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Simply having a wonderful Christmas time

I didn’t sleep terrifically well on Christmas Eve, more from indigestion than anticipation, more pizza dinner repeating than visions of sugar plums dancing. I got woken up early to take the dog for a walk, and I honestly thought the cold outside might actually kill me. I think I was just unprepared for it, given how unseasonably warm it had been leading up to the holiday, but I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering until I came back inside.

All that said, however, I had a really very nice Christmas day. I had a chance to go back to sleep for a bit after I walked the dog, which was good, and then we all got up and opened presents. The rest of the day was spent in eating too much good food, playing with the dogs, and talking. Yesterday was actually the first day in the past week and a half that I didn’t watch any movies. I made up for it tonight by watching two Boris Karloff films, Targets and The Mummy. And last night, I did watch the Doctor Who Christmas special. (For good and bad, this about matches up to what I thought.)

It was a pleasantly unexciting Christmas, full of laughter and good cheer, and today was a just a much quieter version of the same.

I go back to work a week from now, but that’s still a week away. It’s been a good vacation so far, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and/or Wednesday as well!

Winter vacation, day 2

You’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t answer any work e-mail today. I mean, I glanced at it several times, don’t get me wrong. I have a bunch of deadlines that didn’t go away just because I’m done for the year. And I am also a little insane. But today I was happy and able to let things sort themselves out on their own without directly answering anything myself.

I didn’t do a whole lot today beyond a little more writing. (I gave a witch a name.) I shoveled some snow, but there turned out not to be a lot of snow to shovel. I watched a couple of movies (a very weird double feature of The Odd Couple and Hellraiser. And that’s about it. Oh, and I watched this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. (I liked it a lot.) But that hardly seems like enough to have filled the day.

That said, it wasn’t too shabby by wintry Tuesday standards.

Winter vacation, day 1

So I did go with Becket last night, and it was a terrific movie, not least of all because of Peter O’Toole’s performance as King Henry II. It earned him (along with co-star Richard Burton) a Best Actor nomination at that year’s Oscars. (With The Lion in Winter just four years later, O’Toole remains the only actor nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films.) The movie’s not completely historically accurate, but it’s a great film with two towering performances.

I can’t even jokingly say the same thing about Equilibrium, which I watched this evening and which is just laughably ridiculous. It’s also ridiculously entertaining, thanks largely to gun kata (an actual pseeudo-martial-art invented for the movie) and this image of a confused and horror-stricken Christian Bale holding a puppy. (Spoiler warnings at both links, I suppose.)

I definitely can’t say the same thing about Upside Down, which I watched after that. (Well, I took a short break to watch that episode of Star Trek where Kirk “fights” the Gorn.) The movie is ridiculous, but rarely in a good way, and it makes zero actual sense. I enjoyed live-tweeting both it and Equilibrium — it’s telling that Becket was good enough to keep me mostly off of Twitter while I was watching — but I’d only count the former in the “so bad it’s good” category.

I spent the rest of the day not doing a whole lot. I answered a couple of work e-mails over my phone, really just so a book wouldn’t get delayed going to the printer. I swear, beyond proofing a PDF of the book’s cover, there wasn’t a whole lot of actual work involved.

I finished reading Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy, which I didn’t really love, or even necessarily like. With the second book in the series, which I also found disappointing but much less so, Suzanne Collins could have been accused of just doing more of the same. So maybe that’s why the third book feels like more of a departure…but lack of plot wouldn’t have been my first choice for trying something different.

I also did a little writing of my own. I didn’t progress too far in this short story I’m working on, but I poked around at it for an hour or so and expect to do more in the next couple of weeks.

And that was Monday, my first official day off in this two-weeks-plus vacation I’ve somehow lucked into.

Wednesday

It rained and rained and rained all night, and although it let up quite a bit by morning, it rained and rained and rained again all day.

I was just as glad not to be at work. Our office closed early for tomorrow’s holiday, but I’d taken the day off altogether, in the same plan that’s had me burning up left-over vacation days with three-day weekends lately. This will be a five-day weekend, thanks to Thanksgiving and the Friday after, and I won’t go back to the office until next Tuesday. Just last week, we were talking to our UK boss about Thanksgiving, and he was saying, “That must be nice. And I suppose lots of people take the Friday off as well?” He was actually shocked when we told him the office was closed, that both Thursday and Friday are paid days off, and that a four-day weekend for Thanksgiving is a pretty typical American custom.

