Where’d that last month go?

The holidays have come and gone, leaving behind an exponentially growing heap of work on my desk, a good eight extra pounds on my ass, and a million little pine needles all over the floor, all of which, for the life of me, I can’t seem to manage to vacuum up.

Let’s recap quickly, shall we?

Our annual Christmas party returned this year with a bang (and, of course, a John Bang!), after a yearlong hiatus while we were in Nashville. (Did I seriously live in Nashville? I can hardly remember.) It just didn’t feel like the holidays last year without inviting all eight million of our nearest and dearest to come over and trash our house. The good news is, I only got a picture of the “before.” I wish my house looked like this all the time:

Note the overwhelming presence of bacon-wrapped items:

Actually, apart from waking up to an arctic breeze flowing through my living room through an open window (!!!!), the collateral damage this year was far less extensive than what I remember from the past, though perhaps I had too many glasses of champagne to notice. A special shout-out to the girliest girls I know, Elizabeth and Abbie, who took over the kitchen and, I suspect, refilled my glass when I wasn’t looking. Let it flow, girls, just let it flow.

Christmas Eve and Day proved mild and, dare I say, almost a little boring? Nary a tear was shed (and I kept myself together pretty good, too) in our Honda CR-V as Rob and I raced back and forth between family parties, counting the minutes to ensure we were spending precisely the same amount of time with each family. We used to feel a crushing sense of guilt that we were Ruining Everyone’s Christmas and Beloved Family Traditions for our parents and siblings, but this year, either they stopped caring, or we did. It was awesome.

This is not to say that the holidays didn’t bring about the requisite drama. Christmas Eve (and Day) found me in the midst of eight dog fights, at least 25 Jews eating ham, a five-hour drive from Chicago to Highland Park, one ball-in-a-cup smackdown, two Mexican “hired help”-ers admiring my wedding album, one Korean Jazzercise instructor telling me how I look much less fat now than I do in my wedding album, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Mmmmm …. ham.

Mexico’s favorite game for over 100 years!

¡Qué gorda la novia! 

Molly, before going postal, holiday-style, on Autumn (my next dog will be a golden retriever):

and, of course, the grand finale:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, no celebration of The Birth of Our Savior Jesus Christ would be complete without a group of Jews singing church hymns in four-part harmony around the hearth. Can you spot the Holocaust survivor? (Hint: She’s 95 and has the best seat in the house.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, my head nearly exploded the first time I experienced this bizarre ritual, too.

But such commitment to wholesomeness, so fervent as to transcend social and religious norms, certainly could not limit itself to just one holiday. And so, for those of you who still don’t believe that Rob’s family has a Thanksgiving talent show and a sing-a-long, including such beloved hippie family classics as “Feelin’ Groovy,” “This Land Is Your Land” and “You’ve Got A Friend,” I give you my new family, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”:

(Just kidding, sort of. This is a little song by my friend Dan Fogelberg, about love, family, growing up, and the poignancy of life.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s see, where was I?

The new year sort of flew under the radar. I resolved to blog closer to daily than to monthly, and I promptly failed. My friends Liz and Joel have vowed to keep me on my toes, though — Joel because he misguidedly thinks I am hilarious, and Liz because she was getting really damn sick of looking at that ultrasound at the top of my blog for so long, for crying out loud, there are babies everywhere! – so you can all thank them for this gratuitously long entry.

Perhaps if I start blogging more often, Rob will start keeping his own new year’s resolutions. Sadly, I have yet to experience more than even the slightest hint that Rob might be giving me a back rub, in spite of his resolution to do so, and despite the fact that he knows full well what’s in it for him. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you know what I mean.

Though I have to hand it to my husband: he is coming home from work at a reasonable hour.  I suspect, however, that this has more than a little something to do with his brand new speakers. He loosens his tie, pours himself some bourbon, and settles in on the couch, flipping through the unending library of music on TiVo Rhapsody and listening to some tunes, man, all the while tuning out the rest of the world (including, say, his wife, or a dog whimpering by the door to be let out).

Speaking of Molly, she is about two incidents away from going to the glue factory. Apart from developing an overly dominant state of being (that’s Dog Whisperer-speak for getting into some nasty dog fights), she remains a mischevious holy terror around the house.

Because she can no longer have her head in the garbage for what amounts to a good four hours of the day (Abbie had the brilliant idea of turning the garbage can around), Molly has now redoubled her effort to retrieve food from the counter. The other day, while I was attempting to make corn chowder, I left on the counter a mixing bowl with two cups of whole milk (for which I had made a special trip to the store, and that I had just measured out and poured the rest down the drain) while I ran in the office to look at the recipe on the (laptop) computer (that I very well could have brought into the kitchen, but that would have made too much sense).

