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December 27, 2001
Merry (late) Christmas!
Wow. No updates since the 14th. Bad, bad. I do have an excuse, though -- I can't get to Diary-X from my mom's house. Whenever I try, her internet connection dumps me offline rudely. So, no updates from Vermont, at least until my mom gets a better service provider.
Christmas was great -- very relaxing, which was just what I wanted. I took last Friday off work, and caught an 11:45 bus to Vermont. My mom picked me up, took me home, and fed me, and then we went to wander around the mall and do the last-minute shopping. Crazy, yes, but I'd been sitting for 5+ hours, and needed to walk some of the kinks out of my ass. I was very, very broke at that point, so my last-minute shopping was done very quickly. Once the battle with the crowds at the mall overwhelmed us, we went home and I struggled with the pile of presents to be wrapped. The wrapping was a bit hindered by my mom's cat sitting in the middle of each sheet of paper I cut, and eating the ribbons -- not to mention my mom wandering into the room every time I tried to wrap her presents. After much swearing and flinging of wadded-up sheets of wrapping paper, I had a nifty little pile of surprises to put under the tree. I forgot to take my camera with me, so no photos of the happy little tree, alas -- it's an artificial one, about 4' tall, but it looks real. It's very skinny, but it has lots of little twinkly lights, and looks very cheerful in the bay window of my mom's apartment.
Saturday morning, I checked movie times for The Fellowship of the Ring online, and found that there was a theater showing it in Manchester, VT, at noon. (The theater in my mom's town is in the midst of some fight with New Line, so they aren't showing it there. Just as well, as that theater is grimy and horrible anyway.) We had about two hours to get ready and get to the theater, so I jumped in the shower and off we sped, expecting it to be sold out. (My mom had called the theater, and the owner warned us that all the previous showings had sold out, and we were determined to see it.) When we got to Manchester, we found a charming, brand-new theater, with the new owner standing in the doorway waiting to sell us tickets. The theater was lovely -- all deep carpets and vintage movie posters, and it had just opened the month before. I kept joking that I was going to live there, and never, ever leave. Mom and I bought snacks we didn't really want (we just wanted to give the very nice owner more money, in the hopes that the place stays open as long as possible.) The auditoriums were small, but the screens were big, and the sounds was perfect. There were only eight other people there -- so much for it selling out, but it was a noon matinee, after all. The lights dimmed, the movie started, and... wow. I had gone into it expecting to be disappointed -- The Lord of the Rings have been my favorite books since I was about 8 years old, and I was leery of a film version. I didn't think a movie could live up to them, in my mind. I was very pleasantly surprised. I spent almost the entire three hours with my mouth hanging open -- you know how, when you read a good book, you can picture it all in your head? You can see the characters, and the landscapes, and the events clearly? When we left the theater, I turned to my mom and said "I don't know how he did it, but Peter Jackson took all of my mental images from that book and put them up on the screen, perfectly. It was perfect." And it was -- it was uncanny, how everything looked just how I'd pictured it. They cut out a lot of the book, of course, but that was to be expected, and the parts they cut weren't really necessary. And of course Mom and I drooled shamelessy over Aragorn (though Legolas is still my personal favorite -- something about the way he weilds that bow, yow!) When we got home, I downloaded desktop wallpaper of Aragorn for my mom -- when she sat down to check her email and found it, she nearly fell out of her chair. Hee!)
My brother and his girlfriend were originally planning to drive up from Connecticut on Monday, but the weather forecast called for sleet and freezing rain, so they came a day earlier. Sunday night was spent eating chili, and talking, and laughing a lot. My mom had to work on Monday, so the three of us did house-chores for her -- we did laundry, and ran to the grocery store for the last-minute stuff we needed. She's been having a lot of stress at work, and I figured the less she had to deal with at home, the better. She was happy to find fresh, clean sheets on her bed, and fluffy towels in the bathroom, and a stocked fridge when she got home. Monday night, Mike and Mary Ann headed out to visit Mike's high-school best friend, and Mom and I went to the candlelight service at her church. I made it through this year without crying -- Christmas Eve services always make me cry, for some reason. This year I was distracted by the fact that one of my friends from high school was singing a solo. I hadn't seen her in ten years -- we were really more acquaintances than friends, but I'd always liked her. She sang an aria from Handel's Messiah, and did it beautifully. After the service, I went to talk to her, and was amused by her expressions of confusion, recognition, and then happiness. She's doing really well, and it was nice to chat with her. She told me that she's studying opera, and my mom pokes me in the arm and said, beaming, "Mary Ellen just finished graduate school!" Very cute. After church, we walked home, arriving just before Mike and Mary Ann. Our family tradition is to open one small gift on Christmas Eve, so we did that -- I had given Mike and Mary Ann an Uno game, so they opened that and we settled in to play. We stayed up until midnight, drinking far too much wine and playing cards -- by the time we were done we were in pain from laughing (I'd forgotten how much fun a rousing game of Uno with them is.) We finally staggered off to bed at 12:30, with my brother grumbling that he wasn't getting up early, Christmas or no, he was sleeping until noon. At 7:30, I was awakened by this same brother standing over me yelling "It's Christmas! Get up!" Gah. My feeble attempts to ward him off by whacking at his kneecaps with my pillow failed, so I staggered out of bed and fetched some coffee, and we settled in for present-opening. I got new Bath and Body Works stuff (lotion and shower gel in Cotton Blossom, my very favorite scent) and candy and the new Sims expansion pack, and a surprise -- a beautiful jigsaw puzzle. It's a map of Tolkien's Middle-earth (yes, I'm a dork. I love it. Shut up.) which is going to be nearly impossible to put together. I gave my mom two sets of flannel pajamas (one red with floopy teddy bears, one blue with rubber ducks) and a CD and several snowman ornaments -- she's all into snowmen. I bought Mike a Tolkien book (Dork. Yes. Shut up.) and Mary Ann a pair of fuzzy yellow slippers with happy faces on the toes, which she wore all over the house until they left in the early afternoon. The rest of the day was spend relaxing -- I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia, which I'd found in one volume on my way out of Boston, and Mom watched TV and played computer Scrabble. I headed home on Tuesday -- my bus broke down in New Hampshire, I got home an hour late to find my room trashed by the cat, and promptly got a migraine -- but Christmas was much fun. I hope yours was too. And now I'm off to bed...
Posted by Mary Ellen at December 27, 2001 10:17 PM