four calling birds...

merry fourth day of christmas, kiddies. hope you and yours had a blast. i think i will be sweating off christmas candy fumes until mid-march. life is good, and getting better all the time.

mil besos--r

i wanted to get a picture of mr. will in a christmas stocking, but the little fatty wouldn't fit. guess this shot of him looking perfectly angelic will have to do... 

will and his cita...i'm not sure who likes who more, but these two were just about inseperable.  

will and his great-gramps, my poppy, had a big time on christmas eve. 

will, already a very enterprising young man, is beginning to groom his hair to rival a certain mr. trump. watch out, wall street! 

my little cousin brandon took this picture. he'd had enough sugar to sink a boat, so the only way to get him to be tolerable was to give him the camera. i am a sucker for a 7 year old sugar fiend. 

will and me. this might be the cutest picture EVER. he looks like he knows a secret. 

look at those hog jaws!!  

merry christmas, happy hannukah. why yes, that IS a snotcicle hanging from my nose...

this is ridiculous. for the third christmas season in a row, i am monumentally sick. cedar fever is kicking my ass as we speak. in fact, my doc stopped just short of giving me steroids, so i'm not the total wuss i thought i was. my allergies really are that bad. and i feel horrid. seriously bad. like so bad that i had a meeting in san antonio today, and i didn't even put on make up to go. and i had no idea if there were going to be cute boys there-- and i still didn't feel well enough to put on make up.

i'm sitting in my bed, wrapped up in an old, thick, blue plaid robe that i liberated from my dad when i was 17 or so, cuddled up in my down comforter, listening to leonard cohen singing about the sisters of mercy, and wishing i could quit hacking up wads of god-knows-what. the bright spot-- last night, i wrapped almost all of my christmas presents, and it's almost time for me to have more nose spray. it's really the little things that are getting me by, today.

seriously, this is the worst time of year to be sick. i have such a love/hate relationship with christmas, anyway, this really just adds insult to injury. it was like right at the moment i was really getting into the spirit of christmas, i started feeling like utter poo. what the hell? i love texas, i was born here, and i will die here. but i freaking hate cedar trees with the white hot intensity of 10 thousand suns. seriously, seriously.

ok, it's nose spray time. i'm sure you're grossed out by now, anyway. i know i am.

happy, merry, pleasant, blah blah blah.

happy birthday, jesus. even though you were probably born sometime in september...

imagine

i know it's cliche. but i miss john lennon, even though i didn't know him. what a polarizing figure...i mean, he almost got deported from the US. he had bed-ins. he made art. he wrote songs that are so deeply embedded in my psyche that invariably a lennon song is on my internal soundtrack at least once a day. when i found out i was going to new york for the first time, strawberry fields was on the list of places to see--high up on that list, i might add. i was so intent on finding it, and so turned around in central park that i made esteban ask motorcycle cops for directions.

i wonder what john lennon would have been like as an elder statesman. i'm sure his children wonder the same thing. i guess it's a little safer for me to wonder what john lennon would have been like as an old man that it is for me to wonder the same thing about my own dad. funny how we make conjecture safe, sometimes, isn't it?

in other news, my nephew looks just like me. and apparently, is also terrifically gassy. i'm afraid more and more that my brother and sister-in-law have had my child, and that i will somehow have theirs. it's been known to happen.

i have got to get into the christmas spirit and quit being such a grinch. maybe this weekend's festivities and shopping will turn the trick. either that, or i can just buy a bottle of maker's mark and fake my way through it. i'll keep you posted. i mean, it's not that i don't like christmas, or that i don't love my family, and all that goes with holiday stuff. i just can't get excited right now, about anything. i guess it's realizing that i've been out of my old job for almost 6 months, and all the stuff i thought i would have accomplished in those 6 months is pretty much not done.

granted, i have gotten some sleep, which i desperately needed. i no longer cry at the drop of a hat. i have actually written some of my book, and taken a few pictures. i just figured by the time new year's came around, i'd be ready to shop some treatment chapters around, and i'm increasingly aware that i don't have enough material with which to do that. and i've had a couple of tepid reviews from my peeps, so i'm kind of gun shy at this point about doing anything with it. like maybe writing what i've got was just a really long journal entry, and that's secretly where it belongs. i dunno. it's hard for me to be objective about what i'm trying to make. and try as i might, i am having a hard time divorcing my essays from the pictures i've taken, even though i know i could get by with just captions. i guess i've realized that i do have something to say, i just don't know how loud i need to say it.

life is good, even when it's complicated. i DO have a purpose and a mission--but it's my job to figure that out, and then DO it with gusto. if i can dream it, i can do it.

jingle-jingle.

mil besos--rmg