Christmas in a nutshell: exhilarating, depressing, hilarious, exhausting and boring. My mom was in a funk, another family-member-by-proxy was in and out of the hospital, I ate too much, my nieces and nephews were heartbreakingly sweet, S. and I did way too much travelling and so on and so on.
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Mystery bro. and his g.f. came to the house a few days before Christmas and while the g.f. remains one of the dimmer bulbs I've met, bro. is more relaxed and happy than I've seen him in years. So I guess it's all good.
During the gift-opening, the g.f. (for reasons none of us could ascertain) started passing out dollar bills to my sister's kids.
G.F. (to Gabe, who only took one dollar): Come on Gabe! Don't you want more money? I've never seen a kid who didn't want money! You can always use more money!
Gabe: Not if you already have enough.
And so the six-year-old master laid the Zen smackdown on her. My sister and I were laughing so hard we had to leave the room.
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Because things were a bit sketchy with my mom and time was tight, I opted against seeing the ex-charges, something that set off a shitstorm with their mother. The older charge has had a hard time with "losing" me and somehow it became, in his mom's eyes, my job to make him feel all right about it. I set her straight on that crap, pronto. That's about all I want to say here because people close to her read this page.
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S. and I returned home for one day and then it was off to see his folks. We received a lot of well-intentioned but useless and/or hideous gifts (in fairness, we got a quite a few of those from my side of the family also). I know "it's the thought that counts" but sometimes you really wonder what exactly that thought was.
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On New Year's Eve, we made an early escape for Port Aransas, where we spent one blissful day and night at the funky LAUGHING HORSE LODGE, eating and drinking in the New Year. Port A. is reached by a short ferry ride and unlike other parts of the Texas Gulf Coast, has retained quite a bit of its small-town vibe. 'Twas nice.
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Back later today with pictorial goodness.
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