On December 25, my original hometown of Atlanta, Georgia experienced its first white Christmas since the 19th century, while here in Denver, in the state of Colorado, whose reputation is inextricably linked to snow, it was sunny, dry, and 53 degrees. In fact, it’s been sunny, dry, and relatively mild ever since Halloween. This extended autumn finally ended yesterday, December 30. The following shots, from our front step looking towards the clubhouse and pool, and from the sidewalk looking at the front of our house, were taken at 8:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. respectively, during which time the temperature dropped at least 20 degrees:

Now, almost 24 hours later, the snow has stopped and the sun is out, but the temp remains just above single digits, and about half a foot of snow lays on the ground. So while we were nowhere close to a white Christmas, we will indeed have a white New Year’s. 

I am still trying to determine how I’m going to write something interesting every single day, and build up readership again, but there’s only one way to try. 

So it has indeed been a fun and eventful week. Last night we attended our second hockey game in eight days. There’s divided loyalties for this, as I pull for our hometown Colorado Avalanche, but Maria, native of Michigan, cheers on the Detroit Red Wings. (Detroit won 4-3 in OT; it was an intense game).

In between, we have visited the same arena to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra and also attended a performance of White Christmas at a community theater. Both ends of the spectrum, a major metropolitan arena with a packed house of 14,000 for a national touring act, and a theatre seating 260 for a local production. Bottom line, we’ve had FUN.

The kids are gone to their dad’s house, so Maria & I have been enjoying uncommon alone time. Getting to simply hang out, do– or perhaps more importantly, not do– whatever we want, sleep in, drink peppermint schnapps in our coffee, whatever we damn well please.

That’s the upside.

We had a nice Christmas, and everyone including myself is generally happy with gifts received. The fact that we have our family to celebrate with is still the greatest gift of all. Yet, I can’t help but be a bit bummed by the fact that I did not receive a single phone call, or text message, or personal remark on Facebook. I’m not sure what to think about that. Of course, the only call I attempted to make on Christmas Day was to my mom, who did not answer. She didn’t answer the next day, either. Finally, on the evening of the 26th, she called and I discovered she had been at my brother’s house. I was glad to hear that as otherwise she’d have been left home alone on Christmas. My mom is 77 years old and lives with one of my three older brothers. He, however, is in Mexico right now. The oldest of our clan lives 20 minutes away but apparently can’t bother to see his mother. Of the remaining brother and I, he is a bit over two hours away and I, well, am two time zones, at least four states and some 1,450 miles away. Thankfully, other brother took her from her home to his and back for the hoilday.

Every fall I teach a unit on the Middle East to my 7th grade students and one major element we examine is stereotypes about Muslim people living in that region of the world. I need not identify all the stereotypes Americans/Westerners hold about Arabs/Muslims/Middle Easterners (which are not interchangeable terms) but one “they” hold about “us” is we do not value our family members and treat them as we should when they grow old, preferring to pay someone else to care for them rather than keeping them at home with us and giving them the respect they deserve. I think “they” have a point in this regard.

More tomorrow; I am trying to build up to daily blogging again– I do not dare call it a New Year’s resolution as that will doom it to failure (or did I just do that?)

Ten Years Ago Today…

That was as litboiler. For the none of you who are keeping score, my Xanga incarnations have been:

litboiler (December 23, 2000-May 5, 2005)
education_is_life (October 10-November 8, 2004)
jasonwrites (May 5, 2005-present)
jason_the_poet (a self-explanatory side project, first created June 5, 2001)

There were others that I was involved with as a co-contributer, such as the original Xangaholics Anonymous.

It’s been an eventful (mostly fun) week in the real world but that will wait until next post.

Happy Decade Day. That would be one decade, ten years, since the day I signed up for Xanga.

I had written quite a bit of the story already here, and then inexplicably I clicked off the tab.

Poof! And so quickly I am reminded about one of the things I really HATE about Xanga. NO AUTO-SAVE.

I told myself… write it in Google Docs, so it will be automatically saved as you go along, then copy and paste it over. But no. WordPress has that feature built in to their blog editor. 

But no… not Xanga. You’ve only been at this for ten years, boys and girls. You couldn’t incorporate such a simple but eminently helpful, even (metaphorically) life-saving feature as autosave, in the midst of adding all your audio and video and social whatnot?

To further infuriate me, although I do have the Lazarus extension on Google Chrome on this computer, it doesn’t seem to recognize this as a text field to recover. If you’re not familiar with it, Lazarus is this amazing little extension that automatically saves anything you type into a web form, so you can quickly recover it. But, it seems not to work for this weblog entry box, although it does work for the “tag” box below. !@#$#%@

I guess I’ll re-type my story later, when I calm down about it. But, I hope this is the beginning of my “reboot.” Happy Decade Day to me and to all the others who were the first class of Bianca Broussard recruits and have still stuck around here (under one name or another) all these ten years.