Tonight DH and Mom and I met the kiddo and grandkiddo for dinner, then went to see the Christmas lights at Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow before they go away for another eleven months.

Dinner was meh. A fifteen-minute wait (at 5:30 -- I had no idea that many people eat dinner at 5:30!!), and the place was amazingly noisy. Service was a tad slow, and my baked potato with sour cream on the side, nothing else, came buried under butter, bacon bits, sour cream and cheese. The mushrooms I ordered never showed up, there wasn't so much as a crumble of blue cheese in my blue cheese salad dressing, and when I went to the bathroom, a young, able-bodied woman had bypassed all the empty stalls for the handicapped stall. (This boot cast on my right foot/leg makes standing up without help a little bit tough.)

But the lights . . . oh, baby, the lights at Rhema were incredible. There are tens of thousands of them in every color, some of them flashing in time to music. The grandkiddo was enthralled. We parked the truck and got out to walk through the amazingly extravagant creation, and he had a ball, looking, pointing, touching. When we crossed the bridge, he stopped a couple times to do a little dance to the music, and he cried when we had to go.

So Christmas is officially over (well, tomorrow, anyway, when Rhema's lights go off), and I finally got a little of that holiday spirit.

Maybe next year I should head for Rhema the night the lights come on.

We spent most of the day out today -- lunch with family, then DH, Brandon and Cameron and I went to my sister's house and spent the afternoon with her hubby and, for a while, my mom and two little cousins. BIL baked Toll House cookies, which we scarfed down during an "NCIS" marathon.

Saturday night TV isn't fabulous -- no cable, no satellite -- but I love being home then. I watch "Cops" or "Law and Order" and "America's Most Wanted" and "48 Hours" and "CSI:Miami." We eat whatever I throw together (Christmas leftovers tonight), I have all the coffee or cocoa or Diet Dr. Pepper I want, and I go to bed when I feel like it. What's not to love?

I admit, I've never been a coffee drinker, but the book in progress features a hero who owns a coffee shop, so I figured I'd better at least give it a shot. I learned to like weak hazelnut-flavored coffee with strong hazelnut-flavored cream, but that was about it for me. Regular coffee? No thanks.

Then my niece, Kate, who spent the past year in El Salvador, brought us bags of Topeca coffee for Christmas. Oh. My. Gosh. She brought two varieties, and we haven't opened one yet, but the Manzano is incredible. I love it love it.

So, looking ahead to the day when this bag runs out, I checked out the company's website to find out about ordering it, and can you believe it? Their plantation is in El Salvador, but the family owns a cafe and coffee roastery in downtown Tulsa! How's that for coincidence?? And here I was thinking I'd have to send Kate back down there for refills.

I now know more about coffee varieties, grinding and brewing methods than any one person should know. I figure it'll stay in my head long enough for this book. Honestly, I think coffee's going to play into the first love scene. Never thought of it as sexy? Read a few descriptions -- smooth, bold, sweet, subtle, spicy, smoky, rich, eloquent, intense, silky . . .

Hm . . . I may need to go brew another cup.

Too bad this doesn't come with music, so you could hear me singing, "Happy, happy, happy, happy holidays," in my best South Park Charles Manson voice.

I make a vow here and now that next year I'll be in top Christmas form and won't Grinch my way through, celebrating only when the end is in sight.

Have a good one, guys, then let the good times roll.

I've put off doing anything even remotely Christmasy until today. After lunch with the kiddo and dil, we went to Build A Bear and built a dog for the grandbaby. He's the cutest little fuzzy brown and white puppy, and when you squeeze his left hand, you get a recording of our son telling the baby Merry Christmas.

I'm allergic to malls and crowds (seriously, they make me itch), but I had fun with Ralph. He's wearing desert camies and desert boots, and has a cute little black beret. (The kiddo says he's gonna find him a maroon one, since that's what Airborne wears.) DIL named him after the piano-playing dog on the Muppets.

We also picked up an addition to the baby's train set.We bought his first engine for his birthday, and he's getting an Army engine for Christmas. Both his dad and his favorite grandma (don't tell the other grandmother!) love train sets and building towns and making trees, so by the time he's old enough to get his hands in some plaster of Paris, he'll have a complete train that's liable to cost as much as my first car. I've already told his parents that they have to consider the train when they buy a house, since a good set-up requires a whole room of its own.

And that's it for my Christmas shopping. Sister J bought the group gift for Mom, so all I have to do is write a check to her, then it's money for everyone else.

My kind of gift-giving.

It's an easy easy contest. All you have to do is go to Writing Sluts and post a comment on any of the subjects there. For every day you post between now and next Saturday the 27th at midnight, you'll go into the drawing once. The prize is books by our members and a gorgeous beaded bookmark.

That's all you have to do. You don't have to be wordy or brilliant. Just say, "Hey, interesting post!" Or "Merry Christmas!"

Those books/bookmark could be yours.

And I don’t even know why. It’s not like anything much was happening. I didn’t write – this is a holiday thing, by the way. I do actually write pages most of the time, or at least on a fairly regular basis, but it’s just less regularly around Christmas. Anyway, I also didn’t get to see the grandbaby (big pout here – poor little guy’s sick) or the kiddo (taking care of the little kiddo while Mom works).

What I did get to do was clean house, deal with the six puppers, and actually watch “Ghost Whisperer” and two episodes of “Numbers.” (Usually I watch TV while also reading, cleaning, playing Mahjong or working crossword puzzles.) Dinner was a simple matter of reheating the leftovers from the birthday dinner that wasn’t the night before, and after watching part of “South Park,” I went to bed. Didn’t get online. Didn’t check mail. Didn’t blog.

