Holiday Meh

“Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.”

– Winston Churchill

Friday. Issac's birthday--guessing Peg shot him a text from the operating room at the exact time of his birth, as she does every year.

My last final of the semester comes later, sadistically scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. What sinister scheduler thought that was a good idea? The only ones I pity more than myself are the proctor and the IT people on the exam team who must virtually sit there with me.

I've become a distracted klutz and breaker of things, lost in my own head after a week of solid study. I reached to pour Peg a little cabernet last night and missed the glass, pouring wine all over the counter. The kitchen sink handle snapped off in my hand yesterday, the cheap plastic flange holding it in place finally giving up the ghost. Peg wondered if it could be fixed, but I'm pretty sure it cannot. So we're using a pair of pliers to turn the water on and off. Not perfect.

I can feel the tide of work rising behind the dam I've built these last few days to have space for study. The year is going to end in a flood of writing and filing and trying to get ready for a half-dozen trials that threaten to upend this whole plan of going to Manhattan. That's been my luck--I've built the calendar of the last three decades around trials and hearings that usually never happen, until they do when I most need them to go away.

As an example, I may be flying through the ice in the Columbia next week to attend a fifteen minute hearing the judge demands take place in person. The other side has no lawyer, and may not even show up. I've asked for a little grace from the court, but so far that request has been politely ignored.

My computer is telling me down in the corner that temperatures are expected to drop over the weekend, which is really saying something given that it's ten degrees out there right now and we've seen four below this week.

My annual December mental slide feels just around the bend, as well. Christmas is never great, but this one certainly doesn't hold much promise. Both parents gone now, and no family gatherings planned for us. The tanking economy is creating a growing pot of problematic A/R, so we won't have the benefit of our annual splurge at bonus time each year as the firm closed its books. There is no bonus time now. Seeing that pile of money plop into my checking account always brightened the gloom a bit.

I need to get back to studying, but I'm so sick of this stuff at this point I could scream. Just a few more hours--in eleven hours and fifty minutes, to be precise, the time for completing the exam will close, ending what has been an extraordinarily difficult semester for me. The challenge has been good for my increasingly addled and lazy brain, but sometimes I think maybe I bit off more than I could chew. I reckon we'll find out later.