I came home Sunday afternoon from having heard the wonderful Cantata, and I decided that I was going to decorate my home just a little bit for Christmas. This is the first time that I have decorated this home in a Christmas theme. I live by myself except for my service dog, so the decorating is really mainly for my pleasure. Several years ago, I went to a Christmas party where the attendants were asked to bring a white elephant gift. A white elephant gift is defined as an object that is not broken, that works the way it's supposed to, but it is something that is of no use or no interest to the person who owns it. So, we each took a white elephant gift wrapped up in holiday paper and placed it under the Christmas tree. And then during the party, numbers were drawn. And the person who got number one was the first person that was allowed to go up to the Christmas tree and pick a gift out. And when my turn came, I picked out a box and when I opened it up, I discovered I had a neon glitter lamp. It reminds me of a lava lamp that someone gave my parents at Christmastime long ago. The lava lamp when plugged into the wall and heated up, produced globules that bubbled up and traveled around within the lamp. And the lamp, that particular lamp, I remember as being blue. This is not a lava lamp that I got at the party. It's a neon glitter lamp. And the color is green, and that's good because green is a Christmas color. So, I rearranged the furniture just a little bit in the living room, and I placed the neon glitter lamp in front of a window and every night at sundown, I turn the lava light on and I open the blinds of the window, so that I can sit in the living room and contemplate the glitter as it floats up and down within the lamp. The transparent glass allows me to see the glitter flowing around, and anybody driving by my house can look over at the front window in my living room and see the lamp too. The glitter lamp is actually, in my mind, better than a Christmas tree because I don't have to worry about it drying out and dropping needles onto…

There was this one time where my - I was a very young adult and my friend, we would've been like what, 19? 19, 20. Somewhere around in there. And my parents had gone, I think they'd gone on a cruise actually. And we were living in this very old, this semi-derelict farmhouse, maybe that's too strong. But I mean, you could see into the basement from the first floor 'cause there were holes here and there in the floor, just like one or two, and they were very small holes, but you could see into the basement. And there - the fan vent in the bathroom, like, didn't have any kind of face plate on it on the outside, and starlings nested in the fan housing every year. It was kind of nice, you would hear the baby birds in the spring, and you couldn't use the fan in the bathroom for a while. And by the time we left the house, it also had this problem where every time it rained, those of us who lived in the - who had bedrooms in the top floor, I would have to - it was usually me - we would have to wake up and batten down the hatches, because the windows didn't work right, and water would come in the windows. So you had to check and make sure the windows were holding, and if they weren't, you had to bust out the packing tape and re-packing tape the windows to keep all the water out and away from the electrical outlets. So anyway, we were in this house. Oh also, they did finally - the institution that owned the house - we were in staff housing in this place, if you can even imagine. But they did finally remodel the house, and discovered that it was insulated with newspapers from, oh, I don't remember, it was somewhere between the 40s and the 60s. So you knew when it had been, like, worked on the last time. It was insulated with bat poop and newspaper, which is to say that it was a tinderbox of a place. It also didn't have any subflooring. Like the hardwood floor had just been laid directly on the cross beams without any like solid subflooring, which is probably one of the reasons why you could see into the basement from the first floor…

The most overhyped place I've ever been to might be the, like, Harry Potter World at Universal Studios. It's not that it wasn't good or anything. It's just, you know. I mean, I was there in summer and so it was hot and stuff but like, you don't really feel like - or you didn't, I mean I didn't back then. This was like gosh, this was before I had kids so it was like between 10 and 15 years ago. But you know, I didn't really feel like I was in Hogsmeade, and I didn't really feel like I was in Ollivander's, or whatever. The fake snow did not cool me down, you know? And we had to stand in line forever for like the main ride. We're - most of the line is like in Hogwarts or whatever. So it's not terrible, but you're still just standing there, and then the ride made me so sick. Like, it was one of those things where it's like four people in a - you know, strapped in a whatever. You can't really see what the ride looks like because it's all dark but you're hanging, and then moving all around, so it's like there's some sort of screen that makes you feel like you're supposed to be flying on a broomstick or whatever. And so you have no point of reference. It's dark except for the lit up screen. You're being moved all around. And again not being able to see like the ground or the wall or the ceiling or anything. That was just way too much for my motion sickness. And so like about five seconds into the ride, I had to close my eyes because it was like, "Okay, if I do not close my eyes, I will throw up," and even then I was still sick when we got off, like I don't think I could ride anything else for the rest of the day. I was there with a friend, and we were there for a couple days luckily, but I was just like, "And that's it for me." So it was like, a little disappointing and I think the whole thing was a bit overhyped because if you were there by yourself, and it was magical or something, but there's crowds, it's hot, you're sweaty. I'm motion sickness - or motion sick. So, yeah,…