Well, hello!  It’s been a little while.  I apologize for that.  Those few weeks of school…  Phew.  And I got sick!  The sort of deathly illness that leaves you miserable in bed while your parents are snowed out of your city and cannot, therefore, help you with your 104-degree fever.  Let me tell ya, kids, that was not fun times.  But!  The same ice that kept my parents from the city kept there from being school for those days!  So, I didn’t have to use any sick days!  Yay!

Anywho, it’s Christmas Eve!  My first Christmas Eve at home in a couple of years, which is pleasant, if strange.  You see, this is also the first Christmas full of grown-up children.  Well, I say full.  My brother has gone to Austin to be with his girlfriend.  Like ya do.  But still.  Grown people.  Which is odd, because there’s no dramatic coming-home-from-college celebration or anything.  And working right up until Christmas!  Who thought that was a good idea?!  Sheesh.

This last week has been extremely difficult for me.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my sugar gliders on here before, but they came to live with me in August.  Twin girls, and troublemakers, I decided to name them Fred and George (Winifred and Georgina).  They didn’t like me at first.  They crabbed when I went to pet them, they snapped at me a little, but some yogurt on my fingers very quickly made me their favorite person (apart from one another).  George didn’t like being pet, but for the sake of some yogurt, she’d even let me scratch her head!  And Fred, being the more adventurous one, let me scratch her belly for the sake of some yogurt.  But last Wednesday, they came very suddenly down with a serious illness.  The vet at the emergency hospital said they could not be saved and they passed away.  I buried them under a still-growing tree in the back yard that night. And while that was, perhaps, the single most horrible thing I’ve ever experienced, that is not what I wanted to talk about.  What I wanted to talk about were the things that have been getting me through this.  The first thing, that very night, was Harry Potter.  You probably remember the part of The Deathly Hallows when Dobby dies and Harry buries him without magic, using a trowel?  That was the only thing I could think of on the drive home.  So, when I got home, well after dark, I got a trowel and I buried my twins, without magic, using a trowel.

The second thing that has been helping me get through this is Brotherhood 2.0.  This is a truly delightful and wonderfully nerdy videoblog put together by John and Hank Green where they posted videos to one another every weekday for a year.  (You can start it here if you want to be as overjoyed as I was!)  It was one of those perfect and wonderful moments in which a lonely, isolated nerd whose co-workers tend to think she is a bit odd suddenly discovers that she is NOT alone and that there are people all over the world who might think she’s pretty rad!

The short version of this story, friends, is that nerds and nerdiness are what get me through my hard times.