Catchy Name Needed

We spent Christmas evening (not Christmas Eve, but the evening of Christmas Day!) trying to teach Rob how to play cards. He had a deprived childhood in some odd ways - he was the third of four boys and I get the feeling they just ran wild in a pack most of the time when they weren't in school. He says they never played cards at all. (This has showed up in other odd ways over the years, too, like before he met me he had never been on an escalator.)

So we taught him to play Spades earlier tonight. The way my sister plays Spades is somewhat more complex (more like full-on bridge) than the way I remember playing it in the 9th-grade cafeteria, but it was still the same game, really. (Card-playing was very in for adults in the 60s & into the 70s, in general, and for some reason, for a year or two when I was in the lower grades of high school - which would have been 1973-74, maybe - it trickled down to the teenagers of our little town. Then it mostly just went away, as fads do.) Anyway, it took him a while to get the hang of it, but he was doing really well by the time we gave in for the night.

(Our parents, on the other hand, taught us to play bridge, probably even before I was in 9th grade. I think it was maybe when we were still in grade school, and it was a bit over our heads, at the time. Plus our dad had a notoriously bad temper and would yell at us - my mom included - when we messed up. Spades in the cafeteria was a lot more fun. I imagine Rob and his brothers had a pretty good time running wild, too, and didn't care how much card-playing they missed.)

Added: I failed to mention above that my brother-in-law was also there - I feel like it was wrong not to even mention his existence. Besides, without him we wouldn't have had a fourth for Spades. He grew up in Mexico City and he said his mom played bridge, too, but he didn't act like he'd played cards a great deal, either. But he didn't seem quite as ignorant of what to do as Rob was. Rob didn't even seem to know, y'know, how to hold the cards, and that you really needed to sort them into suits so you don't get confused. The basics. (I guess it says something about our life that we've been married nearly 35 years and this never really came up before.)

I have several holiday romance novels/novellas, so I'm prioritizing reading those, before Christmas passes and I decide I'm out of the mood to read them. I'm very much a mood-based reader, which is one reason I usually have several things going at once. (Me, talking to myself: "No, I'm not in the mood to read that right now, what else have we got?") I have some Regency ones, and something that was recommended called In a Holidaze - I assume it's a romance although I actually know nothing about it at all. If I looked at the info when I bought it I've already forgotten what it said.

I also bought the set of novellas that goes with that Thanksgiving one that I liked - I think the overall title is Holidays with the Wongs. There's the Thanksgiving one and and one for Christmas, Chinese New Year, and something else... Valentine's Day? New Year's Eve? Again, I read the titles but that last one didn't stick.

I also bought one more $1.99 romance from Amazon - I was about to say I don't remember the title but I just found where I wrote it down - it's Sleigh Bells Ring. It was in either an Amazon Books e-mail or a Book Riot because those are the only book e-mails I get right now. (And I buy too much stuff already so I sure don't need any more!) I remember thinking that this one sounded like a Hallmark movie - the convoluted plot, the good-looking but annoying boss/new neighbor/whatever, etc.

I enjoy Hallmark movies occasionally. Lest you think I'm a sad, unromantic, Christmas-hating old lady, I will tell you that I was pretty much in tears due to a story I read yesterday involving a lonely teacher, an orphan, and a viscount, all discovering the magic of Christmas together. (Do Americans other than Regency/Bridgerton fans even know what a viscount is? much less how to pronounce it - I only know that last part from some BBC Jane Austen adaptations, I think!) Anyway, my problem with Hallmark (and y'know, all those other channels that do the same thing) is that the plots rarely make any sense whatsoever. I'm not incredibly picky about this, even, but just a little logic goes a long way with me. I suspect the main problem is that they churn these things out so fast that they don't have time to worry over little stuff like the script. So I have to space my Hallmark (/Lifetime/etc.) movie-watching out so I don't start tearing my hair out.

I'll just go back to my reading instead.

I end up mentioning the "Christmas Eve gift" thing practically every Christmas (look in the comments here for more into), but Rob and I have been married for, what, 33 years now (!!) and he said it to me today without any prompting whatsoever - I'm pretty sure it's the first time he's ever done that. I guess he's heard it an awful lot over the years, though - he was around when my grandma and my mother used to go around saying it every year, after all. (Then I looked at my phone and my sister had already texted me to say it, as well. If it's a contest to see who can say it first, then she won.)

