I was able to wrap up the bulk of my garage cleaning today after having knocked out my additional storage. This place was an absolute disaster before I started working, mostly due to Christmas and general item creep in The Garage. Once I finished my new shelving it had become uninhabitable by man or beast so this morning I put on the gloves and went to town. I basically took everything out of the garage and grouped all of my pieces together for storage. I made a dump run, getting rid of even more stuff that I've been carting around for years and picked up a few more plastic tubs to keep all related items together. I moved the rest of my network outside with my main workstation, put everything up on racks and poured my first beer out of a keg in several months.

Now my camping gear is all together, various holiday items are in tubs and stacked together, I have room on my desk for my Mac and Sunshine has room on his bed to lay down again. Basically, all things are good in Tom's work space again.

I had to get everything done today in time for my annual head shaving. I tend to do it a couple of times per year but Dec. 30th has become a bit of a ritual over the last three years. Darin is my official barber though others get their turn if they wish. This year we had my family, Darin, TQ, neighbor Matt (and his boys) and pal Dave in attendance. Both Abby and Ben took a turn swiping at my head with the clippers but Darin did the bulk of the work.

This year we decided to take care of Ben right after my shaving. He was having so much fun shaving mine that he was eager to jump in my lap for a turn. Darin does his boys' hair so it wasn't like I was gambling on that front but as this is only Ben's second hair cut, I was gambling on his eventual "look". Except for a brief bout of crying towards the end (which a pack of Smarties took care of), he was having fun all along. But an unfortunate outcome was, he looks a bit like Augusta from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (the original). The cut seems to have added 20 pounds to his appearance. We didn't shave it like mine... we had the biggest, fattest attachment I had on the clippers but it still seems a bit weird. He's happy as a clam and thankfully hasn't yet begun to worry about his mop so I guess it's all cool but next time I'll likely spend the time to use multiple attachments for various parts of his skull and give a cleaner look. Darin: Nothing against you and your hard work, he just looks weird, okay? See you next year too for my freebie? Sweet!

Monday night we decided to try moving Ben from his crib to Abigail's old racecar bed. He did better than I figured he would but worse than I had hoped. Abby took to her new bed right away and managed to stay in it, even after she woke up in the morning. Ben has me a bit freaked out because I just know he's going to get up and wander the house in the middle of the night.

His first run ended at 1:30 in the morning when I heard some crying and got up to find Ben in the Family Room wandering about. We had left lights on along the hall and leading to our bedroom in hopes that if he did wake up he'd follow the trail to Mom and Dad. I'm sure he wasn't fully awake and was just trying to navigate the halls while avoiding the walls. I picked him up and brought him to bed with us and after a bit Kerri brought him back to his crib. He may end up graduating to a bed later than Abby, if only because I can't trust that he'll stay in bed for the duration of the night and I'm afraid I'll find him drinking bleach in the darkness.

Also, Kerri and Abs are off to Disneyland with Katie and Eve so I'm hanging with Ben for the day. He's napping right now so I'm working on The Garage to get ready for this weekend's New Year's Eve party. I'm not just cleaning up... I'm cleaning out and building more storage. Well, right now I'm finding an excuse to *not* be building storage by posting this entry. But I've pulled everything out and just have to take apart some old shelves above the entry from the house and measure everything so I can buy my supplies. I've got about 19 feet by 3 feet and will run about 4 feet high so I should be able to move a bunch of stuff out of the way again. It's amazing how stuff creeps into the play/work space over time but this year I'm building enough storage to last me a while. I'm also dumping a lot more stuff that I've been carrying around since I moved out of my parents' place at 18 years old. The risk is that I don't get my act together in time for this weekend. As you can tell by my post here, I'm finding lots of excuses not to get done, mostly so I can complain at the last minute rush to pull everything off. I better spell-check this post. Actually, I don't like this spell-check system so perhaps I should write a better one now so I can check this post without all of the hassles. Let's go yak shaving.

Christmas snuck up on us pretty quickly this year but for the first time in a long time I did not use Christmas Eve as my first and last shopping day of the season. I had two items to build this year: An electric motorcycle for Ben and a bicycle for Abigail. The motorcycle was crazy and took about 3 hours to complete. Thankfully Terry helped out and stopped me from making the types of mistakes that could have turned the project into a 6 hour affair. Abby's bike was quick and easy but then again, I wasted many hours in my youth building and modifying BMX bikes so everything made perfect sense.

We went to the Asbury's for their annual Christmas Adam party (that's the day before Christmas Eve... get it?). I'd guess there were 30 adults and 20 kids. The Asbury's always do a great job and everyone had a marvelous time. They employed a Santa to come read to the kids and dispense gifts to the youngsters. As usual the end of the night found the final four (Matt, Tim Darin and myself) hanging out around the fire. We didn't stay too late as compared to previous years but we did enough damage to make the next morning a little painful.

