Christmas has come and gone and there was no invitation to The Jerry Springer Show, so I call it good. The kids seem happy with what they got, we arrived to and from our travel destinations with no problems, and I’ve not heard of any of my friends or family having problems. I win! Well, mostly. I did get the wifey the wrong MP3 player, and now Sprawl-Mart is sold out of the right one. “It looks like my slider phone” just wasn’t enough of a description for me, considering none of them looked anything like her cell phone. (Yeah, I know you’re reading this, Kim.)

I got what I wanted. Of course, I ordered it myself. It’s a podcast factory recommended to me by

shadowhelm

. I don’t know that I’ll subject you to podcasts. I got it because I want to use it to make my annual sampler CDs. And there is the possibility I’ll actually record myself reading some stories while Dan Kurtz, formerly of Oliver Magnum, plays some spooky strains on his stand-up bass. It’s something we’ve kicked around a bit, and I think it’d be fun.

Oh, I also got Kissology Volume 2. It has lots of great concert footage, the cheeseball movie Attack of the Phantoms and some other stuff. I have to say I’m a bit disappointed there isn’t more interview footage on there. What really happened between Gene, Paul and Vinnie Vincent, and how did Vincent come back to write songs for Revenge after the first split? Why is there absolutely nothing with Mark St. John (who, I just learned, died this past April)? I have Volume 1 and 2 now, and will order 3 very soon. How many times is “Firehouse” on the three volumes? Too freakin’ many! Love the song, but sheesh!

So, the MySpace cam whores have been incredibly busy lately. I mark their invitations to view them doing whatever on their webcams as spam, but I want to write back and explain that if I wanted to see naked girls I know how to use Google. Leave me alone and stop cluttering my inbox and friend requests!!!

Today I took the little kids to see Bee Movie. It wasn’t bad. Certainly not as bad as I expected from the reviews, and the quick slide to the dollar theater. It was waaaaay better than that Ratachewy thing we saw a while back. I have to admit that Jerry Seinfeld’s voice wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t as bad as Ray Ramano in the Ice Age movies, but I kept waiting for George, Elaine and Kramer to show up.

Other than that, I’ve been transferring some Hi-8 home videos to the computer so I can burn them to DVD. This is something I’ve meant to do for years. The tape I’ve been working on is from 2003 and starts with Jacob’s first birthday party. There’s a scene, after cake and ice cream, where Kim’s bathing him in the kitchen sink and he’s grinning and babbling baby-talk and is just adorable. Makes me wish for another little ball of coos and chub … then Sara texts me asking for something and I remember why we finally stopped at four. Somewhere there’s a tape of Alex winning a dance contest in about the fourth grade. I can’t wait to find that. I’m making a copy for his girlfriend. It’s … well, you have to see it to believe it, and you have to know how shy Alex was at the time. The song was “YMCA” or something from the disco era, and it was like my scrawny first-born child was suddenly possessed, but not by John Travolta. Eh, maybe I’ll really mortify him and post a snippet online.

Speaking of Alex, he got a new guitar and Guitar Hero 3 for Christmas. He’s already mastered most of the game and has beat Satan at “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I just stare, wait for him to finish, then reset it to medium. He brought my old guitar home from the shop where his band practices. I finally — after about 15 years — picked up the guitar and put some music to the chorus of a song I wrote back in my machine shop days. Alex doesn’t seem interested in it. His band has a point, ya know. They don’t know what that point is yet, because all the good ones are taken, but they’re not interested in my songs about zombies or, in this case … Well, the name of the song is “Lollipop.” You figure it out.