my very favorite christmas song, i think.

happy christmas, gentle reader! to those of you who actually got snow this year: sod off. i hope your stockings were full of coal, and you all had an allergic reaction to your plum pudding. (honestly, we live in upstate new york. this business of not having snow at the end of december is ridiculous. i remember having inches, back in the day.)

daniel got a snazzy new camera under the tree this year, and put it to use immediately. hence:


christmas 2006

(completely irrelevant side note: i really, really miss the days of <center> tags. there is no good alternative for centering block-level elements. drives me nuts. i know, i know, separate style from structure, yadda, yadda.)

you may notice the presence of my little sister-in-law, marie. christian was having bloodwork and a ct scan done that morning, so he and barb were at the hospital. on christmas. at the hospital. *cough* their christmas morning took place (with the addition of katia!) the previous evening, after venison steaks and roasted vegetables. even so, we had a lovely time with them, and with my family. marie got some fantastic fairy stuff, which she brought along with her christmas morning to keep herself occupied. and it turned out the tiredness and confusion christian had been experiencing were results of steroid withdrawal, not elevated fluid levels or a brain tumor, so life was pretty good all around. benjamin and i got two christmas dinners out of the deal, so i really have no call to whine.

since then, i've done an all-night warlords marathon with benjamin and the brothers, followed by the post-christmas mall survey with mum. got a great pair of leather gloves, plus various items from the bath & body sale. o, and we went skating with marie, which was nearly as much fun as i remember. i do miss it. i think one of my new year's resolutions will be to get a rink pass somewhere in rochester and learn to run. (after having converted to hockey skates over ten years ago, i still can't run in a straight line. only around corners.)

in other news, i'm at it again:

benjamin and i are buying a car.

nono, we're really buying a car this time. that's right, ladies and gents. those of you who've spoken with me in the last month have probably heard me whining about the little old saturn and its finicky engine. well, its inspection is up this month, and we young, inexperienced folks are not even remotely sanguine about its ability to pass. we're also looking to break the "it's december, we need another car!" trend that's been developing, so we're getting a new one, with a nice warranty and great reviews (for a poor-person car, anyway), that should last us a while. even my anti-foreign-and-particularly-korean-car grandfather likes our pick; who can argue with that?

it's a 2006 kia rio5 hatchback: 1.6L 4-cylinder twin-cam engine, manual transmission (of course), 110hp (at 6000rpm), 15-in alloy wheels (i admit, i'm psyched about the wheels), 5 doors including the hatch, 6 airbags (both sides, front and back), and so on. we test drove it this morning. it's a peppy little thing--it was nice to actually merge properly into highway traffic without fear of being rear-ended by the latest dodge monster truck. handled very nicely, good suspension, solid feel on the road. on the other hand, the saturn doesn't exactly have a shining driving experience, so maybe my perceptions are warped. either way, benjamin and i both really liked it. hard to go wrong with red hatchbacks, really. (it'll even fit our skis!)

incidentally, this is the fourth car purchase chronicled in this blog. in three and a half years. that's pathetic, folks.

again incidentally, yes, the new car does mean we're traversing the treacherous auto loan territory. (and if you've spoken with me in the past day or so, you've heard me whining about that, too.) advice: do it online. do it all online, so you can walk into the dealership with a check and completely skip the "how high can your monthly payment be?" debate.

i won't forget the news you've all been waiting for: benjamin's dad. he's home, again. there were a scary few days last week when the tissue around his liver stent got infected, but the antibiotics cleared everything up, and there were no other complications. so he's home. he is heavily medicated (it's very painful condition), so having a conversation with him is simultaneously terrifying and desperately sad and hysterical. benjamin and i will be spending christmas with them, so we're looking forward to seeing him soon.

i can't thank you enough for your prayers.

parting thought for the day, courtesy of john howard yoder:

....One of these songs [from the beginning of Luke's Gospel] is found on the lips of the maiden Mary. Catholic tradition knows it by its opening word Magnificat, "My soul doth magnify the Lord." But what it says is the language, not of sweet maidens, but of Maccabees: it speaks of dethroning the mighty and exalting the lowly, of filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty. Mary's praise to God is a revolutionary battle cry.

...

If we are ever to rescue God's good news from all the justifiable but secondary meanings it has taken on, perhaps the best way to do it is to say that the root meaning of the term evangelion would today best be translated "revolution". Originally it is not a religious or a personal term at all, but a secular one: "good news". But evangelion is not just any welcome piece of information, it is news which impinges upon the fate of the community. "Good news" is the report brought by a runner to a Greek city, that a distant battle has been won, preserving their freedom; or that a son has been born to the king, assuring a generation of political stability.

...

The need [in our time] is not for consolation or acceptance but for a new order in which men may live together in love. In his time, therefore, as in ours, the judgment of God upon the present order and the imminent promise of another one, is the language in which the gospel must speak....

whoops, wrote a book again. well, congratulations for getting this far! now go find something worthwhile to do!

take a look at these images.

no, really look. yes, this is, for all intents and purposes, a nude female.

welcome to the 21st-century airport security checkpoint.

another, for good measure.

The technology, called backscatter, has been around for several years but has not been widely used in the U.S. as an anti-terrorism tool because of privacy concerns.
...
[T]he TSA said the X-rays will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture.

o, well if it's only the security officer, that's ok then. i hold my local airport security men in the same regard i hold my husband, absolutely.

they're implementing this in phoenix, folks. call your congressmen.

image credit: the associated press, cbs news