The song for today is, of course, "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

You can hear Johnny Mathis singing it at that link, but I prefer Ella Fitzgerald, myself. It has been recorded by lots and lots of people, and it is very nice to play on the piano and sing. I think we are going to be boring this year and not party at all.

I took the Real Age test and was pleased to see that I got younger this year. I am now 7 and a half years younger than my chronological age. Not that there isn't room for improvement. I am to exercise more (they said that last year, actually, but I didn't manage it), lose weight (ditto), drink half a glass of wine now and then, and take my vitamins more regularly. Since I am scheduled to become really really old this year, I am going to try to follow their recommendations. Except possibly the wine. I will have to ask my doctor about that, depending how my triglycerides are behaving at the time.

Seriously, I think that RealAge is a good source of New Year's resolutions, if you want to do something practical about your health this year. My husband is a year older than his chronological age, according to the test, but that is not bad considering the fact that he is a smoker. They had a lot of suggestions for him, but he scoffed at them all.

Chanthaboune took the test, too, and turned up three years older than her chronological years, largely because she hasn't been exercising. And maybe also subsisting on canned soup and fancy coffees. I've been exercising, but you will know (if you always read my blog and have total recall) that it's been a minimalist kind of exercising. Sore muscles have been rare and days off from the gym have been frequent. I've done enough walking to keep my heart happy, but that's not enough to stave off decrepitude. I need to increase my strength training without decreasing the cardio.

Actually, the ladies in my Sunday School class were talking recently about loose skin. Apparently, they have loose skin dripping off various parts of their bodies. I hope I didn't look as though I were in a horror movie as they were describing this phenomenon, but I know that there was a point at which I realized my mouth was hanging open and I closed it, probably with a snap.

The memory of that conversation should help me to work those strength-training sessions into my schedule. And of course the schedule is the key for exercise resolutions.

I swatched yesterday for this cardigan from Lacy Little Knits. As you can see, it is a good one for old ladies. Seriously, I have some reservations. I am using Knitpicks Shadow, colorway "Redwood Forest." This is what I added to the yarn for #2 son's sweater to escape the dread shipping charges.

Shadow is a nice laceweight, and the color in question was half price, so it was a bargain.

It is also brown. I do not like brown as a color. It is nice for wood, of course, but I would never choose brown for any other purpose. I had thought that it would be more red than it was. I come from redwood forest country, and I thought they meant the wood, not the bark.

However, brown has been a big fashion color for a couple of seasons now, and I am getting more used to it. I might be ready to wear it, even. Sometimes I get to like a color after seeing it around for awhile. Sometimes right before it goes completely out of style.

I also have reservations about the stitch. Lacy Little Knits basically uses simple YO patterns (lacy, rather than lace) at large gauges to produce an open feeling without the bother of actual lace. But I had to go to #3 needles to get the requisite gauge, and the result is hard to work, and maybe not really suitable. I might have needed a sport weight rather than a laceweight yarn for this project.

So, with all those reservations, I started a scarf for #1 son. His grandmother made him (and all of us, actually) a nice crocheted scarf for Christmas, and he decided that he likes it so much that he wants another, but longer and done in ribbing. I had a few skeins of gray Wool of the Andes, so I set to. This is precisely to his specifications, and much simpler than the cardigan.

I am thinking that I might do some sewing today, too, after I finish the computer stuff.

I intend to go around and read about all the exciting New Year's Eve parties the rest of you are planning and attending. I am counting on having some vicarious adventures in that way. For myself, though, lolling around is thrilling enough.

 I looked back at my xanga for previous years, and saw that I had been posting a list of all my Finished Objects for the year on this day. Since my post this morning was awfully boring, I devided to go ahead and do a second post, following that earlier custom.

 Here's all the stuff I made in 2007.

There were some unfinished things, too, but they will have to be in the 2008 group.

I did quite a bit of sewing. One of my goals for last year was to get good at clothing construction. 2007 was full of transitions for my family, and I would have to say that those changes, including my going into business for myself on the side, interfered with that goal. However, I am definitely better at it than I was at the start of the year.

