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Every year, we start the holiday season hoping to get Christmas cards out in a timely fashion. Not long after Thanksgiving, I started on a Christmas letter, but busyness and, to be honest, the typical we’re working, the boys are in school, playing sports and doing band, and we had a vacation<\/em> template bored me a bit, so it got set aside. I managed to finally tap out that we’re working, the boys are in school, doing band and playing sports (see how I freshened it up?), and we went on vacation this year. So last weekend, we were ready to get some Christmas cards to start the writing. But Walmart was out of Christmas cards<\/em>. So I started the preliminary work to panic, but Saturday afternoon, we found another Walmart had plenty of cards. <\/p>\n The Christmas cards we selected this year have little bits of glitter on them to make them sparkle like snow. Which means I have a lot of glitter on me<\/em>. I finished the cards up yesterday, for the most part, but I still have the glitter on my forehead, in my beard, and on my clothing. I am not this festive or fabulous in real life.<\/p>\n I write little notes in the cards, personalized for some (Gimlet and his family got a little \\m\/, the ASCII equivalent of the rock-and-roll horns favored by Dio.<\/p>\n But the standard message was Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2019<\/em>. Except I cannot shake the nagging feeling that at least once I must have written best wishes for 2018<\/em>.<\/p>\n I packed and shipped packages to relations in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Poplar Bluff this morning. One of the items for my aunt seemed to be a softcover book. I don’t remember what that is.<\/em> And I came home to find a gift that I was supposed to ship to Poplar Bluff on my desk where I’d set it when repacking the box. So now I wonder whether I forgot anything else or sent gifts to the wrong places. I guess I’ll know in the next few days. By the way, it costs about $15 to ship from Springfield to each of these areas, and it should be delivered tomorrow. Or I could spend $100 to overnight each box. I asked the young lady if UPS still used the zone system, but that probably went out of favor before she was born.<\/em><\/p>\n The various school programs and concerts are done, and now that the cards and packages (except for the one I will ship to Poplar Bluff tomorrow) are out, I can relax and just watch the snow fall.<\/p>\n Wait, I guess I am in the wrong place for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every year, we start the holiday season hoping to get Christmas cards out in a timely fashion. Not long after Thanksgiving, I started on a Christmas letter, but busyness and, to be honest, the typical we’re working, the boys are in school, playing sports and doing band, and we had a vacation template bored me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24017"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24021,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24017\/revisions\/24021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/dio.jpg\")
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