Happy Almost Christmas!

Greetings everyone!

I hope all is well and nothing is ill! Perhaps you’ve all been able to do some Christmas shopping since my last post. I haven’t! Not at all! And I don’t think I’ll be able to at all either, unfortunately. But I did find my Christmas cards! In the last friggin’ box I unpack, there they are, sitting there like angels (well, one box of cards has angels on them, but that’s beside the point). So, some of you will be getting Christmas cards by Epiphany, and others will just be getting some sort of letter or note or something by then.

On another awesome note, I bought a futon a couple days ago, so if anyone wants to visit me, I actually do have something you can sleep on other than the floor! And I finally bought a chair. My first chair. It’s wood, rather old-ish; I got it at a second hand store for $8.00, so it was a good buy. And I now have a chair I can sit on so that I can eat at my tv tables rather than have the silly plastic plates wobble on my lap as I try and eat. Yay! It’s all about the small things. I’m rather more excited about the chair than the futon, cause now I can feel like I’m eating a meal decently.

Yup. And just to brag (just a little, because I can), on the winter solstice, it was between 80 and 85 F degrees here (roughly 25-27 C, I think. I could be wrong). I still can’t get used to that conversion, but I’m trying. Yeah, warmest it’s been since I’ve been here, I believe. Or at least since I’ve had my apartment, as I had to open near all the windows, which I haven’t had to do before. That was, to put it lightly, rather nice. :D.

Anyways, I’ve taken some photos that I thought I’d share, once again. So, in their order, they are:
1. Another nice picture taken from the front of the church toward the ocean. Yup, that was just a couple hours ago…
2. That long stick there in the centre of the picture, that’s our nuclear alarm – there’s a nuclear power plant just south of us (about a 20 minute drive at 80 miles/hour). So if anything goes wrong this thing’ll go off, which probably means that within our radius we’d be severely affected or something. The staff tell me they test it every once in awhile and it’s a great shock cause it’s so loud. Anyway…
3. That’s our nuclear alarm dressed up for the holidays. They strung lights from it to make it in the form of a Christmas tree.
4. Yeah, that’s a lamborghini that I drove by near Dana Point (another beach city). There are a surprisingly large amount of nice cars like these just floating about.
5 + 6. Aaahhhh, our theologically incorrect church. That marble mural is not, as it should be, Christ, but rather of Mary. And as you see in the photo right under it, they added Jesus just to the left as a kind of afterthought. And Rick (my coworker) was telling me that the crucifix wasn’t even pushed out like that to begin with, it was just flat against the wall like a wallflower. Apparently the priest who designed this church got away with a lot because this parish is the southern most of the diocese, and no one payed much attention to what went on here. Maybe they should have. Rick was also saying that they’ve looked into trying to remove the Mary marble to put it somewhere else (and make the church a little more Christ-centred), but there is literally no way to remove it short of tearing down the whole wall. Feels kinda like the permanent charm that Mrs. Black had placed on her portrait in the Noble House of Black. But anyway, that’s our church.

Hope you’re all doing well! Have a very happy Christmas, everyone!
Peace,
Jane