Kudos!

CONGRATULATIONS to Navy Son, who has been accepted at the Naval Academy Prep School! He will go there from August 2007 to May 2008, then beginning in August 2008, do four years at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis! We are so proud!

The Best Gift

Well, Christmas is over for another year. Without a doubt, the Best Gift Ever is the gift of Jesus Christ - He is perfect, and no amount of Bah! Humbug! or Scrooginess can change the beauty of celebrating His birth. Despite my less-than-cheery attitude this season, the true meaning of Christmas did not escape me, and it moved me to tears as I held my candle and sang Silent Night in church on Christmas Eve.

But my Best Gift This Year came from Bubba and Katie, who searched high and wide to find me just what I wanted.....

Bah! Humbug!

I have tried really hard to be in the "Christmas Spirit" this year. Really, I have. I've been listening to Christmas music on the radio, attending parties, going to church (well, I always go to church, but I'm trying to reinforce the TRUE meaning of Christmas). Just when I think things are starting to look up and I feel a little bit cheery - BOOM! Life kicks me in the butt again and I'm back to being Scrooge.

One of my holiday pet peeves is those Christmas family newsletters that people send out with their Christmas cards. For one thing, if we are really that close, I already know all the stuff that you've been doing over the past year, and may have even done some of it with you. And if I don't know all that stuff - then why the hell are you sending me a Christmas card when you don't even care about keeping in touch with me for the past year? Usually these family newsletters serve simply as "brag letters" - boasting of the wonderful vacations their family went on this year, how Junior is making straight A's in school and playing on the All Star baseball/soccer/football team, how great a promotion Mr. Husband got this year (including a hefty raise), yadda yadda yadda. Puke. Here's my version of our family's newsletter for this Christmas:

Well, 2006 started out pretty good for us - we managed a great trip to Disney for Spring Break and even brought Bubba's Mom with us. Things seemed to be going swimmingly - and then reality hit. Since summer Hubby and I have both lost grandparents, and Hubby's boss died suddenly of a stroke. We had a rather major and hurtful feud with Hubby's family. Hubby broke his leg in two places and had to have surgery, and we also discovered that his blood pressure was so high that HE very easily could have stroked out himself. His recovery has been hellish, and altho now he has finally been given the all-clear, there were 54 days of incapacity for him, which dumped quite a burden on me. He missed a whole month of work. Did I mention he is paid solely on commission? Yeah. A month without a paycheck is rough. All that pretty much blew our holiday vacation plans away. We're also trying to sell our house because our neighbors are drug-dealing gangsta wanna-be's; today one of them drove their car all the way across our yard, from their driveway to ours, coming dangerously close to our bedroom windows along the way. Had to speak with the cops - again - about that one. You know it's a bad sign when all of the town's police officers know your neighbor by his first name. The refrigerator died today - it's only 3 years old, so we're not sure what's up with it, but everything in it is melting and it's leaking all over the kitchen floor. I'm tired, I'm broke, and I'm frustrated. Bah! Humbug!

Robot Boy

Little Son did a very cool thing today - it was his first Robotics Team Competition. Being in 4th grade, this is his first year to be eligible to participate, and his division is called FIRST Lego League - the robots are built from Legos, but have computers for brains. Computers these kids have to program in order for the robot to complete its "tasks" for the competition (no remote-controlled robots here). I must admit, I was not looking forward to spending the entire day at the University of Houston watching a robotics competition, but I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting the whole thing was, and I was so very proud of Little Son for being smart enough to even do all that stuff! His team was mostly first-timers, but they did ALL the work on their robot, from building it to programming it, and managed to come in 16th out of 20 teams in their division. That's not last place. And Little Son got a medal for being one of the two kids on the "floor" running the robot during the competition. He's already excited to go back and do it again next year!

Double Standard?

Danny DeVito was on The View Wednesday, apparently "drunk as a skunk" (Joy Behar's words). He told a long, drawn out story about having sex with his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, and also made several off-color remarks about President George Bush, some of which had to be "bleeped out". But according to an AP report, everyone is laughing it off. Co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck even said, "But he was a fun drunk!"

So why is this OK?

The comments that Mel Gibson made while drunk - off-color comments about Jews - have all but ruined him. The media tore him up. Why is it OK to make rude comments about the President while drunk, but not about Jewish people? I don't condone rude comments about either Jews or the President, but why is one so much more forgivable than the other?