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This is my favorite Christmas carol... and probably my favorite performance of it.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Lena and I are definitely looking forward to a few days off from the grind.

It's a sad time, though; my cousin, Posy, died this week. She was a beautiful woman with amazing artistic talent, and I'm sorry to say that I did not know her nearly as well as I'd have liked. I have one incredibly vivid memory of her: when we were stupid geeky kids playing Dungeons & Dragons all the time, she came down to our table in the basement holding a drawing-- I think it was colored pencil but it may have been pastels-- of a dragon curling round itself. What I remember most, though, is her face just then. I think she liked that her art made others happy much, much more than she liked others praising her art.

I took a picture of our rose bush beginning one last bloom in November a few days ago-- today I saw that it had finally fully opened. I think it opened for Posy.

And another bittersweet moment, I just hung a painting in our sun room. It was painted by my great-grandmother, and belonged to my mother; we got it from her things when she died in April of this year. It's a beautiful painting. I miss my mother.

So we headed back to the Home Country for the post-Christmas. Things felt a little subdued this year, as my brothers weren't in town, and my sisters were there at different times, and I didn't really get the chance to leisurely go around and visit, as I've been wanting to of late. So it was low-key, but good.

There were various highlights during the trip:

My nephew got this ridiculously huge plastic gun that fires clips of nerf bullets. It kept jamming, and I kept dropping quotes and tech-sounding quotes about the AK-47, a la Clint Eastwood: "This is the Nerf Hi-Strike assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you."

At Undo's restaurant in the big wheel, I learned how to correctly pronounce gnocchi, and ate the first gnocchi in my life that did not feel like swallowing lumps of hardened spackle.

My niece told me that I was her favorite uncle. I was caught by surprise on that one, plus I got a little choked up. I'm such a sap.

I showed my mother facebook, and set her up with an account. O, God, what have I done?

We re-met with my friend Chuch and his lovely lady Argelia. Damn, but I miss the guy.

We had a game night at my uncle's house, which is always a fun event, usually a lot of laughing. The capstone of that evening came when I said something about my cousin/friend being able to recite most or all of the Jabberwocky... the two uncles present proceeded to recite the whole thing together, in unison. Caught by surprise again, but with those two jokers, I really should have expected that. I mean, what else would you expect a lawyer and an entrepreneur to have memorized?

June 20th is West Virginia Day. The Mountain Mama is 145 years young!

Lena and I are officially back from parts south & east; more specifically, the Home Country, Sanibel Island, and Epcot. We have been back since Sunday night. We drove. Ugh. Anyway. More later. Too tired to elaborate right now, but good trip.

not sure if we're coming back. Evar!

Today is the Baha'i new year, or Naw-Ruz. It marks the end of the fast, and is usually celebrated with a big-ass dinner. Big-ass, of course, is a spiritual term denoting not only the size of the dinner, but also the corresponding weight gain therefrom.

So this year, the celebration was at our house. I haven't been really into much Baha'i stuff for a while now, but I haven't seen some folks for quite some time, and it was good to catch up. There were 28 people crammed into our house, which is, I believe a record for our current location (at any given time, 32 of 28 guests were in our kitchen simultaneously).

And now there's sooo much food. The dinner was pot-luck. One thing I have to hand to Baha'is of any locale, they can freakin' cook. We had a lamb-rice thingy, a curry thingy, a lima-bean-dill-rice thingy, a big-ass green american-style salad, a "jamaican shrimp salad," a sort of moroccan jambalaya, a big-ass pot of couscous, a cream-cheese-shrimp-cocktail cracker dip, brownies that were so good I have to call them crack-covered crack brownies with crack filling, a blueberry-covered cheesecake, and from those that were too hungry to cook, a store-bought rotisserie chicken and a couple of cakes.

I'll be taking in the cakes to work tomorrow-- that's engineer fuel, that is.

Anyway, 'twere a good evening. Happy Baha'i New Year, everybody. Don't drink and drive.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr day. While most would probably want to take this opportunity to remember his accomplishments, reflect a bit on where civil rights are now, and introspect on their own lives, I'd like to say, screw that! I'm gonna cash in by starting a brand-new breakfast cereal, MLK-Os! The cereal of love, justice, and peace (and 2/3 of the RDA of riboflavin)!

Or, maybe I'll just say, accomplishments, sacrifices, all that humanity stuff aside, there's never been a guy who's been more eminently quotable:

• Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.
• Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
• I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
• It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
• Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
• Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.
• Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Went eastward to the Home Country for Christmas with the family. It was very nice, except that one of my brothers opted to remain in his Secure Compound In An Undisclosed City Somewhere On The Eastern Seaboard (SCIAUCSOTES for short), for undisclosed reasons. Well, undisclosed to everyone else. Or at least, everyone not in our family. I'm not going to un-undisclose them, though. Don't want to be exfamiliacated.