My mom is beginning to slip away from us. She rallied at first, and just as the doctors were going to release her, has developed breathing problems. Time after critical time, in the past, she would brighten when my boys would show up, but today she slept through it all. The nurses are lowering their voices and the words “morphine” and “hospice” are being mentioned, although she is not in pain.

I was distracted by my mom’s double pneumonia on top of the brain aneurysm bleed. Either that or having to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas and the afternoons since up at El Camino at her bedside. I imagine most visitors are similarly distracted. So I left my purse in the single bathroom by the elevators.

Pretty dumb. By the time I realized, someone had placed it behind a post. Wow, good samaritan, I thought, and because I was exhausted, didn’t find out till the next day that you had gone through my wallet. Left my credit cards and some loose change. I guess you knew I was coming right back, and decided not to take more. Of course, you know what I look like, my license, of course. Were you the guy coming out as I was going in afterward? The one I asked if there was a purse in there? The one who spent more than half an hour making up the other bed in my mom’s room yesterday?

You’ll probably have a pretty happy new year, maybe buying some extra lotto tickets. Or maybe one of those big-screen tvs, if you add up all the other stuff you take. Do you have a mom? I hope she never has to spend Christmas hooked up to a bunch of machines. Because no one should have to do that.

It was intended to be an emergency ration.
The idea was not to make it so good that the troops would be tempted to eat it before it was truly needed. Back in ‘37, a military chocolate bar had to, among other things, be able to take high temperatures without melting in a uniform pocket. Chocolatey goodness was not a priority, indeed, it was expected to taste not much better than a boiled potato.

May your chocolates always taste better than plain potatoes.

Produced as Meals, Ready-to-Eat(MREs) by the military, they are called other, more colorful things by their intended users: “Meals refusing to Excrete” and “Meals Refused by Ethiopians” (starving) among others.

Then there is their untold value as field amusement devices. This use is frowned upon by commanders because it involves flammable hydrogen, and if the tabasco packet is pressed into service, tear gas.

If you are tiring of all the holiday candies and pastries, MREs are available on eBay, where rations meant for use by Katrina and other disaster victims can be procured. By the case and unopened.

For roughly the price of a nice rib roast. But then the roast doesn’t come with a pack of gum, high-fiber crackers, a dessert and toilet paper.

Chicken soup, since two of us were sick. (The other two had their share of colds earlier.)

The movie choices were old favorites, Sneakers or The Hunt for Red October. Sean Connery won out, and the film is just as enjoyable as it was the first time, if not more, since we know most of the dialog.

For one thing, it will hard to find a vet due to distemper and rabies issues. Then, of course, they bite and are tremendously destructive.

Now that I’ve figured out how to make it, I’ll be making batches to give away. The only glass jars around here are pickle jars that still smell pickley after washing. IKEA had the perfect ones. And yes, since I was there, I got some little plates, napkins, a rug, a chopping board, some tongs - so two hours of my shopping day are gone.

Pictures later. Now where’s that brown shirt?

An early morning (too early it turns out) trip to IKEA, a breakfast there to kill the 30 minutes before the store part opened, and the list is getting smaller. On the way to the car, there was a large, reddish splotch on the garage floor with feathers here and there. I had to stop.

A seagull seeking shelter from the cold, only to collide with an SUV in a hurry? A sacrificial chicken? All answers come, it seems, if you wait. As we neared the exit, what should bob into view but a pigeon.

A Saudi Arabian Airlines flight was disrupted when dozens of rodents escaped from a passenger’s bag, and began dropping on the heads of other passengers. Did he get through security by disguising them as lumps of coal? See previous post. Or by cooling them into a state of torpor? See post before previous. Has he been reading my blog?

Perhaps it is more correct to called them ‘exploding rats’ since only dead ones were used.

Agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) had many other tools, including cow dung bombs and fake logs full of grenades.

Of course, all this was before Q’s time, back in the days of WWII.

They say that war drives technology. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of the bat bombs, there were a few problems in the plan, just as in the Russian anti-tank dog project discussed earlier.

About half done, I think. There were highlights.

Santa’s booth:
Watching from a floor above Santa’s village, we could see the kids all dressed in holiday finery, from the girl in a winter white gown and hat to the little boys in holiday sweaters and the pair of sisters in matching pink and black dresses. The younger of the two boys was too frightened to smile despite the pleas of all involved. His brother gave him a comforting hair mussing when they finally got to come down. The older of the sister duo gave Santa her brightest smile, and posed prettily while her little sister (2, I would guess, from the fuss) adamantly refused to cooperate. Dad tried to persuade her to sit in his own lap to one side of Santa, but she screeched her distress at the nearness of that scary man in the red suit. Dad gave up. Santa’s photographer should hire an elf to take shots of these other moments, so the families can include them in the card as well.

The struggle-to-make-sense-of it moment:
At Cost Plus, a woman paused to read out aloud her personal Feng Shui characteristics from a book. “I am a pig,” she said, “and my element is water.” Or some such. The crowds swirled around her, and she was unaware we were listening.

The bargain:
Tower Records is in its last throes, I still had $30 left on a gift card. It goes a long way when books are discounted 60%.

At the new Nob Hill on Grant in Mountain View, I stopped to admire the pies. A woman in a bright Christmas sweatshirt (I got some of those today too, but not at Nob Hill) turned to me and said, “I’m going to get in trouble.” Then she pointed out that these particular pies were sugar-free, and confided that she only ate the fillings, not the crusts. I told her she was a paragon of virtue since the crusts are the fatty part.

So now the bedroom is heaped with gifts not yet wrapped. The tree is decorated, but the loose needles have to be vacuumed before the tree skirt goes down. It’s a perfect tree, except for the two tops, but this way, we can have an angel and the little bear that clings to the branch for dear life that is the boys’ favorite. Which we can’t find.

Last night while the kids were trimming the tree, I learned how to make hot fudge sauce.

Having a large baked ham in the fridge means a series of easy meals. Unlike other things I’ve watched recently, Wordplay has no gruesome, stomach-churning scenes like those in Wire in the Blood, for example.

After steaming some broccoli, making the garlic bread and a little ham gravy, I settled down to a movie I had no expectations about. The conclusion was enormously tense, not Hoosiers-tense, but spellbinding.

More on Wire in the Blood later.

A real possibility, according to Briefing.com, citing AppleInsider.

Sometimes, trees are not benign. The poisonwood is found in Florida, the Bahamas and the Caribbean. The locals have an interesting solution if you should be so unlucky as to touch it.

Plus, the article’s author eats a fruit from the manchineel tree, and lives to tell the painful tale.