Well, for the first time I can recall, I didn't spend Christmas with my family this year. "Aha!" you say. "Sounds like quite a stroke of luck for the old family!" you say. With my own personal family being unavailable, I spent Christmas with someone else's family.

So! Off to Granville with my old pal Marty! His folks are great people, and Christmas is as good a time as any to see them. In fact, it's better than most, because all his family get together in one place then, so it's a lot more time-efficient than trying to track them all down individually.

All families, I'm sure, have there own particular holiday traditions. In my family, for example, Dad always reads aloud "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas, my Mum always fixes up a pile of mince pies with brandy butter, and my brother always drinks too much. Then we pull the Christmas Crackers, and put on the funny hats and read the enclosed lame jokes. The jokes are always lame. Mum always buys the cut-rate budget Crackers.

So its interesting to experience the holiday traditions of other families. Evidently, it's a tradition in the Maki household for Marty to split shortly after dinner (even if his invited guest happens to be deeply engrossed in a discussion with Marty's dad, who does cool things like fly his own plane, and flew fighters in WWII, and has pictures too) and go to yet another family, that of Marty's friend Brant, and eat dinner again.

Brant's family were awesome as well, and Brant's dad makes totally awesome home-brew beer. Not like the nasty home-brew you might be offered in other, lesser households. "Drink all you want!" he says. "It only costs, like, fifty cents a bottle to make!". Excellent advice!, but in all honesty I fear that his generosity may have contributed to the fact that I can't seem to recall his name. Sorry, Mr Brant's Dad!

Then Marty drove me home, and just as in the closing of "A Child's Christmas in Wales", "I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. "

Today's the sort of day that I decided to take a break from cleaning the house and sit down and have a cup of coffee. It's perfectly true that I've been cleaning up a storm- so thorough that I even scrubbed the black tiles in the bathroom floor- this in spite of the fact that the white tiles were the only ones with dirt on them. I got a spray bottle of this stuff called "Scrub Free Soap Scum Remover" from Krogers, and I have to admit it does a pretty good job. It gets all the soap scum, even in the difficult-to-reach areas like between your toes. I give it a thumbs up!

I couldn't tell you why I'm bothering to clean the house. Nobody's coming round for Christmas this year. In fact Christmas looks like it's going to be kind of a non-starter this year. The folks decided to split this year and go for a nice cruise instead, and I can't say that I blame them. So with the folks out of the picture, my sis and my bro decided to give Columbus a miss this year as well. As readers with the gift of ESP already know, that's about it in terms of my family in these United States, so it looks like I'm spending Christmas alone this year. Alone, that is, except for the company of sweet, sweet liquor!

The folks are off on a cruise to Antarctica, Ohio in December apparently not being cold enough for their liking. A couple years ago (it was Christmas then too, incidentally) I gave Pops a book about Shackleton and his ill-fated polar expedition, the one where Shackleton lost his ship and had to march hundreds of miles over the ice to get his men to safety, subsisting on fish-guts and what-not all the while. It's long been a favourite of fans of true adventure, and when my dad read it, he was all "hot damn! This I gotta see!" My mum was happy to go along. She likes penguins.

Anyways, these days when you fly anywhere -even to Antarctica, I guess- you have to get to the airport at some ungodly hour in the morning so you can get through security and then sit around for hours. I think the theory here is that terrorists, being busy dudes with shit to do, aren't going to waste their time poking around the Port Columbus gift shoppes for hours and hours when they could be spending that time more productively, off blowing shit up. So since I was going to drive the folks to the airport, we decided it'd be simpler if I just spent the night beforehand at their place.

So dad sits down and tells me that the results fom my mother's biopsy came back. My mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Things like surgery don't necessarily need to be all that painful nowadays. Turns out these days they hook you up to an I.V. and then hook up that I.V. to chemicals which, quite frankly, make it difficult for you to pay much attention to whats going on. And then they start hacking away for, what, ten minutes? Ten hours? I really have no idea. I do recollect that they had to keep reminding me to open my mouth, which suggests that at the time maybe I was a having a little trouble recalling exactly what the purpose of my visit was. Which was periodontal surgery.

Apparently there is- or at any rate there was- something defective with my periodon.

I've never been much of a drug enthusiast myself, but I had always sort of assumed that those who were found their preferred illicit substances to be fun, possibly even mind expanding. But with my newfound experience, I now can say that this is definitely the case: my previously held beliefs are confirmed! I mean if, of course, by "fun" and "mind-expanding" you mean "discovering that your tea's gone cold because you had clean forgotten that you'd made yourself some".

Lately I have been busy doing a pretty good impersonation of a chipmunk with a cheek full of nuts and exploring my new oral topography with my tongue. Tongues are marvelously sensitive instruments. I can sense every thread in every stitch. There are a lot of stitches.

Lately I feel like I'm Frankenmouth.