The Mandelbear's Musings

I've been rather ambivalent about the holiday season for the last several years -- heck, the last several decades, probably. This morning, I finally noticed, and immediately realized why.

I like having friends around, but I really can't handle more than one person at a time in a conversation, and I'm easily overloaded and "peopled out". I love seeing the kids enjoying their presents, but I'm lousy at selecting them. I like festive meals, but I end up doing all of the clean-up, and these days a lot of the prep and even a lot of the cooking. The cooking is fun, but it's tiring. So... yeah.

Here at the Starport we're happy to have our friends feeling free to drop in. I'm happy to have friends dropping in. But there's a good reason why I'm typing this post in the office. The door's open, though. And I spent most of the afternoon between the living room and the kitchen.

I'm actually having a happy Christmas; one of the best in years. Now that I know what the problem is, I can work with it.

A happy holiday season to you all, whatever you celebrate.

On the whole an "ok" day -- my mood stayed mostly positive. And I did something that I've been avoiding for maybe six months, and called Alhambra to ask for a refund of some of the $1500 payment I sent to them instead of to Amex (the two lines are, of course, adjacent on my bank's payment page). The rep was very pleasant; I have no idea why I'd been avoiding it, except that it was something I'd never done before. Did I mention that I'm not very adventurous?

I also pointed RDNA.ORG's nameservers at Yahoo so that the person who has a wonderful Reformed Druid site on Geocities can move it to a more appropriate location. That was another thing I'd been putting off a little too long.

I have yet to think of a good way of rewarding myself for doing the hard things on my to.do list, aside from patting myself on the back here in LJ.

I started reading The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. It's been something of a revelation. A year or so ago I wouldn't even have thought of classifying myself as "sensitive". But I scored 20 on the self test, where 12 is the threshold. Some of the questions were iffy, but a 33% margin doesn't leave much room for doubt.

And thanks to cflute's data-mining skills, I have a new pair of Keen brooklyn mid boots on order.

So, yeah; a pretty good day, now that I think about it.

A few more links up there in the notes.