I am a week late on my traditional schedule. Normally, I get a tree up the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I have been ready in my mind to do it since Black Friday. Yet here I am, with a decidedly non-festive house, a few days into December. I'm starting to panic. What's worse, I can't remember whether we put up a tree last year. I think we did, and I know I could go back in blog posts to see. That takes more energy than I have. I just need to answer one pressing question: Will Harvey murder this year's Christmas tree? I worry that if we skipped it last year, because we had an enthusiastic kitten, then we have a much bigger problem this year, now that we have a nine-pound beige panther. Naturally, all the cats will freak out in their own ways, from next-to-youngest Athena (who has the cutest murder eyes ever) to old lady Rabbit (who has an incurable plastic-chewing habit). Maybe soon I can get the tree inside the house, undecorated for the first day, to see what happens.
You know, thinking back, it's possible all I did to decorate last year was drape one or two strands of lights in an otherwise bare tree. I sort of remember it now. Even that was hard to keep cats away from.
Our current Pathfinder D&D campaign is about to go on hiatus, after a special two-night Christmas special. A different one will start up in January, and I realized tonight that time is starting to tick by quickly now, and in a blink we will be kicking off the new one. We have been strongly cautioned to invest heavily in the backstory of our characters, and while I was the first (I think) to decide upon who my next character will be, I may be the last to complete the process of writing his life story. I have the basics -- he's a mixed race barbarian (and if you don't know, races in D&D have less to do with the amount and tint of ones melanin, but with radically different traits and abilities, more "species" than "races") who is living a lie. His father was an orc and his mother was a human. Normally players take this in a sexual violence direction, but not Doch's parents. Mother was widower father's second wife, and they were very much in love. Older brother from the first marriage makes fun of him for being half human, telling him he's too pretty and weak to be an orc. This is what sends him into the classic berserker rages of a barbarian. So far I have this much. But I need more--much, much more. I spent a little time this afternoon researching other people's opinions on half-orc barbarians on the internet. It made me realize that after a solid year of playing this rules system, I am still in way over my head. Not sure where the mental focus is going to come from to dive deeper and read the sections of the rule book I've been avoiding (sort of on purpose).
And one last thing: for any of you who celebrate the Festival of Lights, please allow me to wish a Happy Hanukkah to you.
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