Christmas is a crazy season for me. As the designated Santa of the household, all I feel like I do is spend 2-3 months per year figuring out what to get who and how to afford things. And this year, affording things has been pretty brutal. We told the kids that Christmas was going to be smaller because we were traveling this year, but Russell also knows it's because we're pretty broke.

For the grandparents, I've got kids making ornaments. Genny selected a beading kit that she's apparently decided is a pain in the ass and isn't so sure she wants to do now. Russell selected a craft that's just hard for him to do because it requires fine motor skills he doesn't really have. I suspect that tomorrow night, I'll be sitting at the table with Mike finishing the stupid ornaments. Next year, I'm making wreaths out of handprints on backed felt. It'd be faster and if I'm going to end up doing it anyhow, then I might as well go easy.

And yeah, I could have just bought something, but we're broke and this was cheaper and more meaningful. I'm all over cheap and meaningful, I tell you what!

Yesterday, I set up LaDawn's books for her daycare in excel and started the data entry. I did a sheet for each family and then connected the sheets, so that she can print out a sheet for her accountant. She was stunned that "you can do that?" LaDawn is a typist of the the two-fingered hunt-and-peck variety, so while she said she'd do some, she's smoking crack. I can get done in two hours, what would take her weeks, so I'm going back to finish up today.

And last night, I fell asleep at 1030 and while normal people would sleep at this hour, I'm wide awake because I've had my 6 hours of sleep. Sick, isn't it? Judging from the yawning though, I'm going right back down for a couple more hours, shortly.

Mel and I have talked and have gotten stuff sorted out and providing that the 10-day forecast on the weather channel website isn't a big fat sorry lie, we leave on-time and everything for a couple weeks.

Mike and I started talking the other night about his job. One of the things that came out is that he's getting bone bored. He's a super smart man, so boredom is a bad thing. We're talking to friends about maybe finding him work out near Mel and her family just because we'd be near Mel and her family and because the friend had worked on stuff for ILM of Star Wars fame. Of course, my mother-in-law pointed out that we'd only be a day's ride from them, too. (I'm sure the kids would appreciate that, but I definitely had the "oh shit" thing going on.)

The thing about living near Mel and family is that the housing is decidedly cheaper there. At $500 a month for 6-9 months a year in heating costs for heating oil, we're also looking at a cheaper way to do winters. We like winters, but here the heating oil ranges on $3 a gallon at 100 gallons a month and the heater runs us $200 to burn it. It's expensive. And housing is expensive -- damned near California-expensive. When we refinanced to pull money out of the house while I was sick, it put us in a rather bad place, as well. Three years of crappy raises at Mike's job has kind of fucked us. The past 2 years, he got maybe $2k in raises because they company was in lean years. This year, he got a decent raise, but nothing to make up for the past two years of jack shit.

I've gotten my substitute license and am in the process of getting applications filled out for each district, but we'll have to see how my knee tolerates it on a day-to-day basis, too. On the good news front, a month of doing leg raises and crunches each and every night has trimmed my body considerably and put my sugars into excellent shape. My blood pressure on a med that often raises it, had actually dropped, a little, 110/70.

After a bowl of popcorn the other night, my sugars were 114, so that's good, too.

Ok, now, I'm getting sleepy again, so I'm crawling into my bed again.

I realized when I saw a CNN fluff story on the basics of survival in winter that it was likely that James Kim didn't survive after his departure from his wife and young children, so I looked it up and confirmed my fears.

I have spent a long time reading about herbs and plants identifying plants in the wild and I know a lot of stuff about survival. I also overpack my car.

I often overpack the kitchen -- it's kind of a panic thing. I can't remember half of what I have at home, so I buy it just in case, because you can't ever have too much pasta or spaghetti sauce, you know? My mom did that, too. She is particularly bad with clothing. I always had way too many clothes and I still do, as do my kids. My son makes fun of me for always making sure he has extra clothes. Genny grows so fast that it's not uncommon for her not to get to wear some clothes because she grows out of them before she gets to wear them. I'm getting better. If it doesn't fit, I get rid of it and move on. I used to keep all of my many sizes and now, I keep the size that fits and donate most everything else. I still have stuff I forget about...I pack away summer stuff and forget I did it and then find it mid-winter, cursing all the while.

And I often think about the phrase,"live simply so that others may simply live" and I think about ways to reduce, clean up, etc. And I've gotten a lot better. I could certainly improve even more, and I struggle with my OCD-ness and my missing brain, but I have taken to writing things down. Organizing my life makes more sense and is less wasteful and that's a good thing.

On the good news front, though, (in light of this news story) I always overpack the car on trips. I always have an extra jug of water. I always pack food. I always pack blankets or towels. In winter, I always think of packing for an emergency. I don't know why I do that either, but when we had to drive over the passes on the trip home from Florida, 2 years ago, even though it was on a main drag, I bought a case of water bottles, 2 gallons of water, sandwich stuff, fruits, snacks, and juice. I bring lighters.

And as I read the part of the news story, when the mother was nursing the two kids to get them through, I was thinking about what I would have done. And when I read that they had brought some baby food jars, a jar of jam and some water, I realized that I would have brought more with me because I'm crazy and obsessive and I think about that kind of thing. And I would have been sucking on pine needles for vitamin C and poking around under the snow for any plants I could have located because I know that kind of stuff and I know what to look for.

And it's not a critique of their family at all. Most normal people wouldn't be so freakishly obsessive-compulsive to pack all that kind of crap on a main drag (which is where they started) nor would they have this vast repository of essentially useless information about wild plant identification and usage floating around in their heads (unless they were a freaking lumberjack or a boy scount).

It was just that I was thinking about what would I do? How would I react? And I realized that I would have been better prepared because while my husband bitches about how much I pack into a car, he never questions my logic when I do it.

I had a shivering realization -- even though I drive myself and others up a tree with my ocd behaviors at times, that I'm thankful that I am who I am -- spazz worrywart that I am. Ironically, I then wished that the Kims had been half as crazy as I am because they might have been better prepared, so that they had all survived.