Of Ting Ting, Finished Novels (okay, just Part One, but still), and The Lame Christmas Song Survey

Hey L'il Smokies. Alyssa says I have to write a Christmas letter to all my peeps, on account of she wrote one the other day and failed to put my name in it. So now I have to do one of my own, lest people think we're having marital discord and I've been disowned as a spouse. Seriously. So we're just going to consider this blog entry my "Christmas letter" and keep real quiet about it from you-know-who. Capiche? Capiche.


So the year in retrospective... Well, from January up until about October, nothing really changed. Same jobs, same basic routine, with a few spicy moments thrown in just to shake things up, like going to Steamboat Springs and Alcatraz, and attending that funeral presided over by the midget, and...umm...gerbil-sitting. So, for the most part, not too much really out of the ordinary, but nothing really gloomy and depressing either. Life for us was like a sitcom where something really zany happens once a week during a single half-hour period and then everything goes back to the way it was.


That all seems to have changed, with the introduction of Ting Ting. For those who don't know, we're going through the process of adopting a special needs child internationally. We've locked in a child, a Chinese girl named Ting Ting who's about 14 months old and living in an orphanage in Chengde. The paperwork is pretty grueling (meaning I would rather eat gruel than work on it), and the timeframe iffy--if all goes well, we could be going to China to pick her up as early as July, by my estimation. If all goes well. There are a bumload of things that could go wrong in the meantime, but hey! In all our years of trying to adopt, it's far and away the closest we've ever been. Just gotta keep the faith. And not commit any serious crimes or die. 


Other than that, the other big news is that I finished my book I've been working on for three years. I guess "finished" is a bit of a misnomer, since the ending is just a cliffhanger leading into Book 2, but now I can brag this up at parties. "I finished a book! Yeah, that's right! What've you done? Huh? Hey, where are you going? Whah? She...she walked away from me! What...what did I do?" Actually, it's a pretty sweet book, with all the over-the-top Ben-ness you've come to expect--a hot female herpetologist and her wanna-be flapper best friend, a boyfriend supposedly killed in a mudslide, cursed part-animal cannibals, near death by box jellyfish, and the most inventive use of nitroglycerin you will ever see in all your days. (Okay, the nitroglycerin thing won't be until Book 2, but I had to stick it in there as a plug.) I'm looking for readers, if anyone is interested. (But know I'm giving it a PG-13 rating, just so no one unwittingly assigns it at their Relief Society book club. THAT wouldn't be good.) 


So that's pretty much my "yearly retrospective." Now for the really important part of this blog post: the all-new Lame Christmas Song Lyrics Survey. This year's hot contenders are as follows:

• "Winter Wonderland." Later on, we'll conspire, as we dream by the fire, to face unafraid the plans that we've made. What is it they're conspiring to do, exactly? Assassinate Santa?
• "Happy Holidays." Whoopty-doo, and dickory dock. Don't forget to hang up your sock. Uhhh...yeah. What he said.
• "Do You Hear What I Hear." A star, a star, shining in the night, with a tail as big as a kite. I know that when I think "big," kites are always the first thing that comes to mind. 
• "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago. This, along with the line about "marshmallows for toasting," makes me wonder if this guy was on some kind of Christmas camping trip when he wrote the song. 

So go ahead and cast your vote for the song with the most inane lyrics. You can pick any of the above or do a write-in. The choice is yours. (I was this close to including "The First Noel" for the part that goes "They look-ed up." But then I thought, nah. It's in the hymn book. I'd probably get hit by lightning or something.)