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.