Christmas day 2004:

Time to lay around the shanty mama and put a good buzz on. I have spent much of the day arm wrestling the digital world. I have uninstalled and reinstalled word twice and tried to do system restores all they way back to July to no avail. Virus scans and adaware are getting me nowhere. The long and the short of it is that some kind of virus has a toe hold in my Word program and we may have to resort to nukes to kill it. John has offered to upload my files onto his hard drive and then rain genocide on my infected PC. We will follow the napalm with a new OS as millennium is fucked. We are going XP corporate friends. With firewalls the likes of which God has never seen Usal (That's a Dune reference).

So Christmas Eve is my family's thing - we do the gifts at night. This year a wrench was thrown in that my folks are not getting into town until tonight so I thought we were doing gifts tonight. Which means last night I showed up giftless at my sister's - except for the futon which we could call a very big gift. So we gave church a miss since the folks will want to go tomorrow and instead played poker for several hours. After which we lit a fire and watched The Wedding Singer.

I've been teaching V, Camilla, Trev, and Taylor all the basics of poker over the past few days so last night we moved into more advanced games - low Chicago, night baseball, etc. This was made all the more entertaining by Vick and Camilla gifting Taylor with a chip wheel, a card shuffler, a Texas holdum gift set, and one of those eight person table covers with chip slots and drink holders.

Camilla got me sunglasses, as I am always losing mine. Taylor got me two kids books about Carl the dog, the kind with the pull tabs that make the characters move. Trev got me a dashboard Jesus and a new keyboard for this computer, and Vick gave me gourmet coffee and a scarf that was woven several years ago by the lepers in New Guinea where we grew up. That last one was a major gift and I am very touched by it.

Surreal is term that originated by the combination of super with real - intended to indicate a hyper reality that cuts through the glaze of habit that we ordinarily see with. Getting a plastic dashboard Jesus and a scarf woven by lepers who were in part converted to Christianity by my father, all the while teaching my nephews how to play poker qualifies as a surreal misadventure does it not? Merry X-mas from my odd life.