We had our "Christmas dinner" today and are just going to have leftovers tomorrow. It was nothing fancy, though - lasagna and apple pie. And we watched While You Were Sleeping, which I hadn't seen in years and years. (I remembered who Sandra ended up with but I couldn't exactly remember how it all worked out.) We enjoyed it. And it's sort of a Christmas movie - basically in the Die Hard sense, where Christmas is just going on in the background but isn't really that integral to the plot. -- Disney+ has it in the holiday movie section, if you have that and you want an easy way to find it.

Our original plan was to drive to San Antonio tomorrow, and that's a really long drive and I can't say I'm sorry we didn't have to do it! I did get to see my sister briefly last week, and in a few months they'll be here (15-20 minutes away, that is) full-time. I haven't lived that close to my sister since we lived in the same house, a million years ago.

 I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling a little sick. Well, we are both sick - pretty mildly sick, I think it's just a cold - and furthermore, my sister and her husband are too. So I guess maybe somebody that waited on us earlier this week was sick, because meals were mostly when all four of us were together. (I believe one server on Christmas Eve mentioned that they were sending her home because she was sick, in fact.) But anyway, I'd rather have a cold than a severe allergy attack, because the cold will go away in a few days. With allergies you just don't know.

Rob went off to see the Halloween movie at the dollar theater. I just stayed home. I'm watching the MSNBC shows from earlier today (what the heck is the stock market doing?) and futzing around on the computer. I bought two more candles from Bath & Body Works (I always want to say Bed Bath & Beyond, but that's wrong) because they have the 3-wick candles on half-price sale again. I bought another Fresh Balsam candle and a non-holiday one that was Eucalyptus Mint or something like that. I thought that sounded like it was pretty safely something I would like.

I'm obsessing about Zoya polishes at the moment - not the new ones, but the old ones - like, the ones so old you can't figure out all the information on them. I suppose this is a stupid thing to obsess about, but I am just the same. (I have this spreadsheet with a lot of holes in it and I was trying to figure out some of the missing ones. I have names and Zoya's polish numbers and I'm trying to match those up, basically.)

Last night I finished the book that I was reading - one of the series that I didn't get around to talking about earlier, the October Daye books - one of Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series - so then I had to decide what was next. I have unread stuff that I could have read without spending more money, but I really wanted to either get the next book in that series or the next Expanse book. That was book 9 of 12 on the October Daye books and I've only read the first Expanse book (Leviathan Wakes) - there are a bunch of those too, at least 8 of them, I think, from what I saw when I looked on Amazon. I like both series and I'm not in any particular hurry to finish one or the other. If the October Daye books seemed to be heading towards some particular ending, I would probably be wanting to finish, but as far as I can tell, they're mostly just serials and could possibly go on forever. I'm not far enough into the Expanse series to have any idea about that - it did have an ending to the first book, they're not just cliffhangers like, say, Lord of the Rings, where it's really just one book divided up. But there's plenty of plot to go on with, too. Anyway, I bought the second Expanse book, which is Caliban's War. It seems to pick up maybe a couple of months after the first one ends, from what I've read so far.

I'm off all week - it's not actually holidays for me, technically, because I'm part-time and I don't get paid if I don't work. But we'll manage, financially, and I can't say I'm unhappy about the break.

We went to see my aunt and my cousins yesterday, Christmas Day, and came back today - which is Boxing Day, other places, but nobody calls it that here. It really should be called Returns and Gift Cards Day - although I admit it's not terribly catchy - because that's what an awful lot of people do on the day after Christmas, right? You return what doesn't fit, etc, you maybe buy some Christmas junk that's marked down (I used to do that a lot but I don't as much as I used to), and you spend the gift cards that people gave you, often on newly marked-down merchandise. However, we didn't do any of those things today. We got up (terribly, terribly early, by my standards), we went to my aunt's and had breakfast, and then we came home. Rob went to the gym after we got home; I played Marvel Heroes for a while and then went and took a nap, because I only got maybe 5 hours of sleep last night. And then when I got up we watched another episode of Stranger Things and then the Doctor Who Christmas special, which luckily taped because I set it in some past year and it always remembers. I do love U-verse for that (although we are plotting to get rid of the TV portion of U-verse if we can figure out how to make that work - I'm not really sure it's doable at this point but I'll report back if we make any progress on that).

