I surrender

I give up.
I am not going to be able to do Holidailies. I am not going to see any movies this month, I am not going to do anything remotely fun that I want to do.

This has been one of the least enjoyable Decembers ever, except for the time I get to spend with my boyfriend, and he has a nasty bug of some kind right now.
December has never been the most peaceful and joyful month for me, but usually I manage to find ways to celebrate my own personal holiday season in my own small way. I go to concerts, or parties, or to see favorite films.
This year, I missed any concerts I would have enjoyed, and while I did go to some nice parties, I had to work to make things for them or to be social with strangers, etc. Movies? Hah. I have seen maybe one film this month that I hadn’t seen before, The Kid Stays in the Picture, which was pretty disappointing. And that wasn’t even in a theater.
The situation with my older relatives is what has me all pissy right now. They expect us (the grandkids, etc.) to give them something, they don’t want any more stuff cluttering their house, but they don’t want any edibles, either. My sister can get away with giving them cute crafts that her daughter does, like pot holder and dish towels with imprints of the child’s adorable hands and feet, that kind of thing. Or she gives everyone framed photos of the child with Santa, and that goes over well too.
I do not have any children, and I do not think that the handprints and footprints of a 35-year-old would be considered cunning and adorable as part of a craft project. I’ve given everyone various types of photo art over the years, like pebble magnets with family photos under them, or photo ornaments, or photo snowglobes … you get the idea.
This year I planned to do note cards. I made some for a friend of mine using public domain art from Alice in Wonderland and they looked lovely. I knew the relatives didn’t want that, though, so I thought I would use photo art. However, after a conversation with my sister, I realized that a) if I gave them photo note cards, they would never send them to anyone; b) my grandmother is the pickiest person on the planet about choosing note cards, so she probably wouldn’t like them. Also, the inkjet cards I had didn’t lend themselves well to photo art.
So I got the bright idea of making a photo calendar. You’ve seen them, usually with one photograph blown up to fill the top part, and then your standard calendar stuff on the bottom. My mom had some made one year at a copy shop that just color-copied the photos onto a template.
My boyfriend told me not to do this. He said it was really too much work. But no, I said, look here, I found these nice free calendar grids on the Web and I can do that part in Word and the photo stuff in Pagemaker and it’ll look great and not be difficult at all.
Only I’ve spent most of the weekend picking out photos and scanning them and laying them out, and because I am an ex-desktop publisher, I couldn’t just blow up one photo per month, there are several photos all in a charming layout with little faux-handwritten comments and all that.
The result is adorable and I wish I could say it was worth it, but I have been fighting with two separate printers all night, finally gave up on one printer, and am now engaged in warfare with the other one. It is a very slow printer. I will be doing this for another hour or two at least. I have to finish it tonight so I can take them to Kinko’s to be spiral-bound tomorrow, and let’s hope fervently that I do not end up with any stories to share about that experience.
Okay, there was a brief pause after that last paragraph while I had a serious meltdown about all of this. I haven’t even mentioned the bit where I’m having to make space for my boyfriend to move his stuff in here, or the bit where my mom promised one of my freelance clients that I’d have stuff to show him at Christmas, so I need to do that by the time I leave Austin.
I am feeling a little better now, despite the other printer screwing up and eating some pages that were already printed on one side. I have just decided that I will take most of Monday as a vacation day from work so I can finish all of this stuff with no more meltdowns. I have also decided that I will go back to using the printer that makes everything look very blue, because I don’t care about extra blue-ish-ness at this point. I have also decided that I am not going to rewrite the client’s Web pages to use CSS instead of tables (sorry Rachel), they will just have to stay table-based for this design iteration.
It must be late, because I have just used the term “design iteration” and I assure you, that is so Not Me.
Anyway, now you know the big reason why I haven’t updated, why I might not update again soon, and why I’ve decided not to care very much about the whole Holidailies thing. Well, actually the big reason has been the perpetual headaches, but it occurs to me now that there might be a particular stress factor behind these headaches, and it might be the merry month of December.
Peace on earth, my ass. December is the least peaceful time of the year. This isn’t a holiday, it’s a sentence.