It’s Christmas Eve, so rather than write one of my long-winded screeds, I’ll settle for some short notes tonight.

In case anyone who comes here hasn’t checked out the St. Rose web site yet, I should mention that we’re having a Midnight Mass tonight, in addition to the regular Mass times of 8:00am and 11:00am tomorrow.  There will be Christmas carols before Mass at 11:30 tonight.  I don’t know if the organ repairs are finished yet; but with or without it, I’m sure the choir will be singing tonight.

I made my annual trip to the Quincy Mall yesterday.  I almost never go there except when I’m shopping for Christmas gifts, and it’s becoming less useful for that.  There’s no KB Toys anymore, and that was always a good place to shop for kids.  I thought Sears would be a good place to get made-in-the-USA tools—wasn’t Craftsman once made in the USA?—but no such luck.  Bergners still has a good kitchen section; but other than that, if you’re not shopping for clothes or jewelry, there’s not much worth looking at in the mall.

The saddest part was seeing Aladdin’s Castle.  I thought it must have been replaced by something else until I saw the sign over the doorway.  It was well-lit, with lots of empty space, and I think I saw a couple girls doing some sort of dance or exercise on a mat.  That’s just not right.  Arcades should be dark, with a maze of narrow paths between the machines.  People should be locked into their games, not dancing and chatting with friends; and the only music should be MIDI-quality stuff mixed with beeps.

It looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas for once.  That doesn’t happen very often around here.  Have we officially switched back from worrying about global warming to worrying about the coming ice age yet?  Maybe I’ll get ice skates for Christmas; it looks like I could actually use them tomorrow, if the rain yesterday didn’t roughen up the ice too much.  I enjoy skating, but around here, we don’t get to do it often enough to get any good at it.  I can go forward and turn, and stop if I have plenty of room to slow down, but that’s about it.

My RSS feed has really taken off these last few days.  From a steady 3-4 feeds per day, it jumped to 9-14 all of a sudden.  I don’t know what that means, and traffic in general hasn’t gone up; but it’s nice to see, since people hitting the RSS feed are usually those who plan to be regular readers.

I decided I’ll put the answers to the exercises in my Latin lessons in a comment after the lesson.  That makes more sense than making a separate post for them or putting them with the next lesson.  No need to treat them like the crossword solution in a newspaper.  Lesson #2 will be out Friday.  I’m toying with the idea of putting them in a wiki and just pointing to them from my blog, because a wiki is really more suited to book-style documentation like that, but I’m still debating.  Either way, you’ll always be able to find them here.

Well, time to try to catch a short nap before I head to midnight Mass.  In case I don’t make it on here tomorrow: Merry Christmas, everyone.