Didn’t get to see the grandbaby today, either, but the kiddo did come have lunch with us. It’s a family tradition that everyone who can gets together on Saturday for lunch. DIL and one niece didn’t make it, and one BIL always has to work, but the rest of us were there.

Tonight was time for another tradition – my mom’s family Christmas party. When I was a kid, my cousins all had names like Judy, Peggy, Betty, Kim, Michelle, Susan. Now all the names are cuter and trendier: Cameron, Kadon, Caitlyn, Colton, Tyler, Serenity, Kelsey. (But in a nod to one of my all-time favorite names, we also have a John.) Though, come to think of it, at one time I’m guessing that Judy, Sharon and Marilyn were trendy, too. Hmm . . . hard to imagine.

Ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right, but you just keep on pushing?

Today was mine. I dragged myself out of bed into a gray, dreary, pea-soup foggy morning, baked a cake and started dinner – the grandkiddo’s birthday dinner/party was scheduled for six-thirty. I cook and take the food to my oldest sister’s house for two reasons: she doesn’t have six dogs who see a stranger’s presence in the house as reason to bark/growl/howl nonstop until said stranger leaves; and she lives between our little town and the town where my older niece has taken up residence, so she’s more centrally located.

Being an inexperienced cake decorator, I practiced last night and got pretty darn good with balloons, stars and confetti – not so good with writing. Today, for the real thing, I squeezed out the first balloon, and it looked like a big blob of blue. Second balloon: small blob of blue. Third balloon: long and skinny and wobbly. Sheesh. The stars, on the other hand, remained great.

After lunch with DH, kiddo and grandkiddo, I went to physical therapy, where I got worked until my muscles burned. Have you ever tried balancing on two squishy balls that shift without warning in every direction except the one you expect? It’s tougher than it sounds, but I kept trying. Once I reached the point where I was staying steady more often than not, the therapist switched me so I was standing sideways with one foot in front of the other. Way harder.

I was late getting out of there, late getting home, late heading back to my sister’s. We had to detour to pick up Mom, whose car wouldn’t start, and then the kiddo called and said the grandbaby had a fever (he’s been fighting a cold) and they were heading back to DIL’s parents’ house. My sick-of-morning-sickness niece cancelled out on us, too, and since neither she nor the grandbaby were there, my other sister, her husband and my other niece dropped out, too.

Dinner for twelve in the back of my truck, and we wound up with five. We did our part, though; I think I brought home only enough for four. The cake is quintuple-wrapped in plastic and in the fridge, and the gifts are waiting for the little guy to feel better. I’m tired, my legs hurt from the balancing act, and my ankle’s throbbing, too.

I should’ve stayed in bed.

Up early today since Mom had an appointment in Tulsa. DH dropped us at the door – me with my boot cast, her with her cane – then went to negotiate the maze of the parking garage. We got checked in, sat down, and they called her name almost immediately. She was gone all of five minutes when she came back, said they'd given her a shot and told her to come back in two hours. We weren't expecting that.

By the time I got hold of DH, he was only a hundred feet from the door. He had to g back to get the truck, come back after us, and then we had to find a way to pass two hours. After browsing through obscenely expensive kitchen stuff at Williams Sonoma (man, I could blow my next advance there!), we headed to Olive Garden to meet my older sister for a quick lunch.

Mom and I always have lunch when she's got an appointment in that time frame, but neither sister ever joins us, so it was kinda surprising that S. wanted to. I called her cell, told her where we were going and when. A while later, we were seated at a back table, and in walked . . . not my sister, but my niece Kate. To say we were surprised is an understatement, because she's been in El Salvador the past eleven and a half months and wasn't due back in the U.S. until late Friday afternoon. She changed flights a while back to come in yesterday but wanted to surprise us all, and she totally succeeded.

The kiddo's home, too, so we had dinner with him, D-I-L and the grandbaby. It was nice seeing Brandon again, as well as seeing the three of them together. Being a military family, we're used to separations, so we really make the most of the time we have. Tomorrow night we're having a late birthday party for the grandbaby, and I'm making the cake. Frosting balloons, I can make. Writing a simple – and legible – Happy Birthday is beyond me.

But that 's okay. The baby kiddo can't read yet, so he couldn't care less.

Physical therapy again today. Ack.

Last time was all passive on my part: the therapist did all the work. Today started out the same, only instead of lying on a table, I got a wide bed with a television mounted up above and a remote control. Cool. But after the moist heat, I had to move to a table, where I got ultrasound – again, nothing for me to do but lie there with a couple of pillows and relax.

Then I got to work. Aw, gee. It wasn't  a whole lot – stretches to start. Then more stretches. And more. Then I got to lie back and relax for a bit while we did some kind of ion something or other – a patch on the back of my ankle, another on my calf, both hooked up to some sort of DC current thing. It didn't hurt, just sort of prickled while the current pushed cortisone ions through my skin or something.

I left, still wearing one patch and carrying my own stretchy band to use at home – which I will. I'm very compliant about those sorts of things.

Another amazingly dreary and cold day. We stopped at the store on the way home and got some peanuts so I could make peanut brittle. I prefer pecans, but my favorite place for buying those this time of year is in Bixby, more than a tad out of our way. The recipe is my mom's, and it's yummers.  

Tomorrow the kiddo heads home. I haven't seen him since August, so I'm looking forward to it. It'll be great when he gets out of the Army and moves back here.

And, oh, yeah, no writing today.