All alone on New Year’s Eve while the wife is away…so somehow my hand was drawn to the hot babe on the label of Acme Pale Ale.

Sorry, gang, I know you were all counting on coming out to cheer me up in my lonely isolation — my wife is away, visiting relatives — but there was that nasty wet storm yesterday, and I just spent a couple of hours digging out the driveway and sidewalks from that (-20°C! A four foot high pile in front of the driveway!) and my face is numb and my fingers are burning and my feet are frozen. Now I learn that there is an even bigger blizzard on the way today.

So this is one of those days when you discover that Western Minnesota is not fit for human habitation. I’ll be celebrating the New Year by nestling in with a pot of hot tea, snowed in and inaccessible for a while. I’ll get wild tonight and have a beer.

The weather is abominable. We started out the day with thick, slushy, wet clumps of snow coming down with rain, and now we’ve got fierce winds and an icy fog of blowing blizzardy stuff everywhere. So I fixed myself a dinner of baked salmon and washed it down with Fire Rock Pale Ale.

If I close my eyes and turn up the music loud to drown out the howling winds, I can almost — almost — imagine it’s Hawaii.

Tonight, it was the Mothership Wit.

Funky wheaty. Not bad.

A slightly late Christmas present arrived on my doorstep this afternoon: Søren from Denmark had a case of 12 interesting beers sent to me. Thank you! Now, of course, I must drink them all. Immediately.

No, wait, that would be unwise. I shall drink one a night until they are gone. Tonight, I am sipping on Trout Slayer Ale, just because the combination of mighty fish and slaying makes me feel macho.

Mmmm. Mild. Lemony. Not very ferocious at all.

I hope you all had a pleasant holiday—I had the strange experience of having all three kids come back to our house for the weekend. We’d just gotten rid of them all, and here they were, hangin’ about, being normal people, having a quiet couple of days together.

It’s a good thing none of the kids have kids of their own yet, or I’d start feeling all patriarchal, and we can’t have none of that.

Anyway, everything is getting back to normal now.

Did you know that if you decorate your Christmas tree with squids and octopuses and cuttlefish, like ours:

…that on Christmas Eve, you’ll be visited by Santa Squid?

We have our nets and harpoons and great big barrel of formaldehyde waiting by the fireplace, in hopes that the Tentacled One will stop by.

We’re also expecting all three of our kids to be here for Christmas dinner, which will be groovy. Right now, the house is resounding with the traditional sounds of Christmas, the gunfire and zombie growls of Black Ops on the home theater system.

Merry Christmas to all of you, too!

I want a prize. I just submitted the grades for two of my three classes this term, including the big intro biology class with two lecture sections. No one gave me a beer when I mentioned my classes were done…I need one now.

OK, so I have to finish the one last class — but that one had the take-home essay final. I want a reward now, not tomorrow when I finish that pile.

Fine, be that way. I’ll get back to work on the papers, right after I get the driveway and sidewalk cleared (we’re in the middle of a big snowstorm predicted to drop 5″-7″ of snow on us by the morning). But I better get that beer when they’re done, this time.

Last final exam for my intro biology class has just been turned in.

Somebody gimme a beer. Now.