Holiday season

Spouse has been super-sick this week, just in time for the holidays, picking up where Rebekah left off. As a result, I’ve been sleeping on the couch all week (not that I wouldn’t have been anyway, had she seen what I was up to with Lisa Bonet in the dream I just woke up from) in order to avoid picking up an extremely nasty virus. We’re hosting on Christmas and the house is nowhere near ready, and tomorrow is going to be a loss because of places we have to be, so it looks like today’s the day. Of course, deep cleaning is never just cleaning but also involves unneeded rearranging, and I got into rearranging TV and stereo stuff yesterday in such a way as would give me back an entire bookshelf, but it would require new cables and wires and so on — which I got because our doctor’s office is located right next to a Radio Shack (and a Panera Bread, so there’s a somewhat much pleasant place to wait while desperately ill spouse has her lungs poked). And at the same time my brand new (well, only two-year-old) Harmon Kardon CD changer has completely given up the ghost, which has completely pissed me off. That’s the last time I pay for “quality” in a CD player — I’ve got $75 pieces of junk that have been bounced around the basement, garage and yard that are still working, but this thing was apparently too delicate for the environs of the living room. Tried to get a very similar replacement cheap on eBay, but I got outbid, so now I’m forced to think about what CD player I want. Kill me now.

I did get to the gym last night, where I found that I’m only up three pounds, not the 20 that it felt like, as a result of this inactive season, so I hit the track and did some swimming and it felt fantastic. Ran into someone I know a little bit and asked the stupid standard question, “Ya ready for the holidays?” To which the poor guy had to say, as he’s probably had to say a million times this month, that in fact his family was Jewish. Well, I didn’t know. But he then went on to say that they had a German foreign exchange student living with them, and they were trying hard to find Christmas-y things to do with him so that he felt a little more at home. (I guess all must really be forgiven.)