Of Christmas Goodies, Alyssa's All-Around Alyssaness, and Bad News

Bonjour! Happy Louis Pasteur's birthday! Oh yeah, and merry two-days-after-Christmas as well. It was a fun Christmas, but, honestly, I'm glad to have it over. I have never spent so many consecutive hours making goodies or aiding in the goodie-making process in all my days. Toffee, almond butter cookies (3 fetchin' batches!), challah bread, chocolate-covered pretzels, latkes, apple cider, flan, and so on and so forth. Definitely enough sugary junk to put 10 Bens into a coma. But what's the Christmas season for? Besides the goodie-making, we saw the lights at Temple Square, attended various children's school Christmas--oops, I mean HOLIDAY--programs (Charlie Brown would have been appalled by Brayden's school's materialistic, toy-and-candy-focused program, as was I), and enjoyed the usual auction at Alyssa's parents' house, at which I was the proud winner of a pen and pencil set, some granola, and a bag of "New Moon" chocolates emblazoned with the oh-so-hot faces of Bella and her vampire friends (for which I received much flack, as you might have guessed). We also attended the birthday party of one of Alyssa's mom-side relatives last night and there were two more white elephant style gift games, from which I won two identical Lego basketball guy sets and some sparkly nail polish, the former of which I traded to Karen for some hot chocolate mix, and the latter of which I dumped off on some random little girl. With all that going on, it's a wonder I ever managed to find time to study for my finals, but I think I pulled through on most of them (but I still haven't been able to summon the courage to actually check my grades online--maybe I should do that, huh?).

Alyssa, in addition to the aforementioned activities, spent a great deal of time preparing herself physically and mentally for her work's "12 Days of Christmas" contest, in which there was a different Christmas competition each day--bringing the best goodies or the most toys for charity, guessing the number of candies in a jar, decorating one's cubicle, etc. I am not exaggerating when I say she probably won at least half of these competitions, leading to her eventually winning us a ClearPlay DVD player. I've said it before and I'll say it again--when Alyssa sets her mind to winning something, hope pretty much goes out the window for all else involved. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but she just got a new job at Children's Academy, which she starts on January 4th. You rock, sweetie.

Had myself another bizarre dream this morning, though I don't remember nearly as many details of this one as the last one I recorded. It was just as weird though. I was on some college campus and everyone was rushing around madly because Jonathan from Amazing Race 6 had a gun and was shooting random people, meaning we were under quarantine (makes perfect sense, doesn't it?), so I was hiding out in a locker room nursery (that's right--a nursery within a locker room) but for some reason I didn't have any pants on, just my long johns. Not sure what any of that means, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if Jonathan were to actually go on a killing rampage. What a nutcase that guy was.

Now for some bad news. My uncle Dave apparently has only a few weeks left to live. Like I've said before, I think he's always been my favorite uncle. When I was little and I would act up at their house, he would put me in "the goophole," which was the space under his desk, and I couldn't come out until I was good. The goophole terrified me then, but it makes for some funny reminiscing now! He could entertain us for hours with stories from his days teaching physiology in Winnipeg (many of which involved performing electrical experiments on cats' brains!) And he was quite the dancer, which I never even knew until Janessa's wedding reception a few years ago. A classy, classy man, and one whom I'll never forget.