What A Great Day

(Hope Yours was too)

I made my girlfriend, Pat, wait until almost eleven o’clock Saturday morning to open her Christmas presents. She is such a trooper. This came about because I didn’t wake up until I had to answer a phone call from my mother sometime after ten AM. I’m such a bum. In my defense, I had previously arisen about four AM and spent three hours reading and working on future writing materials.

We decided not to travel this year for Christmas. Pat is facing five weekly round trips to her office in Chicago beginning next week and I couldn’t even get her interested in flying to Key West, not to mention Pittsburgh or Alabama. I’m in Key West in mind and spirit right now in spite of the rainy 38 degree weather we have outside here on the island.

We invited everybody to come see us here on St. Simons, but you know how that goes…inertia and gravity and all that. Last year we did southern Alabama and Kansas City Missouri in five days including flying Delta on Christmas day. I’m still tired from that trip as I did all of the cooking in Alabama and wired a surround sound stereo system in KC. I also fell in love with Pat’s daughter’s little miniature Daschund puppy named “Olive” that liked to sleep on my chest while I snoozed on the sofa—but that’s another story.

This year we didn’t leave the condo all day and we didn’t have to get out of our PJ’s either. I cooked a brunch featuring Welsh Rarebit cheese sauce over English muffins, Canadian bacon, asparagus spears, and a poached egg. For dinner I heated up a spiral sliced ham, cooked giant lima beans with pork neck bones, baked sweet potatoes, and made a deep dish apple pie. See my The Redneck Gormet Blog for some of the recipes.

I was back in bed by 8 PM and as a result of the early departure I’m back on the internet now.

I hope that your Christmas day was everything that you wanted it to be also. Unfortunately, there are people out there stuck in airports, facing illness and death, or living homeless on the streets that saw Christmas as something other than the lazy blessing we enjoyed here. There are people living in Haiti and Cuba and Iraq that will never see a meal like I cooked for the two of us this evening. And there are several hundred thousand of our fellow Americans sitting in tents and manning armed fortifications around the world attempting to guarantee our right to run around in our stocking feet between piles of discarded wrapping paper all day.

One more week, then we all can have a new year and a fresh slate, we can inaugurate President Bush for his second term, and we can look forward to kicking some more “Insurgent” butt and hopefully see the Middle East a little closer to peace. I wish us all good luck.