I'm writing this from Tod and Kristen's house where we spend the day hanging out and making Japanese "nengajou" New Year's Cards. Some pictures may follow when I get home. Greg and Jo were also present, and Jo cooked a wonderful dinner. Tod and Kristen are always doing really neat things, and the nengajo party was no exception. I wish I was as cool as they are.
Tod is also helping me to install FreeBSD (a type of unix) on a server that will be the home of this website in the not to distant future. I'm hoping to see slight performance improvements, and great improvements in manageability.
By now anyone who reads this site with any frequency knows this, but my Mom is a wonderful person. My Dad isn’t too shabby either, but that’s a different story. Every year at Christmas time, she sends us a box of wonderful things that she always picks or makes with tender loving care. It always makes UltraGirl and I really excited to get her Christmas presents.
Back when I was too short to be able to measure up to a whole ‘Ultra’ at the beginning of my name and sufficed with a ‘by’ at the end, I used to get really excited on Christmas eve as I’m sure of the rest of those of you who celebrate Christmas did when you were young. I remember that I would lie in bed trying hard not to think about anything and go to sleep so I wouldn’t be tired in the morning during all the excitement. I usually successfully avoided thinking about anything in particular, but there was this excited buzz throughout my brain, and I would lie there for what seemed like hours hoping that sleep or morning would come soon. I always fell asleep before morning, and in hindsight probably a lot more quickly than I fall asleep now, but it always seemed like an eternity.
In the morning we would wake up early and we would have to wait in the hallway while my Dad made sure that all of us were together and went out to check that Santa had left everything as it should be. I think he always enjoyed our excited anticipation of the moment when he would tell us we could go, and we’d all run out and find our stockings loaded with goodies. At those times I always remember having a stomachache, the sort of stomachache you get from being extremely nervous. The kind of stomach ache I got the first time I sang in a band at a live performance, and the time when I first proposed to UltraGirl about 8 years ago (on Christmas eve).
Well I had that feeling again yesterday when I got this year’s package from Mom and saw her handwriting, neat but full of character on the customs label. And the mailing label she lovingly printed on her computer in a pretty font. I don’t think I got the feeling this time because I was nervous, or because I was really excited, though I was excited to receive the package. I think I got the stomachache this time in sympathy with all the Christmases past when I experienced it. The trigger this time was realizing how much I love and miss my Mom and Dad.