We had friends come over on Christmas Eve for brunch and ended up with a surprise visit from cousin Colleen. I haven't seen Colleen in nearly 10 years so it was quite a treat. In addition we had the Flannery's and the Davis family. Later in the evening we went to Kerri's Grandpa's house (that's Great Grandpa to my kids) and cruised his neighborhood to see all of the Christmas lights. He lives smack in the middle of a little area termed "Candycane Lane" which attracts thousand of cars with families packed inside to see the crazy light displays. Hundreds of homes put up thousands of lights and other decorations for everyone to see. It really is quite a sight.

Once the kids went to sleep I went over to neighbor Matt's place to retrieve the motorcycle and bike so they could make it next to the tree for morning. Abby is at the perfect age right now because she really "gets" the Santa portion of Christmas. She actually asked me if she could go to bed and put herself to sleep much earlier than usual. Would it be bad if I were to invent other magical beings with similar late night activities that I could assign to other holidays and get the same bedttime eagerness? More thinking required...

Christmas morning came earlier than I had hoped but I suspect that will be a continuing trend for the next several years so I had better get used to it. Perhaps inventing other holiday beings isn't such a good idea. More thinking indeed...

We've been trying to reign in the sheer number of gifts for the kids but with friends and family it's difficult to manage. We're definitely better off than we were 2 years ago but we need to do better because these kids have way too much stuff. Perhaps we need to restrict gifts to particular types, like books and art supplies and clothes. Just what every kid wants, I know. They'll be calling me The Grinch if they end up with all socks and sweaters under the tree.

The kids were lucky enough to have all four grandparents around them for Christmas this year. Terry and Nancy have been at our place for a bit and it has been most excellent (I'm not just saying this because Terry is right behind me either). The kids love it and Terry has been rebuilding the broken parts of our house on a daily basis. Kerri and I also got to hit the movies to see The Chronicles Of Narnia while grandparents watched the kids. Goodness all around, for sure.

I suppose the "real" meaning of Christmas if different for different people but for me it is about the birth of Christ with some side bonuses. Everyone I know has been in good spirits and there is a general "warmth" in the air as I interact with firends, neighbors and family. If only the Christmas season were to last all year long -- We'd have a lot less going wrong in the world.

Finally, I caught up with some of my December photos and a few Christmas pictures in the Dec. 2005 album. I tried to keep photos with myself out so you could enjoy the experience a bit more.

Merry Christmas everybody! Be sure to check back after New Year's Eve for a description of our annual gathering and for pics of my newly shaved head.

This post needs a warning because I'm about to describe a fairly nasty event.

Poor little [big] Ben has been sick for more than a week now and part of his suffering stems from the inability to poop for days on end. All that came to a disgusting end last night while Kerri and her parents were out shopping.

I had put him and Abby down for the night and was destryong brain cells in front of the TV when Ben started calling out for me. He does that sort of thing all the time and I usually just walk in there to lay him back down. To keep things in perspective you'll need to remember that I cannot smell anything -- You could clean a room with amonia and I'd never know it.

With the light off I couldn't see anything either. One of Ben's tricks to get out of bed is to claim that he has pooped. Since I can't smell I always have to check. For some reason, this time, I decided to turn on the light and what I found was a mud-like substance all over Ben's hands, back and crib. He apparently decided to check out the extra weight in his diaper and found that he could paint with the contents. I'm convinced he did it on purpose, just so he could get out of bed with the side benefit of watching me clean everything up.

This sort of thing doesn't bother me as much as one might think. It might be my 4.5 years of parenting or the 5 years I spent working at a dialysis clinic but human "functions" just don't get to me. It was incredibly frustrating though because I knew the kids had to get up on time in the morning for a Christmas party and I'm sure a few brain cells that were slated for destruction ended up surviving because of my shortened TV time.

I'm hoping this is my only experience with this sort of thing. If not, I'm gonna have to start shopping for a size 2T straight jacket/jammy.

We've been woefully short on evenings around the fire pit this year. I guess everyone is busier and more tired at the end of the day as compared to last year. When my work day ended yesterday I decided to pull a bit of a rude maneuver and call Darin to see if I could invite myself and the other guys over to hang around his fire pit. He was agreeable so we all fed our families and met at Darin's place. The women were all very gracious and took care of the kids while we burned the night away (Thanks girls!).

There wasn't anything especially remarkable about the night other than all of us having the exact same feeling, like it had been way too long since we had just hung out on a Friday night around the fire. As each guy showed up and sat down they released a huge breath of air and said about the same thing, "Man, I *really* needed this".

Darin provided the pit and beer while T.Q. brought over a wheelbarrow full of wood. I pretty much brought myself and my dog (what a leech!). We managed to keep the conversation light (No discussions on abortion, the war or politics) and turned in relatively early. I'm not even sure why I'm writing about it but I imgaine it's because the night could be easily forgotten due to its nature and I wanted to remember about the simple things that add to the joy of life.