I'm recommitting to that goal for 2008.

I am expecting to hear a sermon this morning with some reference to the New Year. A lot of preachers mention it, after all. But the New Year isn't part of the liturgical year at all. In fact, the liturgical year begins with Advent, which we just finished. We are currently having Christmas, but the next big thing is Epiphany. So I am guessing that the song for the day ought to be an Epiphany hymn. Here's one: "What Star is this, with Beams so Bright?", set by Charles Coffin to a 15th century German tune, and translated by John Chandler into English.

It's not a very exciting song. It has the star and the magi, as Epiphany hymns are wont to, but the words are not unusually lovely or anything. The tune is sprightly, though, and fun to sing. I think this would be nice with a violin.

I will be playing bells this morning in church. Sigh. I think that we are doing "Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfant." Here are more verses. Here you can hear Dr. John's jazzy take on it. Here is a very free English translation. This is another sprightly tune, popular in francophone Africa and in France. In the U.S., I believe that it is not as well known as it should be. This may be because we have so many translations, some of them pretty bad.

 Anyway, you have two songs to choose from today, and I hope that you will sing one of them at some point. I think that they would both be nice on a violin, too.

I finished #2 son's sweater. I wasn't able to get a good picture of it, I'm afraid, even by taking it outside.

It's a completely ordinary sweater, which is what #2 son wanted. It is not pink, as my monitor persists in claiming that it is. It is a good deep red, "Iron Ore" being the name of the color. It's Knitpicks Wool of the Andes, using the set-in sleeve sweater pattern from The Knitters' Handy Book. I would have to go look at the needles to tell you what size they were, but I've never understood why people give that information. The guage was 5 stitches to the inch, so you'd really just want whatever size of needle produces that when you knit. It doesn't matter what mine were.

I followed the pattern exactly in the first place (it's just math anyway), but then had to add another 4" or so of length to each sleeve. This did allow some suspense in the matter of whether the yarn would hold out, and it just barely did. I have had to lengthen sleeves for my kids before. They will tell you that they have long, gorilla-like arms, but I think that they are just skinny enough that the size that is big enough around for them is too short. I am good about checking the length of the body, but sleeves are at the end of the knitting, when I don't check things as much because the barn is in sight. Knitters will know what I mean, I think. So it is nothing wrong with the pattern.

After church, I will contemplate what to knit next. I have a few inches completed on the Doctor's Bag, but have lost my place in the pattern, so I might start that again. I also have yarn for a sweater from Lacy Little Knits. And I still have a foot or two of Erin sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

I am also determined to get back to my SWAP Part III, begun in the summer and then allowed to languish with no progress whatsoever made on it lo these many months. I roasted a turkey yesterday and did some housework, but there is a lot more housework to be done, and most of the turkey to be dealt with. So I am planning a throughly domestic day, of one kind or another.

I have some dog pictures for you.

First, here are the three dogs. They are all good friends now. They are teaching each other their favorite games.

We are all having a long weekend -- we are all off till Wednesday, in fact. I'm preparing balanced meals and exercising, and have done some slight forays into cleaning up, but I am doing my best to keep festive.

My husband is not helping in this, frankly. His layoff is drawing to a close and we are suffering only slight financial twinges, so I would say that it is time to  "be merry; put sorrow away!" In the interests of doing so, here is William Billings's "Judea," which enjoins us to "Let us be merry, put sorrow away! Our savior Christ Jesus was born Christmas day!" This is very fun to sing, since the chorus goes twice as fast as the verse, which always sort of surprises people and makes them laugh.

 Not a good thing in choral performances, but great for casual singing.

Billings was a tanner in Colonial America, and he wrote a lot of cool choral music. This particular song is said to have encouraged the troops under Washington during that horrible Christmas at Valley Forge. Billings was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1970, though he died in poverty at the age of 53, leaving five children to manage as best they could, so that induction two centuries later might not have cheered him any.

This is Spicer, stuffed into a dog sweater the girls bought for her. It might not have been bought with the intention of humiliating her, but it really did remind all the onlookers of the unwisdom of horizontal stripes on the plump.

