NEW MONTH

Hello & welcome to December. Advent starts tomorrow & there are only twenty four days left until Christmas. I still miss Christmas in N.Y. but O_bla_di O_bla_da life goes on bra/la la how the life goes on. The weather, so far this morning, has been bitter cold but at least there's no ice or fog. Tonight's the night of my high school class's thirtieth reunion. I can't go because of confusion about my jury duty. I should most certainly hope all my old buds have quite a jolly good time. I always managed to make it to all the other ones but this one got a little out of hand because of that one technical detail. I was always such an interesting teen ager. Of all the people in my class the ones I got to know have always claimed I was always entirely too much of a cut_up & the ones I didn't know have always claimed I was pathologically quiet, shy & intorverted. I'm still hoping that means I'm somewhere in the middle. Yesterday, I finished "The Professor & the Madman". I'm still reading "War & Peace" though. I suppose I shall continue my usual practice of starting another one right away. Tonight I shall be at O.L. Sorrows to lector at 5:00 p.m. Mass. Next week I have to lector again. Uncle Frankie's back up on his feet but he's very much slowed down lately & hasn't been coming over or calling anywhere near as much as he usually does.

JURY DUTY AWAITS

Tomorrow I have to be ready for jury duty on an entirely just_in_case basis. That means I can't possibly go to my high school reunion. My father went to the V.A. hospital this morning to find out why he's having such a problem with congestion. His appointment only lasted a fairly short time. I'm supposed to lector at 5:00 p.m. Mass tomorrow with Linnae. I suppose if I have to be available for jury duty, I shall have to ask Rocco to cover for me. I've never really gotten jury duty, & I'm most certainly not looking forward to it. This morning was unusually cold at about 28 degrees. There was only a little bit of ice on my windows & it wasn't foggy. It gets me crazy when there's too much fog & ice. I made sure I spent part of yesterday reading those books. "War & Peace", especially, can get me crazy. The other one's nowhere near as nerve-wracking, though it gets pretty weird in certain spots. From now on, I'll be doing quite a whole lot of grumbling about people who insist on saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas". When I say insist, I mean exactly that. They presume to take it for granted that they have the right to make it unavoidably mandatory for all of us to stoop to the likes of this. It's on all the commercials these days & happens constantly with people in general. I can't stand the constant Christmas carols that started at the beginning of this month either, trivializing the whole thing. The Gap(including Old Navy & Banana Republic)have jumped back onto the anti_Christian bandwagon this year. They take every possible advantage of Christmas as a money_making gimmick, but never dare to pronounce the word. Advent starts this Sunday, December 2. >

SNOWED

As my parents spend another morning furiously plowing their way through Christmas decorations, they make a mess of everything. All the accumulated wreaths, ornaments etc. of five decades worth of Christmases past gets them quite confused and annoyed. There are trains, boxes, wrapping paper and lots of other things strewn around. Meanwhile the weather gets progressively colder & colder. Today's a relatively nice day so far but it most certainly didn't start out that way. This morning it even snowed a little. It was nothing much, though, just enough to be aggravating. Uncle Frankie's still very sick. He always seems to come down with something these days. Each time he recuperates from something, he immediately gets something else to replace it with. Last night, at around 8:00 I went to bed with an extremely annoying headache which I couldn't get rid of until around 12:30 a.m. Lately, I've been experimenting with all sorts of things on the internet to make my blogs as interesting as possible. If I don't get the hang of all this sooner or later, it most certainly won't be my fault. I read a couple of dozen more pages more of "War & Peace" yesterday. It continues to be quite an ominous, formidable task for me. A couple of times, lately, the left lens of my glasses has fallen out of its frame. That really grates on my nerves. I know there's no risk of its breaking but it's still quite annoying because it adds to the already never_ending list of things that conspire to drive me nuts.