I guess I should back up and talk about yesterday. Oh, no, actually I'll back up to Saturday night (or very early on Christmas morning, really) right after I posted the previous entry. I did paint my nails - the color is Twinkle Lights, if you want to know. I do really like it but it was a bit difficult to get opaque. Between coats of nail polish, I was messing around on the internet like I always do, and at some point I went back into Marvel Heroes and my inventory panel was suddenly chock-full of stuff. Presumably this was a Christmas gift of sorts from Gazillion (who runs the game), although there were two of everything and Col said today that the rumor yesterday was that the doubling-up was a mistake which they just decided not to try to rectify. It was all these different kinds of gift boxes, and I was determined to sort it out before I went to bed, and I felt like it took for-freaking-ever. There was lots of good stuff in there, so I'm not exactly complaining but it did stress me out for a while there. I did still get to sleep at what for me is a decent hour, because I knew I had to get up by 10 or 10:30, so we could get to my aunt's house in time for a late Christmas lunch.

I had talked to my aunt on Friday and I told her that we were leaving about 11, and she said "but it'll take you three hours!" and I'm not sure where she came up with that number, but we made sure to time ourselves because we were sure she was wrong. We started out the door at 11, actually pulled out at 11:15, and got there at 1:30 even with a brief stop at Buc-ees for a bathroom-and-cold-drinks break. so it takes, what, actually about two hours flat, driving time. (Of course there wasn't all that much traffic, on Christmas Day.) I had told her if they got ready to eat and we weren't there, not to wait, and they didn't. We got there right when they were finishing up. I was trying to decide if it was rude not to get there on time, but since they won't actually ever set a fixed time it's hard to work up much guilt there. There were actually still a couple of people lingering at the table and we just fixed plates and joined them, so it was like Christmas dinner, act 2, more or less.

I'm not going to try to distinguish too much between my various relatives, because there's too many of them, but basically, this group of people is composed of my aunt, who is actually my aunt-by-marriage (my uncle died about 15 years ago), my two first cousins who are in their 40s, their four children (between them), and the family of the oldest of those four children (husband & three little girls). (I always just say "my aunt and my cousins" - obviously some of them are actually first cousins at a remove or two,)  Plus there was my aunt's father, who is 103 and not in particularly good health (although he's hanging in there very stubbornly) and his caregiver. He is still living at home but he broke his hip and now has round-the-clock care as of this past year. (I can't imagine what costs them, but he's pretty well-to-do so I assume he can afford it.) The caregiver just joined right in with everything like she was part of the family. This is all a pretty extended family, I imagine you're getting that from this description if you've read this far, and so it has expanded and contracted to include a variety of people over the years. We usually only see them this one time of the year, but they always seem happy to see us, and it's sort of the last remnant of Christmas that we much participate in.

We normally go on Christmas Eve, stay one night, my aunt ritually complains that we don't stay longer, and we normally go on home late in the afternoon on Christmas Day just the same. This year, since we had to work on the 23rd, we begged off coming until Christmas Day. I enjoyed being home on Christmas Eve, as I said in the last entry, but I'm not sure if the logistics will work out to be able to do that every year. (We'll worry about that starting 11 months or so from now.) Anyway, people came and went, we opened gifts, we watched movies at my aunt's house ("Elf" and "Enchanted") and then Rob & I & a couple of the younger ones went down the street to my cousins' house to spend the night, and we watched more movies ("A New Hope" - which I hadn't actually seen in years, I decided - and part of "Avatar" before we finally collapsed. (To connect around to what I said earlier, I got about 5 hours of sleep, woke up at 6am and never did go back to sleep again. I finally gave up and started setting up my new paper planner that I got as one of my gifts.)

It was a pretty good Christmas, overall.