After laughing at her for a while, they put the sweater on Toby. Toby is not plump, but the sweater wasn't a real fashion triumph on him, either.

While plying the Dark Art yesterday, I came upon something really sad.

One thing that you do, of course, is to look and see who came to your sites and why, and what they did in  the process. This involves looking at the screens other people were looking at, and seeing the words they typed into the search engines.

This can be very entertaining. The folks over at SEOMoz wrote a recap of theirs that had me sitting all by myself sniggering, hoping customers weren't frightened by my doing so.

But yesterday it was sad. An unfamiliar screen came up. There are lots of unusual search engines out there, especially in other countries, and I am not bothered by that. I zoom right down the screen in search of the relevant terms. But with this one, it was soon borne in upon me that I wasn't looking at a search engine. I was looking at  someone's personal search log. You know how you can look at your history and see the last 300 things you searched for? That's what it was.

Not very sad yet, you're thinking. Mine only goes back a day or two, because I search for a lot of things, mostly for work, and it has searches like "Billings Judea" and "supersaturated solution" and "formation of diamonds lesson plan," so there isn't much emotional content there.

This person's went back for several weeks. It had search terms like "is my husband cheating on me?" followed by searches for medications and "taking [medication] but still depressed." It got worse. The searcher was using the search engine as though it were a counselor, or perhaps a Ouija board. I hope she had some actual humans to talk to in her life as well.

I moved away quickly, but it has stayed on my mind.

Here also is #2 son's sweater. I have only a few inches to go on the second lengthened sleeve, so I am feeling pretty confident that he will have it for New Year's. I am going to roast a turkey this weekend, and watch the Monk marathon, and knit.

I have changed the mantelpiece decorations to something more sedate than what we had last week, but there may not be any other preparation for New Year's. The weather is mild enough for us to go out for the community celebration, but the boys have their own parties to go to and my husband is busy moping. 

I am thinking about my goals for next year, of course. I like, at this time of year, to contemplate how my goals for last year shaped up and decide on the new ones. This is a good thing to do while knitting. But don't ask the internet, okay? It isn't going to give you good advice.

And don't knit dog sweaters, either. Dressed-up dogs are probably shoved into their lockers and otherwise mocked when they are out with other dogs.

Lest you think there has been no creativity chez fibermom lately, I have some pictures for you.

First, the highly decorated Possum Pie that we took to my parents' place on Christmas Day.

You make a crust of 1 cup flour, 1/2 c ground or finely chopped pecans, and 1 stick of butter. Bake it for about 15 minutes.

The filling has two parts. First, mix equal parts cream cheese and powdered sugar and spread that over the cooled crust. Then combine a package of chocolate instant pudding with Cool Whip and spread that on top. Finally, top the whole thing with Cool Whip. Real whipped cream is better, of course, but #2 son doesn't think so. Since this is his favorite, we use his preferred stuff.

Notice that it contains no possums. I don't know why it is called "Possum Pie."

Next, the T-shirts the boys made for us for Christmas gifts.

These are #1 son's drawings. I love his drawings. I'm always trying to get him to illustrate stuff for me.

He usually refuses. So I was especially glad to have his artwork on a gym shirt.

#2 son was the one who brought the designs to the big (shirt) screen, making it a gift from the two of them. They used June Tailor Light T-Shirt Transfer Sheets, and they worked just the way they are supposed to.

I am adding the requisite inches to #2 son's sweater.

I am also writing, and working on my goals for 2008, so I guess I've been feeling reasonably creative.

#1 son has been playing guitar quite a lot, having gotten a new instrument for Christmas.

However, we cannot deny that the main occupation around the old homestead of late is the playing of video games. I do not know whether this is creative or not. I can't tell.

Most of us are back to work by now. And yet it is still Christmastime. Some people are at home, the house is still filled with goodies and decorations, we're all still fairly festive.

