As it worked out

The holiday itself was quite entertaining. David was up and banging on the door by about 7:15 - all eager to see what had happened. Jane and I hopped into sweats and headed down with him to let him open the presents. Santa had eaten the three Milanos we'd left for him, and drank the cup of water. Go figure! He left David a nice airplane toy which had it's electronics broken within two hours of the abuse beginning. He left a few more goodies, but the airplane was the keystone. Santa gave far fewer things to Jane and I, but that was by design.

After a while, we picked up Jane's folks at the hotel and went to the brunch at the Hawthorne. We always go to the brunch. Period. Quite frankly, I'm sick of it, but I go anyways, because her folks genuinely believe brunches are the highlight of cuisine, and they think the Hawthorne's is near the top of the list.

The last time I went there for a Christmas brunch, I had a 2-day case of Montezuma's from the hollandaise on their Eggs Benedict.

It's not actually a horrible brunch, my distaste for it is more based on the fact that I'm just not big on brunches, period. And I dislike repetition. The food in their restaurant at the hotel is actually quite good, and I like going there on occasion. I just am not a big one for habit. However, this year Eggs Benedict was not an offering. A plus.

Anyhow, after that we went home and David fought the idea of a nap for quite a long time - he was too excited to sleep. We won, eventually, and he finally went down for a few hours. The original plan was to go out for Chinese that night, but Jane and her folks couldn't wait for David to awaken and instead dove into the ham they'd bought the previous day. I abstained - I'm not a big ham guy (those who've seen my "acting" might beg to differ), and just improvised a supper later on.

Yesterday was a surprise. We woke up to about 3 inches of snow, with more on the way. I took out the electric shovel I'd bought last year, and cleared out enough of the driveway and deck to get out and pick her parents up. We came back to town, and went to Brujitos for lunch and to play - David had a blast there, as always. Highly recommended to all North Shore families with young kids. We're regulars. I cooked dinner last night - a huge pasta meal with my homemade from-scratch tomato sauce. I also baked brownies. The best argument for cooking is that it gets me out of cleanup duty.

Meanwhile, it kept snowing, so when we went to take her folks back to the hotel I needed another run with the shovel first. Slow going, but no real problems. This morning, though, we were so socked in that I broke the weatherstrip on the bottom of our storm door - I need to repair it when the snow melts. Which may be in May.

And I made an interesting discovery last night after everyone else had gone to bed. Turns out the reason we always heard the wind so loud in our chimney is that the damper has been open for - say - about the last 11 years of so (we never used the fireplace after the first winter in the house - I'm too paranoid about that sort of stuff, and the chimney needs more work than I want to bother with). So closing it should save some good money on our heating bill, I suspect. It made an immediate impact on the noise. But if I ever do want to start using the chimney again, I'll need to put a pull on the damper. It doesn't have one.

By the way, I heard that keeping Ty Law inactive was a game-time decision. Hopefully he can get a little time in next week to get the rust off, because without him in the lineup I doubt they get back to the Super Bowl. The bye week will help, though.