release

There will be no stupid April Fools Day jokes on this site today. That is all.
(Mainly because all the good domain names are taken.)

Nate loves music. Everything from Christmas carols to heavy metal gets him dancing, with head bobbing and arms waving. And when he loves a song and the song ends, claps his hands and shouts, “Yay!”
This morning at mass, the last notes of the first hymn had just finished echoing through the church when [...]

We’re in New York, visiting Dineen’s parents for Christmas. Her father has just finished making us breakfast, her mother is at work, and Dineen is upstairs taking a shower. Alex is playing with a Fisher-Price bus, running over plastic pedestrians at criminally negligent speeds.
Nate, as he has done many times, grabbed my hand [...]

The day’s almost over. The flowers you ordered? Didn’t come. The card you got? Lame. The cute little custom-order teddy-bear you heard about on the radio? Everyone else got one too.
So what’s a guy to do on Valentines Day to redeem himself? Spend a little time thinking about [...]

First we hit some clubs down in Ybor City, finally ending up in a champagne-soaked, half-naked orgy of New Year festivities where we caroused until the sun came up.
Wait, that’s not what happened.
For reasons that will be obvious to even the most casual readers of this site, we all celebrated the arrival of the New [...]

There may be no expression of the Christmas spirit than this one carol:

Joy to the world!
The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart
Prepare him room;
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing
Joy to the world!
The savior reigns.
Let men their songs employ.
While fields and flood
Rocks, hills, [...]

Growing up in Florida, we never had white Christmases, so we had to find or make our beauty elsewhere. Our neighborhood found it in the luminaria, a tradition from the Southwest that founds its warm to other warm climates.
Every Christmas Eve, we would get a bucketful of sand, a stack of paper bags, and [...]

It’s a sign of the times when even your Christmas tree ornaments are at war.

There are few moments in a man’s life when the veil separating the absolutely mundane from total bone-shaking terror parts and allows the two to mix. Today I had just such a moment, putting Christmas lights on our house for the first time.
Generations of received wisdom dictate that properly placed lights run along the [...]

I’m thankful for after-dinner naps.

Dineen found that an Amazon.com search for “christmas stocking” includes some results which might surprise Mrs. Claus.