PERT NEAR DECEMBER

December is getting dangerously close. The year will very soon be over. The weather's been very nice for the past couple of days but I just know that sooner or later it will once again flip out on us. It's hard to believe that, by now, I've been living in Pa. for so long. I now know that cousin Java, & maybe his wife Nunziata read this blog. He complained about a comment I didn't make anyplace else. I'm still reading Simon Winchester's "The Professor & the Madman". Besides that, I'm also still reading "War & Peace", which is substantially more intense. They're both based on true stories & filled with real historical figures. My parents are taking down Thanksgiving decorations & putting up Christmas decorations. I heard my mother & Fran make plans on the phone for the cookies they intend to bake over the weekend. Yesterday, because Uncle Frankie has to stay in the hospital for a while, they ended up having to go crazy all day with Fran's dog. It's only a little thing but it can still be quite obnoxious & annoying. It's not loud or smelly, just hyperactive. I've never liked animals so I can never get enthused about things like this. I've been trying, for the past few days, to get my playlists organized as well as possible. I decided it might not be such a particularly bright idea to put something by the Sex Pistols too close to Peer Gynt Suite No. 1.

GROOVY MUSIC

A_HUNTING THEY WILL GO

All went well on the trip. I went to 7:00 p.m. Mass at St. Anthony's in Exeter on Sunday evening & since then things have been back to the usual grind around here. I got kicked out of the library early yesterday, & didn't get a chance to put anything onto my blog, because it was the first day of hunting season & a state holiday in Pa. The place was crowded. When I used to go to Buffalo, Uncle Vince & Java, Sr. always celebrated my arrival with a hunting trip as soon as I first showed up before Thanksgiving. I guess N.Y.'s hunting season must start early. Yesterday was bitter icy cold & pouring but today the weather's much nicer. My father & Uncle Frankie went to the V.A hospital this morning because both have been sick lately & they wanted to get things straightened out. I got a book from Mary Anne & I'm almost finished with it. It's about the evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was begun on Guy Fawkes Day of 1857 & took seventy one years to complete. It's the definitive dictionary of the English language. There are all sorts of odd details in the book. I'm also continuing to read "War & Peace". Even at the rate of forty pages a day, it will still take well over a month to finish. My musical additions to my blogs have been going quite well so far. My tastes, in spite of my long_standing image, have always been quite genre_defyingly eclectic. I've been finding out the hard way, from the site I use, that there all sorts of music out there. People have extremely seriously weird surprising combinations of tastes.

THEY'RE BACK

Mary Anne & Steve are home. My father & Michael went to JFK to pick them up & bring them home. Our trip home is tomorrow morning at around 10:00 a.m. All seems to have gone well. I got into a bit of trouble with cousin Larry because of a misunderstanding but I just gave in & got it over with. I was playing around with one of Steve's acoustic guitars a few hours ago & tried to remember how to play one of my very favorite Beatle songs, "Do You Want to Know A Secret". I remembered that it's a bunch of minor chords & a B7 but I couldn't quite figure out the right progressions unfortunately. For the past couple of days, I spent a while putting Playlists on a couple of my websites. Each one is entirely free, unlike most radio stations for the past few decades, of anything whatsoever that I don't like. The kids seemed to have been having a really good time over the course of the past week, but Bridget & Sam were fooling around a little bit too much today & she spilled a can of celery soda on the carpet in the basement. Bridget seems to be turning out to be quite the couch potato these days. If it were up to her, she'd be quite happy to stay up throughout the middle of the night watching TV incessantly.

HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY

It's the single busiest shopping day of the entire year, an absolute nightmare of traffic. I haven't spent a significant length of time outside but I went out for a few minutes to help Michael take his new amplifier out of his car. It was very hard to get it out because it was entirely too tightly squeezed into the back seat. He pushed it into the house on top of his skateboard. He wanted me to go to the store with him to get it but I wasn't dressed in time. I'm still reading that Virginia Woolf book. Besides that the only thing I've ever read by her is the long essay, "A Room of One's Own". Mary Anne & Steve are still having a nice time over in Italy. The last time I got an e mail from them, they had yet to meet Francesco. Today is a very big day for leftovers. People have been frequently telling me for quite a while that I'm very thin but today should just about end my skinny track record. Bridget watched "Ugly Betty" last night. That's yet another of the very many shows I've never bothered to pay any attention to. I've only seen a couple of minutes of it every once in a while. Lately I've been doing a lot of looking around through Youtube. I found out that Paul Mccartney recorded both "Please Please Me" & "I'll get you, two of my very favorite early Beatle songs, in concert a few years ago. I also noticed that in 1977, during their days with Keith Moon, the Who recorded "I Saw Her Standing There".

WEBFOOTED

PAUL MCCARTNEY: PLEASE PLEASE ME