‘Sup, blogosphere. Been a while. Guess I can’t put off starting the new year any longer. Since we’re nine days in. Still, I couldn’t just rip the 2011 Mad Men calendar off my wall until Ukrainian Christmas, with all of its belated and desultory holiday gluttony, had finally trudged past, could I? (I’m telling you, one person should not be able to devour as many pickled beets and mushroom-stuffed pyrogys in a single sitting as I did. It was truly disturbing. And impressive.)
So I took a bit of a break from the interwebs over the Chrimbo hols. Got all ‘disconnected’ so I could ‘re-connect’ with people…yeah, right!
What a holiday. Helheim wasn’t as hellish as usual, with step-Satan away on a visit to his homeland, the fiery, demon-populated pits of the Judeo-Christian concept of a punishing afterlife. Little half-brother, Idiot-Bra, is now a helpless, bed-ridden cripple due to a few months of hauling the slaughtered carcasses of innocent cows (what a puss. Shoulda chosen tofu, muthf-kka). Idiot-Bra only emerged from his cave of gleeful, Skyrim-filled convalescence to sate his unquenchable appetite for grilled cheese and chocolate milk. It was truly a Festivus miracle. (That he stayed away, not that he came down, I mean.)
So for most of the holidays, it was just me, Marmee, and Book Cat. A fortnight of secular Christmas revelry: traditional Christmas smashing of bitter-memory-laden Christmas miniature houses (with festive Christmas hammer), a cruelty-free Chrimbo feast (for the animals, at least, ha ha), watching A Christmas Story for the billionth time and still laughing like a loon, a couple of pagan bonfires, and a Yule goat quest. Then there was the rest of it: all of the revenge missions, kickin it in the T-dot (shut up, that’s what I call it), knitting hubris, knee-crushing running, feline sartorial madness, endless TV and movie marathons (this shall forever be remembered as the Degrassi High Christmas), seeing a version of The Nutcracker that somehow misplaced its effin trepak (um, what the eff, National Ballet of Canada?), absolutely no writing at all (despite dragging every single one of my research books home in a weirdly literal example of “the road to hell” thing), and the only thing really relevant to this blog, so much reading my eyes turned into this:
It was awesome. It was brilliant. It was the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER! (And I didn’t even mention New Year’s… holla NYC!)
So I’ll post what I read over the hols tomorrow. Which brings me to the purpose of this post, which, as usual, I have taken a zillion years to get to. The class for which this blog was created is, sadly, over (tear!). However, I find that this blog has become a part of me, as the great Garth Algar foretold it would. And while I may have cast off the sullied tatters of the old year in which it was spawned and shuffled into this pristine, shiny, and brand spankin new year with an eye to forget most of icky and accursed 2011, I will not abandon this blog. No, my friends, I fully intend to continue on with this blogging mission…quest….thing. So I’ll carry on, with only a few slight alterations. I’ll be blogging about books and book-related stuff, and reviewing and musing on what I’ve read, am reading, and plan to read – same old, except the books won’t be exclusively YA, as they were when this was a school-related blog, and there will be significantly less self-censorship. Which means more nerdiness, more weirdness, and more Book Cat. And more of whatever the hell I want. Boo-yah!
You can’t see me, but I am totally doing my much-practised evil genius grin and accompanying evil genius laugh. If only Book Cat were here so I could do the evil genius stroking equally evil feline side-kick in lap thing. Sigh.
There. Business taken care of.
And now, in summation, here is a list of Things I Learned Over the Chrimbo Hols:
- It’s really bad luck to wind up with Old Scratch for a step-father, but it’s slightly better luck when he cloven-hoofs it back to the netherworld.
- Grete Samsa probably had a kick-ass Christmas while Gregor was upstairs whinging and freaking out.
- You can never make too many “Christmas is coming” jokes while re-watching the entire first season of Game of Thrones.
- Some people just don’t understand the need to spend hours building a bonfire on the smelly shores of Lake Ontario and then take less than a minute to jump over this bonfire. Once. Why do I even have to explain this?
- Chocolate hedgehogs taste better than real hedgehogs (hedgehogs agree).
- Not even the shards of a hundred thousand miniature Christmas village houses will satisfy your thirst for grandparenticide.
- Christmas revenge is the sweetest revenge of all.
- Toronto kicks fake London’s ass, but crumbles beneath the mightiness of true London.
- Undoing days worth of knitting will reveal terrible, wonderful, frightening depths of profanity you never imagined you possessed.
- A cat will only put up with so many photoshoots when he’s forced to dress up like a reindeer.
- “Everybody wants something they’ll never give up!”
- There is absolutely nothing in heaven or earth better than watching all three Lord of the Rings movies, back to back, in the most epic movie marathon of all, to ring in the new year. And then starting to re-read the books. For the eighteenth time.
- The National Ballet of Canada will take a lot of your hard-won (read: scammed from Beelzebub) money and then stamp on your beloved Christmas traditions and spit on your desire for authentic and established ballet choreography. Not that I’m mad or anything.
- It is easier to play Vikings while wearing your hipster-y faux-fur vest and waving your umbrella sword than it is to write about Vikings.
- Reading is more fun when you don’t have to do it for library school.
Well, that’s all for today, folks.
…
P.S.
I did take down my Mad Men calendar. And you know what? All I could think was, KINSEY!!!
Paul Kinsey, where are you? Come back, I miss you! I would totally go for Ukrainian food with you, and then we could listen to jazz, smoke some Mary Jane and quote Eliot at each other!
It’s just not the same without you, Mr. Kinsey.
The Reading Robyn 