Here it is two days before Christmas and I\u2019ve already eaten so many cookies that I feel like a drunk in the middle of a four-day bender.\u00a0 Well, there\u2019s no avoiding the excesses.\u00a0 Camera Girl is fiendish in her strategies to kill me with food.\u00a0 She should hide these evil foods somewhere far away.\u00a0 Instead, she lays them out all over the kitchen where even a man with a will of iron must succumb.\u00a0 I\u2019ve kept up my exercise regimen as best I can but exercise deals in hundreds of calories while pastries are measured in the thousands.\u00a0 The pain, the pain.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I watched, \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life\u201d in its entirety.\u00a0 That\u2019s something I haven\u2019t done in at least fifteen years.\u00a0 Many years ago, I overdosed on it.\u00a0 I watched it too many times and it became played out.\u00a0 But yesterday I found it fresh and enjoyable.\u00a0 Of course, every scene in the movie was extremely familiar down to the slightest word and even gesture of the actors.\u00a0 But I was able to appreciate just how fine the acting and directing was.\u00a0 And as highly emotional as the ending of the movie obviously is I wasn\u2019t put off at all by it.\u00a0 Maybe this American Christmas Carol is fitting for the time and place we live in.\u00a0 Maybe people are ready to hope for miracles again.\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly true that we need a few of them.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to claim that heaven interceded and put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Kamala Harris.\u00a0 At best maybe a divine force kept him from intersecting with that bullet that grazed his ear.\u00a0 I\u2019m afraid that heaven is not going to let us off the hook for the situation we find ourselves in.\u00a0 But maybe we are being given a chance to straighten things out on our own.\u00a0 The headaches that will entail are already beginning to emerge.\u00a0 Well, we\u2019ll leave the future to next year for now.<\/p>\n
Today it was time to begin my annual \u201cChristmas Carol\u201d viewing experience.\u00a0 I chose the George C Scott version.\u00a0 And it did not disappoint.\u00a0 Marley\u2019s ghost, the Cratchit Christmas dinner and the final scene in Scrooge\u2019s office provide all the correct notes to ensure my approval.\u00a0 And as always Tiny Tim is pathetically frail and impossibly uncomplaining.\u00a0 I noted to Camera Girl at the appropriate moment that Mrs. Cratchit\u2019s railing against Scrooge during the toast moment was pitch perfect.\u00a0 I could imagine and probably have heard equivalent protest from Camera Girl when some acquaintance of ours overstepped the bounds of propriety according to Camera Girl\u2019s standards.\u00a0 She does have a highly developed sense of outrage, especially when she decides that I will have to be the one to enforce it.\u00a0 Women have that propensity.\u00a0 Bless them.<\/p>\n
Well, time is running out.\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to fit in the Alistair Sim and Reginald Owen versions in tomorrow.\u00a0 That should be doable but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be able to get through \u201cThe Holly and Ivy\u201d tomorrow.\u00a0 Well, that can wait till Christmas Eve morning.\u00a0 Christmas Eve and Christmas will be full days and I am not sure what my posting will be like.\u00a0 The quotes and the photos are all pre-scheduled but my patented rants are a daily chore so I\u2019ll have to do the best I can to put together something fitting.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have to see how that goes.\u00a0 But Christmas week is here and away we go.<\/p>\n