So here I am, back from shopping, no closer to finishing my xmas shopping than I was yesterday.

Yet oddly...I'm fairly content.

I won another auction on Ebay for a goodie that would make a beautiful gift for my little girly. I haven't heard from the seller yet, but since I know that the weather in her area is as unpredictable as the weather where I live tends to be, I'm not that worried. Whether she gets back to me tonight or at the end of the week I'll have to overnight payment to her if I want to get Zoe's gift here in time. If all goes well, the things I ordered for Trent and Larry will all be in by the end of the week too, but if they aren't they should at least be here by xmas. My husband, children and parents are the ones I always buy for first (for the obvious reasons), so I'm really psyched to have theirs finished.

I finally bought a winter coat. I have a whole closet full of past ones that I have either grown to loathe because of the way they look on me or don't fit any more because I'm not pregnant. Pregnant chick coats, just like every other wardrobe piece, are wildly different from non-pregnant chick coats. I'm a plain (worse than plain but I don't want to depress myself tonight thinking about the differences between pre-baby me and post-baby me), kinda girl so I do tend to buy clothes that don't draw attention to me. They're either clothes that I buy to try to minimize my...well, never mind, or are black. As pale as I am I'm in love with black. It gives me a sort of vampirish look with my dark hair and light eyes, but I like it anyway. I'm not going for a vampirish look but that's the result. Tonight's purchase was radically different. Sure it has a black lining and accents (of course), but it's red.

Yeah, I know.

And yet it looks okay. And more importantly it's warm so that's a nice plus.

I bought some groceries tonight and it felt great. I have to admit that I love all of the domestic little chores that go along with having a family and a home. They're chores but they're also reminders. I have to make a trip out into the cold and spend money on food, but it's to feed my family, whom I love. I have to buy things to clean house with but I have a home to go back to.

See how that works?

I have become a serious admirer of Martha Stewart. Set aside the legal stuff for a moment (oh please - if I knew my stocks were going to go the way of the dodo bird I'd bail too, and so would anyone else, so don't lie - LOL), and she's got quite an impressive list of accomplishments. I saw most of a biography about her and she really knows how to do all of the stuff she does on her show. Unlike me she knows why a good thread count is important, how to plant a rubber tree and keep it alive through the winter, and how to feed an army of 35 unexpected guests a charming casserole made of leftover soymilk and a stale potato chip (that they'll all rave about later). She's the domestic version of MacGyver dammit! And I think she rocks!

The only thing about her that really bothers me is that she's too damn good. I have made myself insane wanting to do all of the things she does, and at the end of the day there's still a little dust on my furniture and my blancmange never set. I can make clown sundaes, s'mores and huge fancy dinners but they never look like hers and my house for sure will never look like hers. Not unless I line the walls with velcro and start making all of my children's clothes out of felt.

Still, we're comfortable and well fed and even though I can't quite do her thing to perfection, Martha does give me something to aspire to. Her standard right now is the ultimate unreachable, and something I really do dream of attaining. That's not the only thing I want to do with my life, but it would be really nice to have everything I do for my family and my home turn out as perfect as it does for Martha.

So I take a lot of joy in these things, mundane though they can be.

One of the things I'm going to do is finally get off of my sorry ass and make some xmas cookies. Oatmeal, both with raisins and without. My dad won't eat them with the raisins. He was traumatized as a child when my uncle, who was a few years older than my dad, held him down and stuffed raisins up his nose (they were both kids, by the way). They stayed there for quite awhile and caused a nasty infection, which resulted in forcible removal of the raisins by a doctor and a round of uber-potent antibiotics. My dad has hated raisins ever since. But he does make me laugh by calling them nose-stuffers.

That leaves just the red-velvet cake on my list of things I have to prepare myself (not sure about the moneky bread any more, there's still so much to do), and the bobkas, which I'm going to order tomorrow.

Larry told me last night he's been feeling the holiday blues too. His is stress-induced like mine, for lots of the same kind of reasons. He's told me about his childhood and it sounds fucking horrific. His dad was an alcoholic (like mine), and he was afraid of him most of the time. His mother was so submerged in her own pain and depression (living with her husband and her mother took a serious toll on her), that for most of the time he and his brother were growing up she was emotionally unavailable. She loved her children, of that I have no doubt, but it was so hard for her to be there for them. The holidays remind him off all of those things. When he told me that I sort of let it out that I've been having a hard time with this holiday stuff myself. It turned out to be a bonding thing. Or a "bonding after the bonding" thing. In spite of our occasional arguments (and they're actually pretty rare), we're very close. I felt that in talking about this we reinforced the bond we already have and maybe made it even stronger. We both promised to look after one another even more than usual and each help the other get past the holidays.

That reminds me. While we were away in SC I finally told Larry who he reminds me of.

Dan Aykroyd.

Larry knows a lot of his old SNL sketches, like Ed Garvin, Male Prostitute and the Bass-o-matic commercials. He was doing the Bass-o-matic a few weeks ago and it was as if a little bell went off in my head.

Oh. My. God. That's it!!

Because I always had that sense of something familiar with Larry, part of which I'm sure is a past life experience since we tend to know the same people in most of our lifetimes. To me, Dan Aykroyd was just way too cute in his SNL days and I still thought he was cute in Ghostbusters. He'd be cute even if he wasn't, if that makes any sense.

He's funny and completely awesome and talented.

Larry's funny and completely awesome and talented (and very, very cute).

They're both intelligent men.

They both make me laugh.

So there ya go.

And now Larry knows. He was pretty cool about it. I think he may have been flattered by the comparison, or at least was understanding about it.

It was a compliment, after all.