Man.  I’m hungry.

‘Tis the night before Christmas and I am at home
sitting in bed and composing a poem.
My bathrobe is hung by its hook on a door.
Underwear’s strewn on the unvacuumed floor.

One cat is curled up at the foot of the bed.
With visions, no doubt, of dead bugs in her head.
The other cat’s downstairs, most likely asleep.
No worries, no job, no appointments to keep.

And I, in my nakedness, type like a fiend
writing this verse on my laptop (wide-screened).
The TV is off, but the air cleaner hums.
What’s chaffing my ass?  Oh – some old cracker crumbs.

There’s no tree in the house and no presents to wrap.
I’m an old single guy and I don’t do that crap.
I don’t leave out cookies and milk for the elf.
I don’t even have any snacks for myself.

The crackers, you see, were from sometime last week.
Since then, I’ve had nothing but salads (all Greek).
There’s canned food downstairs.  Of that I am sure,
but, for me at least, kidney beans hold no allure.

That being the case, there’s not much to say.
I guess I’ll just starve for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow, however, I’m having lasagna.
I’d offer to share, but you might get some on ya.

So have a nice Christmas, alone or with friends,
and think of me starved, as this poem portends,
but do not get misty-eyed.  Nay!  Do not weep!
I’ll surfeit tomorrow.  Tonight, I shall sleep.

TWD

I’ve had a fairly uneventful week, which is nice.  Did a little (very little) work between Monday and Thursday before shutting down the work laptop for good on Friday.  Not planning to bring it back up until January 3rd.

Dropped Scott off at MARTA on Wednesday morning, and he’ll be gone until at least the 4th.  Once I had the house to myself again, I sort of got into the cleaning mode.  Cleared out the music room, which had become a dumping ground for … well… for stuff over the last year or two.  It has now been reassigned to its former role of a place for horns, music, books, a piano, etc.  It also has the Day family dining room table in it, although I don’t have any chairs yet.  Maybe I’ll cruise up to TR this week and pick those up.  If they’ll fit in my car.

I also got serious about rebuilding my “Kramer” laptop (so named because of the faux wood finish on the case) and got it up and running again.  I’m using it now, in fact.  Set up its docking station on Mom’s old sewing machine table – a nearly perfect fit – and there’s now a fairly nice little office setup downstairs (also in the music/dining room).

I also straightened up the living room and let the Roomba loose for a few spins around the entirety of the downstairs area.  Great little machine, that Roomba.  I don’t endorse a lot of things, but I’ll give that thing 5 stars.

Upstairs, I did a half-hearted job of cleaning my bedroom, but more needs to be done.  Really want to get some wireless set-top boxes for the televisions so that I can rearrange the bedroom the way I’d really like for it to be, but that will have to wait.  At least all of my clothes have been laundered at put into drawers – and I’ve got a festive holiday quilt on my bed now.  Hoping to clean out the bedroom closet this week also.

Last night I played the final GBB caroling gig at Lenox Mall (for the Salvation Army thing).  Much to the relief of my aching elbows, I did so on a tenor horn instead of the tuba.  Started out pretty out of tune, but after the horn warmed up and I messed around with the slides enough, I acquitted myself fairly well.

This morning, I finished watching Jane Austen’s Emma on Masterpiece Theater (PBS).  I tried to read it earlier this year, but lost interest about 3/4 of the way through and felt sort of guilty about it.  Now that I know the story (I assume that the movie was fairly true to the book – it was 4 hours long), I might give reading the book another shot next year.

I’m also going to finish Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying this week. It’s quite likely that I’ll have to start over on that, as I’ve forgotten much of the plot and most of the characters, but it’s a pretty short book.  I stopped reading it because I found that just reading it was impossible for me – Faulkner is just too much work – but that reading it aloud made it much more interesting and opened my eyes to just how good a writer Faulkner was.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to read aloud when Scott was in the house; and, since he lost his job in November, he’s been in the house pretty much non-stop since then.  Now that I’ll have a week alone, maybe I can knock the thing out in an afternoon.  Shoot, maybe I’ll tape myself and give away personalized audio books for family birthday presents this year.

Spent much of today asleep.  That wasn’t my intention when I got up at 6:45, but I crashed on the couch at somewhere around noon and didn’t wake up until nearly 6:00 this evening.

Tomorrow (Christmas day), I’m going over to Jenny’s place to have dinner with her and her parents.  I realized today that I don’t have gifts for any of them.  Maybe I’ll stop at Kroger’s and get them each a pop-tart or something.

TWD