no better feeling...

than the one you have when you're minutes away from the end of your last work day before a vacation. i can smell the barley and hops from here. not a long break this time, but a much needed 5 days at home starting tonight.

(no worse feeling than the minutes before returning to work after a vacation, but fortunately i come back next thursday for a short 2-day week.)

wii are the champions

been a strange week for me- worked the weekend before christmas and christmas day, so despite the holiday i feel like i haven't really had my vacation yet. i'm off a few days next week, so after tomorrow at 5pm it's happy hour until after the new year.

santa was good to the fink clan as usual. molly got the pink fishing pole and toothbrush she asked for, brendan was thrilled with his webkinz, and owen had all 6 bionicles that santa brought him built by dinnertime.

the big hit for everyone has been the wii. brendan likes it, owen loves it, and grandma and grandpa are infatuated with it. it's been on almost non-stop since christmas afternoon. the interactivity makes it so much more enjoyable than other games, and the fact that it involves some physicality makes playing it a little more justifiable. it wears on you, though- i'm nursing a sore shoulder thanks to the baseball game, and i'm a little worried owen may develop little leaguer's elbow without playing a single game of little league.

after a few flying controller incidents, the boys are getting better about wearing the wrist straps. still funny watching them jump all around the living room, though. thank god there's not a soccer game as part of the package- i'm not sure my living room could handle it.

merry christmas!

no post tomorrow, so here's my chance to wish you all a merry christmas.

don't forget to track santa tonight- always fun to see where he is before your sugarplums start dancing.

sounds of the season

i've often got a few things rattling around in my head that i think would make good posts. this one's been brewing for a few weeks, but got tabled because of the events of this past week. time to pull it out, if for no other reason than to transition to a sense of normalcy and restore some brightness back to this blog.

i'm a big fan of christmas music, and have assembled what i think to be a pretty decent collection. i thought it would be easy to do a "top 5 christmas songs" post, but then as i started to compile my list, i realized how hard a task it was (bing's "white christmas" is by christmas law supposed to be #1 on every list, but i couldn't put it even in my top 5). i tried breaking it up into traditional and modern lists, but even that had too many crossovers (elvis' "blue christmas"- traditional? not exactly an old english carol there. sting's "gabriel's message"- modern? the song's got its roots in medieval times).

so, i decided to make the list of "top 5 christmas carols", whereby "top" is defined as "most likely to give me the warm-all-over christmas fuzzies". here we go:

5) "must be santa", mitch miller & the gang: if you grew up with a mitch miller album like i did, you know this is on your list too. back when we'd stack 5 LP's on the turntable, and they'd drop down one after the other, then we'd flip them over to hear side B on all of them, this was the song that the arm got lifted back and the needle replaced so we could hear it over and over.
4) "christmas must be tonight", robbie robertson: i love this song. i remember hearing it in the christmas rotation on WBAB, long island's finest rock station, and found it on a compilation disc a few years back. great lyrics, pleasant melody, way better than that paul mccartney song.
3) "i believe in father christmas", emerson, lake and palmer: at the risk of coming off like some classic rock geek, this was also one i picked up an appreciation for thanks to WBAB. got this one off yet another random christmas compilation.
2) "(there's no place like) home for the holidays", perry como: this is always the first christmas song i listen to every year. i won't allow myself to listen to christmas music before thanksgiving, and usually at some time on black friday, i'll pull out this song and put it on. i think my love for this one goes back to a 4th grade chorus concert.
1) "rockin' around the christmas tree", brenda lee: we didn't have this song on LP as kids, but it certainly got its fair share of radio airplay. i always liked it a little, but after "home alone", it became my favorite song of the season. (that movie for me is a classic, and i absolutely love the scene with him dancing by the tree to this song, with his bb gun over his shoulder and the cardboard cutouts moving by on the toy train.) never feel more christmasy than when i'm swingin' to this song.

honorable mentions: "do they know it's christmas", band aid, "twelve days of christmas", john denver and the muppets (by far the absolute best version of this song- "BA-DUM-BUM-BUM"), "i saw three ships", sting

intentionally left off: "white christmas", bing crosby (see above), "little drummer boy/peace on earth", david bowie and bing crosby (got nuthin' but love for bing, but this song just doesn't do it for me), "father christmas", the kinks (fun, but not fun enough)

if you managed to get through all that, and still care enough to leave a comment with your top few, be my guest. remember, though- my blog. i always win.

back to the grind

emotional service yesterday, as was expected. as with most memorials, it was a litany of accolades, all deserved, for a great person. hopefully all in attendance will have heard something which inspires them to make their lives a little better.

kids start their christmas break today, which could spell disaster for their already emotionally and physically fatigued mother. thank god for tivo.

what do i call this feeling?

hard to put up a post between the last one and the likely one that will follow tomorrow's memorial service, but i thought this was appropriate and fit some of the recurring themes on this blog...

