Sorry for the interruption, and this is the first chance I've had to look at the page and see that my HTML hijinks worked. Unbelievable.

Oh, and: Happy Birthday to Christopher and Jesus yesterday. I think they both get cheated being born on Christmas, but what can you do?

We drove many, many miles before we did anything but think about sleep. We saw many strange and wondrous sites, some of them even captured by the new digital camera (but none of them downloaded yet). We got stuff. We gave stuff. We chuckled in much amusement of the audiobook version of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. (Not a present; I raided my mother's dormant audiobook stash.) We heard Christopher's great grandfather and grandfather sing on a record that was over 50 years old. It was a good Christmas. Not much of a birthday, I don't think, but a good Christmas. We finally exchanged our own presents around midnight, when we finally got home and finally got to bed. We'd given each other the big ones (computer software and digital camera) when we got them, so just odds and ends. Cool books(a book of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Nicola Griffith's Slow River (I loved The Blue Place and especially Stay), and Kelley Eskridge's new book Solitaire, which is so good I read three chapters last night even though it was late and exhaustion had long set in.) and a cool crocodile tiki candle, Sunset Boulevard deluxe DVD and such for me, a shaving mirror, CDs (Steve Earle, Richard Bruckner), J.K. Potter art book and such for Christopher.

And I'm still very tired. And it's time for me to get ready to face what will surely be a deserted office.

If this entry seems decidedly unsentimal seeing as how it's the holidays and all, well, Christmas is the holiday for loot, food, and rowdy family celebrations. Not sentimentalism. That's New Year's. Maybe.

I leave you with amazement at cool science. Pictures coming soon, but not of science.