Dear Diary,

A problem with waiting so long between posts is that you then hardly know where to begin with all the minutiae that has (have?) accumulated over the past month. The only November post was about Halloween, thus technically an October post. And now we are in December, and a fair way in at that. So there is nothing to do but throw in everything I can think of and hope the feeling of being somewhat caught up inspires me to a little more diligence. Or not.

So, the “morning after” exhilaration of the election has faded, but I will still cheerily submit that I hosted a “call for change” party the Saturday prior, wherein a handful of local lefties came to my house and used their cell phones to get out the local vote (when did air quotes become real quotes?). We lost the battle (sorry, Darcy), but I really didn’t mind too much considering the nation-wide results. The next day, very unshowered, I was chasing Naomi as she demonically pushed the teeny kiddy cart around the produce section of the Whole Foods when a man came up with a notebook and started asking me questions about the election. In a display of really shameful political self-aggrandizement, I told him that when I was calling voters just yesterday, it seemed that they WERE unclear on what Darcy stood for, though I also had just seen some of her newest tv ads that seemed to try to take that on, blah blah blah, stem cell research, blah blah blah. He took my name, and told me his- Bill Y., a reporter for… wait for it…the New York Times! Yea, baby! Of course, when I looked up his article a few days later, it was three short paragraphs and did not contain quotes from anyone, let alone a disheveled mother of one in the Whole Foods produce department. Still, neato!

On the work front, we are coming to the end of the moving walkway. The big project that we have been working mandatory 45 hour weeks to finish is…finished. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I really like to be busy, and having a frantic, coming up on a deadline kind of work experience is enjoyable to me, in some ways. Now, I’m back to the point where I do… I am not sure what. Think about the big picture and sign up for training, or something. Work is going very well for Jim- he is starting to work on creating schedules for his small team’s part of the project, and that means he is learning new skills and also showing his handsome, capable face in meetings with muckety mucks. He will probably censor this paragraph after he reads it (so humble is he), but in the meantime, I will confide that I am proud of him. Even more so this week, when, despite being famous (around our house) for taking a sick day when he so much as feels a cold coming on, he went to work so sick that even I conceded that he could have used a sick day, loaded himself up with dayquil, and stayed the whole day. Way to go, man.

Naomi has been hard at work herself. Just last night she came home from her sweatshop job with glue in her hair. When I dropped her off this morning I got to see why- she had been gluing toothpicks to a little construction paper hedgehog, of course. Last week things seemed a little off with her- she slept an extra one and a half to two hours a day, woke up grouchy, seemed out of sorts. After about three days of this, she seemed to be shining more brightly all of a sudden. She talks more articulately, in longer sentences. She can sing nearly entire songs that we haven’t heard her sing even parts of before. Everything is pretty and beautiful, too, including the “Chrisums tree”, the picture of Gramma, her tiny transparent plastic purse with a flower on it, and mommy and daddy. In the car on the way home from school, she said, “My miss Mommy. My love Mommy.” Aww. My miss you too, cute little Frankenstein talker.

And now I will close with an anecdote that illustrates just how big a dope I can be, like you didn’t know. The weekend of the 15th I had a trip planned to NYC to visit my friend the urbane professor, and bask in the joyful holiday goodness that abounds in that city. Hooray! So this weekend, on the 9th, I planned to throw a little holiday open house. There are still a few neighbors we don’t know, and a few we’d like to get to know, so on Monday morning I sneaked around in the pre-dawn darkness and delivered all the invitations (that is, stuck them on everyone’s front door). Two hours later, I got to work, checked my yahoo mail, and saw the note from Expedia with my itinerary for my December 7th trip to NYC. Wha, wha wha? That’s right, I had the dates wrong. And had already invited neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, to my house on the Saturday I’ll be watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (is that where they ice skate?) Shit. So today I have to go around and un-invite everyone, hoping they can make it the following Saturday. Fun! And I had planned to have a four to five day word of mouth campaign to convince Naomi that it was going to be so neat to have Daddy take care of her for four days while Mommy visits aunty urbane professor, which must now be compacted into two days. Rats. But still, NYC at Christmas time! More on that in an upcoming post.