At this time of year, I like the Provencal carols about the procession of the Three Kings. We had one here yesterday, and here is another: "The March of the Three Kings." Just as English carols had the baby Jesus lying in the snow, Provencal carols have the kings travelling through France with a flashy retinue, and all the villagers joining in the procession as they travel, so that the arrival of the Three Kings in Bethlehem was a major crowd scene.

I tried to get Mapquest to help me determine how practical it would have been for three kings on camels, with a retinue and rapidly growing crowd of peasants on foot, to get from Provence to Bethlehem, but Mapquest was not up to the question. I think we have to assume that this is strictly folklore. However, I consider it a very good piece of folklore, much jollier than a baby in snow.

At this time of year, you often see articles about the children of divorce. It is a hard time of year for them.

We have no children of divorce here, but we do have to cope with #1 daughter's divorce. We took the position when she married that we were not losing a daughter but gaining a son, and the boys were happy to have a new brother. It has been nice to have him here for Christmas, but also somewhat sad, since I guess we will not have him for future holidays.

#2 daughter goes through boys at such a pace that we try not to get too attached. A family friend suggested at one point that we just call them all "Noah" till she settles down, to save the trouble of remembering names. We haven't gone quite that far, but we do try not to become too fond of them.

The boys haven't yet brought girlfriends home. #1 son has had the occasional date, but so far they are pretty indistinguishable. #2 son doesn't date yet.

We still have time to have our hearts broken some more in the future, I suppose.

If you were wondering about the fate of #2 son's sweater, I will tell you the sad news. It did not get finished for him to wear to the grandparents' on Christmas Day. I finished the second sleeve that evening, but the next day he decided that he wanted longer sleeves. Since this pattern does the sleeves from the wrist up, that meant frogging the sleeve caps and adding length, so this will be a New Year's Day sweater rather than a Christmas sweater.

The song for today is "Tous Les Bourgeois de Chartres," a sprightly song from 1725. You can find the sheet music for it here. This is a Google Books result, so it won't be just the thing for printing out and taking to parties with you. You can hear a snippet of it on this page if you search around. You can also find a harpsichord midi on this page. Again, there is searching involved, but it is worth it. It is Suite 1, number 6, and a charming tune, too.

Happy Boxing Day! It is the Feast of Stephen today, so I think we have no choice but to have "Good King Wenceslas" by John Mason Neale for the song of the day. Here you will find not only the lyrics, but also numerous reviews and/or scholarly writings about the song, information on Wenceslas, and so forth.

The one bad thing about working at home is that, on a day when your house is filled with mess (a small sample to your right; my entire house looks like this right now), you cannot escape to a clean office and indulge in a fantasy of elves coming in while you're gone and cleaning up.

You have to go ahead and work while surrounded by mess.

I have a long, long to-do list today, but I believe that I will find time, once the morning essentials are completed, to dig the house out a bit, at least the part in the immediate vicinity of my desk. That includes the kitchen and the living room, thanks to an amazing bit of poor planning.

So, yes, we had a lovely Christmas Day. We had lots of presents and good food, we enjoyed visiting my parents, #2 daughter got safely back to the Midwest, and we relaxed in the evening and did nothing but play with our new toys and eat rich food.

The other song for today is "St. Stephen's Day Murders" by Elvis Costello and Paddy Moloney. You can hear a bit of this song from the Chieftains here. Not that this song describes my experience.

The menfolks are all still on vacation today. They are all asnooze in their beds at the moment, while the females of the family are up and getting ready for work. Until they actually get up (at which point they will shout for me to make their breakfasts) I will indulge in that fantasy about their getting up, preparing a healthy meal, and tidying the house. They'll scrub the kitchen and plan something for dinner. After that, they will say, "Listen, I know you have to work, so we'll just take the dogs out for a nice long walk and then spend the rest of the day repairing all the cars. We've made you a pot of tea, though. Here's a nice hot cup." Then they'll leave quietly.

  I have gotten about six inches into the second sleeve, and am up early not just for Santa duties, but also in a probably vain hope of finishing the sweater so that #2 son can wear it to his grandparents' house today.