erin and i were discussing the differences between sympathy and empathy, and both realized we didn't have a great idea of the differences between the two. i had always thought that one of them dealt with a sharing in emotions because of one's prior similar experiences. kinda right.

both words describe the sharing of feelings with another person. sympathy can be used very generally, for any feeling or emotion. empathy involves shared feelings, but usually describes the sharer with a deeper sense of feeling the actual emotion. no need for prior experience, but that's probably what had been explained to me before as empathy.

right now, either works, but not as good as a much simpler word: sad.

tragedy

as a medical professional, one of the worst but usually unfounded fears is that the anonymous patient in the next room, bed, or ambulance is someone you know.

erin worked yesterday and happened to be chatting with another nurse who was reviewing her patient's labs. erin recognized the name as that of a friend of ours, and then confirmed that the patient, in fact, was a classmate and friend from georgetown. he had gone to another hospital with a severe headache the night before, and was rushed to georgetown. tragically, he had a massive bleed into his head from an undiagnosed tumor, and died yesterday.

ray was 41, leaving behind a wife and twin 6yo girls. he was the last person you'd think something like this could happen to- an outdoorsman, rock climber, AF academy grad, helicopter pilot before going back to med school, family physician, all around great guy.

at a time of year when you're already more likely to appreciate those around you, do it a little more today. that is the only way any good can come from this.

apostro-phed up

as promised, the long-awaited apostrophe rant...

more than any other grammatical mistake, the misplaced and misused apostrophe gets me all fired up. maybe because it's the most common, or maybe because when misused in public, it's the most ridiculous appearing. the two main uses for an apostrophe ( contraction and designation of possession) are equally abused, but because abused contractions (like "your welcome") are usually just homophone mistakes, i'll limit my rant to the possessive apostrophe.

the rules really are quite simple: if you want to show one thing belongs to another, put two nouns next to each other, then give the first noun an apostrophe and an "s", and the second noun now belongs to it. (any two nouns will do- it might not always make sense, but it will be grammatically correct). if there's no belonging involved, there's no apostrophe involved. that's it.

acceptable: "the computer's keyboard", "the water's edge", "a winter's night"
unacceptable (actual phrases from signage in THIS VERY COMMUNITY!): "hour's of operation", "hot dog's and hamburger's", "shirt's- $1.29"

special apostrophe occasions:

• plural possessives- if you want your first noun to be plural, the apostrophe goes after the "s" ("the cars' headlights", "their parents' joy").
• "its"- "it's" is a contraction for "it is" or "it has", and is not a possessive form. "its" is the possessive form of "it", used similar to "his" or "her". there is no such word as " its' ".

whew. now that's off my chest. next up, more top 5's.

that time of year again

one of my favorite things about this time of year is pulling stuff out of the mailbox that actually is worth reading- your christmas cards. always fun to see how many we can get in one day. been a slow trickle so far, nothing yet to challenge last year's record of 12 in one day.

got my nog here in front of me, which means i'm about to start the annual missive myself. so keep an eye on your mailbox, estimated time of arrival is early next week.

sing along with freud

apparently, the networks and major ad agencies have openings in their media departments for pop music aficionados. only that can explain the lack of insight that goes into the choices of music paired with some recent TV spots. while the songs may be catchy (and some would argue, isn't that the whole point?), the titles, artists, or lyrics of the song don't always match up well with the subject matter.

two very recent examples while watching football this weekend:

• happened to be watching the BCS selection show this weekend (only because it immediately followed football on FOX), and when they announced that ohio state would be going to the championship game, they showed a montage of clips set to the new foo fighters single, a rockin' song that (unfortunately for OSU) is titled "the pretender"
• those UPS commercials that come up almost every other commercial break, the ones with the artsy looking guy writing on his dry-erase board with his brown marker, are set to a very pleasant electronic melody (recognized by some as "the song from grey's anatomy") called "such great heights", recorded by a band called 'postal service'- one of UPS's main competitors

oh, tannenbaum

got the tree and dressed it up real purty yesterday. our initial intent was to ride the wagon at the tree farm out to the field and select the most perfect tree God hath created, fell it ourselves, then have a few teenagers in overalls drag it back to our car for us. with the miserable weather here yesterday, it turned into this: getting out of the car, walking 40 feet to the pre-cut lot at the tree farm, looking at one tree, finding it acceptable until the helpful TOAs (teenagers-in-overalls) pointed out a second one which was even more acceptable, purchasing said tree, strapping it to the roof of the carbon-footprint-leaving conestoga, and hauling it home.

the time between our arrival at the tree farm and our departure- which also included getting 3 kids out of the car, into their muddy tree-finding shoes, an additional 7 minutes to purchase 75 feet of pine roping and a wreath for the front door, then getting the kids back out of the shoes and into the car- was no more than 18 minutes.

you say rush job, i say more time for egg nog!