has to be started now and so I spend my Saturday night pulling together posts through 2007. It was fun to read but really I should be doing those darn Cinema 4D tutorials! Which of course I should be doing now instead of writing now.

Self expression.

I have a fear of expressing myself in real life so I think I compensate by expressing myself all over the web.

I handed out some business cards to a few at work to show off my new website nancysward.com. I doubt any will look but they will see a different side or learn something about me. I am unable to show that side to them in person so I depend on all my internet presences.

Knowing this was kind of an eureka moment.