The Librarian Kate

Happy Day After Christmas to all.

First off, a Glittery Jesus and Mary.  Apparently one of my sister’s friends found this outside of a house in her neighborhood.  Apparently you cannot say “Birth of a Savior” without a Bedazzler:

I hope everyone had a nice holiday. After I got out of work Christmas Eve I relaxed at home for a spell before church. We go to the 5 PM Mass at my church, which happens to be the Children’s Mass – which means you have to get there at 4 PM to get a seat. No small feat when you have 5 1/2 people (the 1/2 being my baby niece). The Mass is always enjoyable, and during the sermon, there’s a puppet show for the kids and a story or two from our resident Spanish priest. (We have a rather large Hispanic/Filipino population in my area, so the church has a Spanish speaking priest for a weekly Spanish mass and outreach to those communities.)

The only downer was that my dad feels this need to leave right after Holy Communion because he wants to beat traffic, whereas I prefer to stay for the whole Mass. Granted, there’s only about another 10 minutes or so after the Holy Communion, so I am not missing much but I wish he would stay put. Told him next year I’m signing up to be a cantor for Mass so he would HAVE to stay – he would not leave when his child is performing now, would he?

Christmas Eve was at my brother in law’s sister’s house, and Christmas Day at our house started rather quietly. Everyone liked their gifts, especially the books I found for my niece.  I received a lot of clothes, a “knitting pattern a day” calendar, Welcome Back Kotter Season 1 DVD (my sister and I used to watch this show a lot when Nick at Nite brought it back on the air in the mid-90s), a Beatles-themed Monopoly game (I heart the British Invasion and the Beatles) , a gift card to Michael’s, among other things. We all received a framed picture of the baby.

In recognition of my parents’ new hobbies, their gifts also had themes. My mom took up counted cross stitch and sewing again this year, so we gave her a sewing machine and related notions.  My father decided that he wanted to have more of a commitment to physical fitness (for those that don’t know, my father went through a very serious illness earlier this year, resulting in a dramatic weight loss and an understanding that he has to take care of himself better( and went back to his first love of golf. He treated himself to some new golf ciubs earlier in the month (the old ones being given away when we moved last year) thus everyone gave him accessories and the like – tees, balls, a rain suit, etc.

After gifts I went downstairs to do some bills, though my mom doth protest too much, and that’s when all hell broke loose. I’m balancing my checkbook and hear someone upstairs flush a toilet. And then I hear water gushing in the laundry room. It’s normal to hear water rushing through the pipes in our house, but not this loud.

Ladies and gentlemen, Santa left us one more present at the house – a backed up sewer!

So no showers, toilet flushing, any use of water at all until the following day (today) when we could get someone to fix it. Naturally, all you want to do in this situation IS use the bathroom! Fortunately, if there was a gastronomical emergency, my sister lives close enough by that we could use her toilet.

I watched this pretty cool show with my dad last night on The Golf Channel, called The Big Break. It’s like Survivor for golfers.  Take the Reward and Immunity Challenges from Survivor, put them on a golf course, and you have The Big Break.

Once this is cleared out (working as we speak – good thing I woke up, for this entire procedure is rather loud) we’re all going to enjoy the small but valuable luxury of going to the the bathroom and taking showers, before we go get my aunt and have Christmas Round 2 with Turkey Dinner. Tomorrow we go see my Babci (and I get my last state quarter; she has been helping me collect them) and Sunday I am off to New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other amusements.

Here’s hoping everyone else’s pipes run wild and free! Oh, and that you had a good Christmas too.