Solstice, a white Christmas, and the flu. My ass has been thoroughly kicked.
Once again the holidays kept me quite busy this year. I celebrate Solstice while the rest of my family celebrates Christmas, and starting a few years ago we started celebrating both with one another--but this means I need to fit it in on top of all my Solstice celebratings with friends who celebrate the return of the light--not to mention the birthday of both my brothers are only a few days before Solstice. It all becomes one giant exhausting cluster fuck.
This year I had 3 Solstice happenings along with trying to fit in the one with my family. They were all pretty awesome, albiet exhausting. I had a lot of fun and partied hard, but didn't have time to do any shopping. The one chunk of time I had Saturday afternoon was spent gathering and delivering clothing to the sister of one of my lovers who's baggage never arrived when she flew in from Italy on Wednesday before I ran off to another Solstice gathering with a different friend. I also found out late that night that my other lover had just gotten injured during the weekend. :o( Poor Ocicat.
Soltice parties and work kept me quite busy until Sunday night when I was to join my family for our belated Solstice gathering, only to find that my aunt ,who was visiting from out of town for the holidays, had come down with the flu Thursday, and my brother had gotten it on Friday. By Sunday my mom had been sick all day and my dad was not feeling well. Uh-oh. Yet we still gathered, me hoping aginst hope that I'd be ok, especially since I'm on the tail end of recovering from the chest cold from hell (it's lasted for almost 2 months). Suffice to say, though, I was the only one to eat at the "feast".
On Monday I had to work (I always volunteer to work Xmas Eve because I celebrate Soltice, and want people who do celebrate Xmas to be able to get it off), but only for a short shift as the store closed early. I was crossing my fingers that we closed early enough to get a bit of holiday shopping done, but it was challeging. Showed up at the first store only to find out they closed in 15 minutes. Went to a second store that closed a short while later and really didn't have what I needed, finally found a last resort which at least hit a couple bases, but I did end up needing to give a lot of "coupons" for baked goods and truffles. At least this way people can choose which flavor they want instead of me trying to guess. :o)
I then made a brief trip by the ranch to drop off some things to try and aid Ocicat's healing, which was nice because things have been so crazy I haven't been able to visit for the last couple weeks and it gave me a chance to hang out and touch base for a few minutes with everyone up there. Mrew, they have been missed. After I got home I stayed up late taking care of wrappings and such. Fortuantely for me my family was going to gather for present opening and such later this year, in the afternoon instead of the morning. Yay, blessed sleep!
Everything went quite smoothly with my family, complete with a light dusting of afternoon snow that laced everything so beautifully, and I headed off to dinner with my close friends family. It's become a bit of a tradition for me to have Xmas dinner with them; I really feasted, the food was great! Afterwards I settled in for a traditional partaking of chocolate during a movie. The choclate did NOT settle well. I tried evrything I could, but finally there was no denying it--I had the flu. Damn! Fortunately it's a really fast moving flu and after 14 hours in bed I felt better, but still needed to drag my ass out of bed to go pick up a friends from the airport I haven't hung out with in 7 years who's visiting from NYC for 2 days. I wasn't really up to it and had flashes of hot and cold sweats the whole time, but we were both very happy to see each other and just kept our distance as much as possible, minus a couple hugs. :o)
I am so happy the holidays are coming to a close. I really look forward to things normalizing.