In addition to knitting yesterday, we mostly played games. A forthcoming PS2 game arrived from Amazon's review program, just at the point of the day when the kids were getting tired of waiting and beginning to revert to their childhoods. The game was called "Jungle Buzz," and it was quite fun. Rapid-fire short games come up at random, so that at one moment you'll be trying to match colors at high speed and the next you're jumping out of the way of obstacles while sliding down a vine. Lots of visual puzzles, speed drills, and coordination. There is also a game in which monkeys administer shocks to one another, but the less said about that one the better.

It was good to see my teens and twenties shouting in hilarity as they played with monkeys and hippos.

We had mad excess in the feast, as is proper for Christmas Eve. It was madder than usual, because the boys went to collect the good things we had ordered and then, in the words of #2 son, headed for the grocery store and "bought $50 worth of salt and sugar." There were no fruits or vegetables of any description on the table.

Having enjoyed round one of the feast, #2 daughter and I went to church, which was uplifting. The music was somewhat uneven. The resident country western star sang an appalling ditty about Santa Claus adopting an orphan girl. Songs like this do not, in my opinion, belong in church. I am not sure where they do belong, but it ought at least to be among consenting adults in a secular setting. I assume that there were many who enjoyed the song; in fact, the baritone up in the choir loft with me, who had just sung "O Holy Night" very beautifully, exclaimed "Yee-ha!" at the end of the song, so I may have been the only one thinking it was tasteless and inappropriate.

However, there were plenty of fine hymns, and a saxophone solo, and a good brief sermon, and many shouts of "Merry Christmas!"

We came home feeling very jolly and opened presents. This revealed still more games, and the kids were playing them long after I went to bed.

I got presents, too! This doesn't happen every year, but this year my children gave me lovely things, including a musical electronic picture frame which I must learn how to operate, a beautiful tea set, and a really snazzy handmade T shirt for the gym. The boys made shirts from #1 son's drawings, and they are extremely cool. I will get pictures at some point.

At the moment, I must return to the knitting.

This is as much as I got done on the first sleeve last night. It doesn't look so good for finishing the sweater today, does it?

However, I spent the morning in church and most of the afternoon making eggnog truffles and still more cookies, so I have not entirely given up hope.

#2 daughter did get home, so we have all the kids home for Christmas for the first time in years. I am so happy about that. We even had Son-in-law over yesterday. We do not at this point know whether we get to keep Son-in-law as our kid after he and #1 daughter divorce, if they ever get around to having that divorce. We've never had a divorce in the family, and do not know the custom.

At sundown, the 12 days of Christmas will begin with Christmas Eve. This is pretty exciting, isn't it? Those of us who observe Advent now get 12 days of unbridled merriment and frolicking. Those who begin celebrating and/or dreading Christmas directly after Hallowe'en generally quit celebrating around noon on the 25th.

They're doing it wrong, that's all.

Christopher Hitchens did a tacky speech (you can see it on YouTube) comparing the experience of having to tolerate other people's Christmas celebrations to life under a totalitarian state.

This was tacky because a rich white guy who suffers dreadfully over having to overhear other people's Christmas carols has no business comparing that experience to life in a totalitarian regime, and Hitchens is knowledgeable enough to know that.

My husband recently saw a little human interest story about a football player who puts a dollar in his shoe for luck. "That's not against the law?" he asked, surprised. He explained that in his country, putting your foot on a picture of a president would land you in jail, and possibly executed. Hitchens should be embarrassed.

It was also tacky because he was standing in front of a Christmas tree and wearing a Santa hat at the time. People who hate Christmas, and especially people who make money by expressing their hatred of Christmas, shouldn't be wearing Santa hats.

I have an extremely limited degree of sympathy for people who don't celebrate Christmas and are tired of hearing about it.

I think it must be like my experience of football season. That is, I don't care about it at all, and yet I am surrounded by the evidences of it. I hear the fight song in the grocery store, and people expect me (not just me, of course; everyone) to base my schedule on the football schedule. The team's mascot is all over the place, and people talk about football all the time.

