(Technically, it's after midnight here in Oklahoma. But on this machine, the clock is still in the Pacific zone, so this entry will bear a Christmas Day timestamp.)

My flu/fever/low-grade-infection/whatever seems to be pretty much gone, thankfully. Still have 4-5 days' worth of horse pills to take, yet, but at least I'm feeling better. Last night, I ran down to Norman to drop off some gifts with a friend. Hung out, ate chips & queso, and sat through a hard-sell Christian-conversion effort from my friend's mother. I have so few people I deal with regularly in California who are even Christian to begin with, let alone driven to aggressively convert everyone they meet, that I forget what it can be like. Lots of lecturing on how Jesus is the basis for the season, for the holiday. Not wanting to turn the evening into a shouting match, I just smiled and nodded and let her speak her mind. It's her right, after all. To have pointed out all the Pagan trappings of the holiday, and recount the history of how the holiday was essentially a "compromise" between the invading Christian Romans and the Pagans of the lands they were trying to conquer and integrate into the empire, that would have led to madness. I really had better plans for the next 3-4 hours, and they didn't include a history/theology debate.

Instead, I drove over to campus and found a good hotspot and checked e-mail (and uploaded yesterday's entry– since I'm not consistently connected, I'll be periodically posting my entries in clumps). I hadn't slept Thursday night, between doing laundry, packing, burning some data CDs for friends out here, and pushing out one quick update to one of my Perl modules. So I slept pretty soundly once I came back here and crashed.

Today started off with an actual breakfast, early no less. Two concepts that are generally pretty alien to me while home in California. We went over to my brother's place and exchanged gifts with him and his family. It's hard to believe my niece is already 11, nearly 12. Well, hard to believe until I actually get there and see her. She's at least 5'6" already. Definately takes after my brother on that count (he's about a half-inch to a full inch taller than me). They all liked their gifts, him especially (I got him the first season of Monk). I got clothes, some clothes, and then I got some more clothes. Later, I went down to Norman to my friend Pasha's parent's house, and had dinner with them and their family. She got me a spice rack and a crème brûlée set (of which I am far more likely to use the torch on my modelling projects than actual crème brûlée). And her son did this amazingly-cool piece of AutoCAD work on a section of clear plexiglass, engraving my name. When the light hits it right, it reflects off the opposite face of the glass. I guess you gotta see it to understand. It's cool.

All in all, a very nice Christmas day, indeed. I'm closing it out with a homemade peanut butter & chocolate brownie, and the Bond Live DVD playing on my desktop in a separate window. If there's anything better than four lovely women, it's four lovely women who are amazingly talented at their chosen craft.

(Oh, I took in two movies, as well. I'll cover those in a later post.)