But the fire is so delightful

It finally snowed yesterday. Yay! I say "finally" only because this entire fall has been unseasonably warm, in the 50s and 60s, and while that's not entirely unpleasant, per se, it does seem a bit odd. Kind of fills me with a vague sense of unease, a certain wrong-ness, like maybe there's something to this whole global warming thing. Ya think?

Speaking of a vague sense of unease*...we spent the weekend after turkey day with a side branch of the extended family tree, and there were some major inter-family fracases (fracasses? fracasees?) happening while we were there. Major to the tune of us being woken up at one in the morning by people downstairs screaming "Don't you dare! Don't you dare!" and loud thumping noises and someone at the top of the stairs screaming, "What the fuck is going on down there?"

What the fuck indeed. To be honest, it was sort of refreshing, in a way - my own family is probably filled with just as much resentment and ill will as this particular family is, we just tighten our assholes and keep everything bottled up and seethe quietly to ourselves (or complain behind each other's backs), whereas these people just let it all fly. I was sort of taken aback that they felt no compunction whatsoever about fighting (at one in the morning! drunk!) in front of the relative strangers that we constitute to them, and that no one bothered to mention it the next day when we all convened for pancakes in the morning, preferring instead to go breezily about their day as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but I was also sort of envious that they felt free enough to just...scream at each other.

Aaaaand we were down in Dirty Jers the week after that (last week) for one more round of job interviews. KB met with four more groups, three of which he's really really jazzed about, so if any of them offer him a position, we'll probably end up taking it (and if more than one of them does, we'll have some major decision-making to do). It was an exhausting week, with rounds of "meeting the group" dinners and real-estate agent tours of towns every day, not to mention the fact that the whole family came down with the plague. Actually, Nolan was fine, it was just KB and me who were on death's door. He even was forced to cancel one of his interviews to stay home (at my mom's) on Wednesday, he felt so crappy. It was really a bummer, since we were all just sick a couple of weeks ago. But we got to see Nana (my mom) and Nolan learned how to say "Hello?" to the telephone, and we saw my grandfather and my aunt and cousins, so it wasn't all work. Nolan and I spent a LOT of time in the car with the real estate agents, plus the five hour drives down and back with KB, so we're all happy to be home again.

And now, let the usual time of holiday franticness begin! Take a family holiday picture! Soon! So we have time to order Christmas cards online! And mail them out! Hurry! I've started looking for presents in all the catalogs we got in the mail while we were gone, and I realized that, without exception, every single one of them is labelled something like, "Last-Minute Holidays 2006" or "Order by Dec. 22 for Christmas delivery!" or "It's Not Too Late!" And I think, "It better not be too late, motherfuckers, I just started!"

Thanks for reading.

*Nice blend, Fozzie - thank you, Fozzie!