Do I get all het up over this? I do not. I also do not put on a team shirt and then make speeches about it. I just go on with my life, and am glad that the football fans are enjoying themselves.

I have been enjoying myself with my holiday preparations. This morning, I brought out all the containers of goodies from the freezer, and I have begun putting together the cookie and candy boxes for distribution today and tomorrow. This is a lot of fun. If you live near me, you could come over and have some.

The other things we are doing today include preparing our unreasonably lavish feast (the boys are going out this morning to procure meatitude and sweetitude for the purpose), practicing the music for this evening, and knitting intensely in hopes of completing that sweater.

We have our presents wrapped and under the tree. We don't usually do this, but #2 son finally agreed that I could wrap the things instead of getting up early on Christmas morning and causing them to appear magically, unwrapped, under the tree. I appreciate this.

#2 daughter and I are singing "All My Heart This Night Rejoices" in a quartet this evening, and she is singing "Ave Maria" with saxophone accompaniment. We are also preparing "Evening Prayer." You can hear a little bit of  it as a guitar duet here, and it comes at the end of this YouTube. It is not yet clear whether we will actually sing it in the service, but we will enjoy singing it at home, regardless.

If you are not celebrating Christmas, then you could get a lot of work done today, since so many of us, even if we are at work, will be laughing and singing and eating cookies and generally staying out of your way. If you are celebrating Christmas, then Merry Christmas to you!

 At the store yesterday, I spent much of the time commiserating with people who had ordered things which were not in fact going to arrive in time for Christmas. You do not, in these cases, want to be lacking in sympathy when you have to tell the people that the item they want is sold out. At the same time, you do want them to consider that if they had just come in and bought it from our store in the first place, it would be under their tree right now. Maybe not. After all, the fact that it is sold out suggests that there weren't enough to go around in the first place.

This is also the time of year when people's credit cards are declined. A lot. And the time when people call up asking for things like special Barbie items and gaming systems, which they know right off that we will not carry. They are desperate. They are going to call grocery stores next. And the time when people bicker throughout the store. "It doesn't have to be about money!" "I'm just saying we could do better on price." "Not now, you couldn't, since you waited so long." And, "Why was the card declined?" "I don't know. There's no reason for it." Insert accusing glance at me here, as though it were somehow my fault. "Try it again."

Basically, it is a mistake to wait this long to shop for Christmas. However, if you are determined to do that, it seems to be a mistake to go with your spouse. It leads to quarrels. This point in the season is when men should go by themselves (men rather than women because, statistically speaking, men are better at accepting the best of available options in stores), announce the recipient's age, and cheerfully take whetever the workers thrust into their hands.

Then I came home, jubilant at the thought of three days off to celebrate the holiday. #2 daughter called to report a bit of a glitch that may keep her from getting here, which has made me feel a little less festive, but I did get quite a bit of knitting done on #2 son's sweater. In fact, I stayed up till midnight with #1 daughter, watching "Holiday Inn" and eating gumdrops as well as knitting, and am feeling slightly sick this morning as a consequence. But that is a finished front and back and a started sleeve you see over there in the picture.

I just got a call saying that the store dog has died.

I have for you today a beautiful Irish carol, "Don Oiche Ud ImBeithil." That link will ask you to register, but you will hear the music without doing so if you give it a minute. Here are the words in English and in Gaelic, with a midi file so you can learn the tune. Here is the sheet music. This song was recorded recently by Celtic Woman, so it is now much more available than it used to be, and you can find it on YouTube and so forth. It is good for singing or listening to quietly when things are not as pleasant and peaceful as they ought to be, when things are too festive and you need some calm, and even when things are a bit sad. Bring out your fiddle, harp, and tin whistle for this one.

The plan for today is church, followed by determined knitting in hopes of finishing the sweater by tomorrow night, interspersed with candy making, as though there were any need for more sugar around here, followed by either joyful celebration when #2 daughter arrives, or brave Moving On if she doesn't, which will of course be combined with Mad Rearranging of the music for which she is scheduled. Not to mention the present she was bringing down for me to give to someone whom I will not mention.