I sincerely hope that all of you crazy people had happy holidays and got ridiculously drunk in the safety and privacy of your homes, ate obscene amounts of Christmas cookies and other savory foods, got all sorts of lovely presents, and celebrated with wonderful family and friends.

Unfortunately leading up to Christmas there was a string of deaths in my life and the lives of my loved ones. My cousin passed away, my best friend’s mom, and my other best friend’s little baby, so there definitely was something of a shadow cast on our holidays, but we did our best to try to relax and enjoy as best as we could.

If you could keep my family and friends in your thoughts, that would be great.

I kept having seizures the day before and the day of Christmas, which I thought were due to stress, as my cousin passed away on Christmas Eve. However, last night I realized that one of my primary seizure medications was sitting on my dresser and that I hadn’t been taking it with my other pills (which I keep in a box) for about four days, which was when I had it refilled.

D’oh.

Seizures be damned, I had to fill the rather sizable shoes of my Ukrainian grandmother and fry up a giant mess of pirogi for the masses.

How well I remember Grandma, beer in one hand, spatula in the other, screaming, “You DEM kids, get out of my kitchen!” as we tried to steal the little pockets of potato and cheese goodness.

The only difference between her and I is that she made them from scratch and I buy the frozen ones from a Chicago deli, a fact that probably horrifies her into rolling feverishly in her grave.

I’m also betting that Grandma never burned the shit out of her arm by stupidly tossing a stick of butter in the pan while the burner was on high.

Hey, I never claimed to be Marta Stewartska.

After a big dinner with my mom, stepdad, the J-Man, my sister and her kids, and my brother and his son (who just got accepted to Notre Dame – whoot!) and some furious present-opening, it was off to B.’s for ANOTHER Christmas dinner and MORE present-opening.

B.’s mom is a ridiculous cook. She whipped up a huge German feast and made bread with bacon in it. Bacon. And Swiss cheese. I mean, come on.

She also made at least ten different kinds of cookies, one of which were miniature pecan pies. I was in gluttonous heaven.

I never made cookies, by the way. I suck.

B.’s family was incredibly generous with J. and I. I was touched, as always, by how incredibly welcoming they are and by how much they give to us.

Everyone seemed to really enjoy having us there and really liked the gifts that we got them, too.

J. blends right in with the cousins, which is nice. They were running around like freaks and making YouTube videos and cooking crack or whatever it is young teenagers do these days.

Afterwards B. came over and we watched my DVRed American Horror Story episodes, which – if you haven’t seen the show – Oh. My. God. Incredible. Jessica Lange? Ridiculous.

The next day I slept until noon and then cleaned like a psycho.

Today I am looking into the Lutheran high school for the J-Man, because I have come to the conclusion that he is pretty much never going to survive public high school. I was wishing and hoping, but the public high school out here is enormous and overcrowded and serves five towns, and I think he’d be swallowed up like shark bait.

The Lutheran high school (always, always I am plagued by the Lutherans) is tiny and kind and great academically with all sorts of wonderful extracurricular activities, and the woman that’s been e-mailing back and forth with me bestows God’s blessings upon me every time she signs off, which is a hoot. Is she a direct representative of God? Has God appointed her an Almighty Blessing-Giver, or is she just arbitrarily handing out God’s blessing because she feels like it? That seems awfully presumptuous to me.

Tomorrow is my thirty-eighth birthday. Christ, I’m old.

Happy Tuesday.

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