I went and got a haircut this morning, to at least try and pretend like I had some kind of schedule. But mostly I just sat around, watched an episode of Sleepy Hollow, tried to explain iTunes to my mother, and avoided going back out in the rain. I only replied to a single work e-mail. Not exactly an eventful day off, but I’m not complaining.

Last night, I watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which I seem to remember having watched in theaters, even if the movie itself wasn’t perfectly familiar. It wasn’t bad — not as good as Wrath of Khan or as much fun as The Voyage Home, perhaps, but I think history has been kind to the movie, and there’s a certain hokey nostalgia that hangs over it. A lot of the practical effects are dated, and there’s a fair amount of scenery chewing — Christopher Lloyd’s no Ricardo Montalban, but his Klingon and Shatner’s Kirk trade a good bit of yelling — but it’s entertaining.

Wake in Fright, on the other hand, which I watched this evening…well, it was interesting. It’s set in the Australian outback in the early 1970s and starts to feel like a horrible fever-dream after a while. I think the moral of the movie is “don’t drink so much that butchering kangaroos in the dead of night seems like a good time.” Seriously, the kangaroo hunt is bloody and graphic and awful to watch. Though maybe the disclaimer about this at the end is strangely preferable to the “No animals were harmed during the making of this picture” we often see — and which it turns out might not be worth a damn. Still, that doesn’t make the scenes any easier to sit through.

Anyway, that’s been my Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, and then I have three more days of weekend to get through. I wonder how I’ll manage.

Sunday

It’s been a couple of days.

I took Friday off again, mostly just trying to make it feel like a Friday instead of a Saturday — mostly because that makes Saturday feel like a Sunday, and I don’t need two Sundays in my weekend. (I like Sundays, but I don’t need two of them.)

That evening, I watched Before Midnight, which I really liked a whole lot. While I think it can be enjoyed without having seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, it’s absolutely a companion piece to those two films, and it’s a delight to dip back into these characters’ lives — even when those lives themselves aren’t always delightful. (Watching them fight is like watching good friends, or your parents, fight and almost as uncomfortable.) I’m surprised to discover I was hoping they wouldn’t make the movie a couple of years ago. This, too, seems like a fitting end to the story…and yet I could see coming back to them again in another ten years. This film is sometimes less fun than the first two — it’s less about falling in love than struggling to maintain in — but it’s still terrific.

Yesterday, I thought about watching a movie, but ended up just watching a bunch of television. Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, the new Doctor Who. Mostly that’s because I went to dinner with my parents and aunt and uncle to celebrate a birthday and got a home a little later than I expected. (A short but furious snow squall that made driving almost impossible for a good stretch of road didn’t help any.) And today’s it’s mostly more TV, trying to avoid the ridiculous cold and wind outside.

My writing group got canceled, thanks to a friend’s car troubles, but I decided to make use of the writing prompts he posts every Saturday and do some free-writing on my own. I really do need to get back into writing more regularly, above and beyond the forty minutes of it I do most Sundays.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

She was staying at the cabin, the one her father bought before he died, when she saw the thing that might have been a wolf.

There wasn’t any heat or running water at the place, and only candlelight or a beat-up lantern by which to see. But she was only staying the one night, packing up the last of the old man’s books and papers because nobody else in the family wanted to. There were ten months of notes and ratty journals squirreled away up here, maybe more; and although she and her sisters were just as likely to burn it all, Karen had agreed to travel the three hours north to box and tag everything she could find. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside the family even remembered her father’s novels, and whatever he’d been working on here, it sure as hell hadn’t been another book. But maybe there were still some collectors out there, die-hard fans who would pay good money for a glimpse of his later writing.

God knew the old man hadn’t left them much of anything else. It was only chance that Karen had even found out that he was dying.

He’d come back to Chicago for some reason. She didn’t think it was to die — she couldn’t even say for sure if he’d known he was sick — but that’s how it had played out. Almost a year without contact, not even a word, and then one morning Deb called her from the hospital and said, “Um, Kar? I think they just wheeled Dad into the emergency room downstairs.”

Karen was tempted to think of it as destiny, or maybe karma. Those were the kinds of words that Deb had used at the funeral, and like always Maggie had echoed her, but maybe there was some kind of truth to it. All Karen knew was that the man was dead, and there was a strange satisfaction in knowing that he’d breathed his last in a city that he’d always hated.

Not that the cabin revealed anything more about her father. She’d glanced at the writings she was bundling for the drive back home, but it seemed like there was more of his madness than answers in there, and the building itself anonymous and ramshackle. He’d apparently been there since last October, paid in full, but it was a lonely shack in the woods more than anything else.

Not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s something that wasn’t there before I started, so that’s something.