So we opened gifts the other night since Linz and I won’t be together on Christmas (at some point I’ll have to leave my family tradition and we’ll start one of our own). And watching the boy reminded me of the spectacle that is a child unwrapping gifts. Children virtually douse themselves with impatient gasoline sitting next to the tree and when a gift is handed to them it may as well be a road flare, setting them on fire with anticipation as they're rip into the paper, the sum of their imaginative wishes filling the contents of the package. It’s truly a magical event. It does makes some gifts anticlimactic, though. You can see the tension loosen in the wires that hold their excited face when all the paper comes off and it’s not the magic item they failed to will into the box but, say, tube socks. But the hugging is still fun, even though it may just be an exercise to them after gifts like those.

I went to the rental property after work to do a few minor repairs for the new tenants moving in that day, mirror, towel rack, drywall holes, shower head, paint. Then I helped the dude tetris in his couch while gouging every wall and scraping every corner, stuff that we would normally charge damages for if the tenant had done themselves. I took the very last of my stuff home including my junk trunk which contains stuff I’ve accumulated over my entire life. You know, little flotsam & jetsam of memorabilia, including a zillion wallet-sized pictures of people that have come and gone (some now Facebook friends), a torch lighter someone got me from Australia, pieces of paper with passwords to websites probably now extinct, a 9mm casing from an outing at the gun range, the earring I used to wear, textbooks, hockey trophies from childhood, etc. And a dusty picture of me with the ex and her boys which was tossed but not before Lindsey had a look.

Me: Oh my god, look at this.
Linz: You guys had a “family” portrait done? Hee hee.
Me: Yeah. That once, I think.
Linz: This thing is terrible! You still have that ugly shirt!
Me: Oh, right.
Linz: How come she doesn’t smile?
Me: That’s just the way she smiled, never with an open mouth.
Linz: In fact, it doesn’t look like any of you are smiling.
Me (laughing): That’s cause we were all miserable!

I was kidding, or course.

When Linz and I finally made separate meals for ourselves it was 9:30. We ate while watching a couple episodes of our newly and collectively favourite show, Californication. Then she went to bed and I proceeded to get meleed by suburban teenage or pothead 20-something Americans. In other words, I brought a gun to a knife fight and lost.