Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven at the end of it is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope that you'll get your money back at the end of it." -- attributed to A. Whitney Brown. (Swiped from someone's .signature file.)

Trying to get stuff done, and it's come down to performing triage on the to-do list and accepting that some gifts just aren't going to be done in time. :-( I did get both ends of the neon shooting star to light up, but it's still dark in the middle. Hmm. Hoping to have enough spoons left to get to the party at Breno's house tonight (and maybe even to church beforehand) after getting a little bit more ready for tomorrow.

Mom emailed me today to say that folks are meeting for breakfast at her house before going to the in-laws' for dinner, because my sister and her husband will be doing dinner with the other in-laws. I wrote back that I'll try, but that I don't have a great track record with breakfasts. If I do make it there, it'll narrow my wardrobe choices a bit, since I'll be expected to wear pants to Mom's house but would prefer to dress as myself when I go to Rockville, so the obvious thing to try to do would be to pick a top that goes with both my black pants and a skirt I can change into in the car, is festive enough to feel Christmas-part-ish, is warm enough for the cold weather predicted for tomorrow, and ideally isn't what I wore last year. So whether I make it to Hyattsville tonight or not, what I'll be doing before bedtime is picking clothes for tomorrow in case I do wake up early enough. If I oversleep, clothing choices open up a bit, but then I miss family-obligation stuff.

Actually, if I make it to breakfast, I may well need a nap someplace in order to make it through the dinner party. Doing both would be a long day for me physically. Oh how I miss my a) youth and b) health from before the fibromyalgia. In my early twenties, thinking about how much family stuff I'll have energy for in a single day simply would not have been an issue.

WRNR is broadcasting their "dysfunctional family Christmas" tonight from 18:00 to midnight and again from 6:00 to noon; a bunch of Christmas music without commercials, and if it's anything like last year, it'll be a rather diverse collection. I'm really tempted to attempt to tape it, perhaps by going from the earphone jack of a boom box into the audio input of a VCR and sticking in a 6-hour tape (actually that was my father's trick for scheduled recordings off the radio). I'm wondering whether that makes more or less sense than running the radio into a computer and trying to capture a womdigious MP3 file to try to break up into individual songs later. One complication is that I have trouble getting that station tuned in cleanly in my house (though it's easier to get in than WTMD), and the tuners on the boom boxes drift a bit sometimes.

Okay, back to the to-do list, or more likely, a nap. We'll see how I feel after carrying a computer upstairs and moving the car back to the near side of the street. I'm hoping not to need pain meds this afternoon, but I seem to be headed in that direction, which would bode ill for both tonight's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast. We'll see. Nap likely.

Sheesh, you'd think I would've stopped looking at Perrine and going, "OMG, my cat is so adorable! I'm going to die from teh cuteness!" by now, huh?