Realizing I neglected to post over the holidays, I decided to wrap up what went on at House Daedalus. With mitda having put in a ton of effort to Christmas we had a pile of wrapped presents under the tree, the four usual adults, mitda's mother (also technically an adult :) ), kid-who-is-18 and the kidlet (9) all here to open them on Christmas Day. The presents were really quite good all round, me probably doing the best overall because mitda managed to score the last 5 Terry's Dark Chocolate Oranges available in Austin Texas. And I do love the Terry's Oranges. So I have enough of them to both share and be selfish with them. I also received a new copy of Sein und Zeit, my old one having oddly disappeared during the period when we lived with the MIL, and an apropos t-shirt emblazoned “If I'm not happy, nobody's happy”. For all the gift recipients mitda had put together a bunch of cool stocking stuffers last minute on a very slim budget, and opening them was one of the highlights of the day.
Generally mitda herself doesn't celebrate Christmas and so she had the slimmest pickings of the bunch (she remonstrated to everyone not to buy her presents in the weeks leading up), which didn't feel so good when she worked so hard to make it a good holiday, even though she will always do well on her holiday of choice for gifts, Valentine's Day. She and I had exchanged new rings in stainless steel, which appears to be the only metal she can wear these days without a reaction. And I have not-so-subtly brought her over to the 'dark side' of logic and set theory, and the two books she got on those subjects were a bigger prize for her than I expected.
Aside from trifles emmie's presents were a bit, ahem, virtual. She is in line for some big gifts this year but it simply was impossible to make the giving of them coincide with Christmas, so she received pictures of the items in question and the family's promise that the pictures would eventually have a material aspect to go with them. Materially she did get a wireless remote control for her digital SLR which will come in handy for getting herself in her photos. E received a bluetooth earbud from the family, which he seems to really get off on, and various and sundry smaller gifts from his birth family et al. Both kids did pretty well, although kidlet was disappointed to not get a new video game for his DS and made such known. With his recent grades (a number of F's, although most were in spelling and spelling has always been a bane), it might be better that neither of his parents saw new video games as a necessity. And the MIL also had a few nice gifts, including some from mitda's twin brother who lives some distance from here and couldn't be here in person. He was sweet enough to include gift cards for mitda and I as well. The family received a gift card from the MIL that she really shouldn't have budgeted herself to purchase, so every dollar on the card feels like twenty would have from anyone else. She has worked very hard this year to get herself back on track after a financially disastrous move a few years ago from California (occasioned by the very real need to take care of mitda's grandmother during her last years) and shown incredible toughness of spirit and resiliency in handling very difficult circumstances.
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