{"id":39,"date":"2007-01-11T22:55:14","date_gmt":"2007-01-12T03:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crankopotamus.com\/blog\/?p=39"},"modified":"2007-01-11T22:55:14","modified_gmt":"2007-01-12T03:55:14","slug":"let-nothing-you-dismay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/let-nothing-you-dismay\/","title":{"rendered":"Let nothing you dismay"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was surprised by how good our Christmas was. There were certainly some difficult moments (for instance, if I ever meet the guy responsible for the song The Christmas Shoes,<\/em> I’ll be hard-pressed not to poke him in the eye), but by and large, it was lovely.<\/p>\n

Sarah helped a lot: I found a cache of gifts for her family, wrapping paper, grocery lists, and a sketch map of the house detailing where the decorations should go. I think she would have been proud. I didn’t try to make cookies, and I only had the energy for one of the four huge bins of ornaments, but we hit all the important highlights.<\/p>\n

We spent the holidays surrounded by family. My mom flew in from California and stayed with me, my sister drove up from North Carolina and stayed with my dad, and we all joined Sarah’s family for their celebration. We were at Sarah’s parents’ house on Christmas Eve, and we hosted breakfast at our place Christmas morning. Then we all went to Sue & Lou’s house for Christmas Day. There were 20 people there and it was joyful chaos. Everyone had a grand old time.<\/p>\n

Nate’s number one gift was the Pixter, a sort of electronic coloring book. It has a scribble mode, connect-the-dots, paint-by-numbers, and a couple other things that he hasn’t figured out yet. It is absolutely perfect for him to play with on long car rides. He calls it his laptop.<\/p>\n

A week or so after Christmas, we drove up north to visit Leigh and deliver her new computer. I had packed a bunch of FireWire cables in my laptop bag, to assist in transferring her data from the old computer.<\/p>\n

It just so happened that this was the day of our first snowstorm. As you know, we’ve never had snow in New England before, so no one knows how to drive in it. Folks were slipping and sliding all over the place. We must have passed twelve or fifteen disabled vehicles. A drive that usually takes a little over an hour ended up taking two and a half hours. At the two-hour mark is when I realized that I had left my laptop bag at home.<\/p>\n

So I was gritting my teeth and trying hard not to scream obscenities. Nate asked me what was wrong, and I growled out that I was very angry, because I had forgotten my laptop. He said, “Daddy, it’s okay! Because I will share my<\/em> laptop with you. Now you don’t have to be angry.”<\/p>\n

And my heart exploded. Which is very lucky for the Radio Shack employee who told me that there’s no such thing as a six-pin-to-six-pin FireWire cable, because without Nate’s calming influence, I think I would have bitten him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was surprised by how good our Christmas was. There were certainly some difficult moments (for instance, if I ever meet the guy responsible for the song The Christmas Shoes, I’ll be hard-pressed not to poke him in the eye), but by and large, it was lovely. Sarah helped a lot: I found a cache … Continue reading Let nothing you dismay<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nate","category-sarah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}