CRASH! SPLASH! Wait … splash?!?

I came running into the kitchen to find milk EVERYWHERE.

Note the tail in the background. Not pictured: the milk dripping from the tops of the cabinets and — I kid you not — the ceiling.

And, of course, that was the end of the corn chowder. It was the end of a really bad day, and I’m not gonna lie: I cried. I cried over spilled milk.

It has been snowing a lot, which has meant that I’ve been outside shoveling. We live in a condo building, and of course we are paying someone to do this kind of thing for us — not that he has done it in, oh, about four of the five years I’ve lived here, not that I’m counting, but the condo president refuses to fire him, and he happens to be the same neighbor that tried to punch me, so I’m not going anywhere near this one. (Wait, have I not told you that story yet?)

Anyway, I do a lot of shoveling. We all know my affinity for mindless household tasks and manual labor, such as painting the mantel or installing light fixtures, so I can’t exactly play the martyr.

Molly adores the snow and is thrilled when I ask her if she wants to “go shovel.” She treats a snowy day like a crime scene investigation, shoving her nose, then her snout, then her face and entire head into the snow banks, sniffing relentlessly to verify the identity of the culprit that has covered her entire world in this cold white stuff. Once she uncovers a piece of evidence — be it a stick, a piece of cloth, or a McDonald’s cheeseburger wrapper — she flings it up in the air and bounds over and through the snow, prancing around with trash hanging out of her mouth like she won a prize.

It’s good entertainment.

Here she is, enjoying a frigid afternoon and beautiful “wintry mix”:

Because she’s a cute dog, my neighbors assume (and insist) that she should be wearing a sweater, or at least some doggie boots. But I swear, Molly could live out in that snow and never get cold. When it’s time to go in, she puts on her best pathetic face and pleads for five more minutes.

Some days, I have half a mind to just leave her out there.

Have I suitably made up for having missed an entire month? I hope so. Even I’m getting sick of me by now.

That was stunning, all right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I feel stunned.

First, there was endless line of otherwise fairly intelligent Republican pundits who set aside their personal integrity in order to throw themselves on (or perhaps in front of) the Palin bandwagon. Even Rudy Giuliani championed her candidacy, though surely a lifelong New Yorker – and mayor of the city, during the terrorist attacks — couldn’t possibly take her and her small-town experience seriously.

Next came the Evangelicals, who were only too happy to embrace Bristol and her baby daddy, never you mind that scarlet letter poking out the front of her dress or the dirty details of the sin that put it there.

Not that they haven’t already overlooked McCain’s philandering. After all, he had just returned from Vietnam to find that his first wife, a former beauty queen herself, had gotten a little thicker in the thighs. Isn’t a POW entitled to a “get out of jail free” card on that piddly little commandment about adultery? He oughta be entitled to at least a little somethin’-somethin’ from the woman who would become, as she was last night, a perfect life-sized model for Mattel’s next big thing: Grandma Barbie.

And then, the main event: One Fargo-sounding hockey mom, staring vacantly at the teleprompter like a moose into the headlights, delivering her acceptance speech for the nomination for the vice-presidency of the PTA. Whoops! I mean USA.

Apart from the blatant lies about the facts of Obama’s experience and candidacy, Palin’s little Sarah-nade amounted to a 45-minute snark attack. I mean, had Giuliani not gone on for so long, she could have fit in those closing jokes about Obama’s mom, instead of ending so abruptly as she did.

And boy, oh boy, never was a candidate received with so much hooting and hollering from the oh-so-classy members of the Republican Party. Among whom, might I point out, there was nary an iota of pigmentation, of the hair (or what was left of it) or the skin (except for those two black guys they zoomed in on at the very end).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

Sarah, please! If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

Everybody knows that sarcasm is a way of deflecting an insult, and Palin’s mean-spirited attack did less to establish her as a bright and independently strong politician than it did to put her very much on the defensive, like a tenacious pit bull in lipstick who will just. Not. Let. It. Go.

I’m reminded of wrenching Molly’s jaws apart and shaking her entire head to knock free the slice of pizza she snatched from the countertop. Let it go! Loose! DROP IT! BAD GIRL!

Take it from a sarcastic person herself. I have had to learn the hard way that people don’t want to hear you bitching and moaning all the time.

Nobody likes a downer. Wipe that smirk off your face and say something positive.

Or not. Either way, Sarah Palin feels like a Christmas present to me. Unless people are even dumber than I thought.