Hurrah -- It's Friday!!!

No photo updates of Jonathan's and my game just yet, but the weekend is almost here, so I imagine we'll have a little more time to proceed on that front. Funny how the game -- the Action at Pickelhaubewicz -- has only become more interesting as we have gone on with it. Colonel von Grundig may be losing the game, but, from a purely objective point of view, it's fascinating watching him do it!

In other news, my amateur rock band, The Indras, met for practice yesterday evening and covered five new songs in fairly short order, a few Carl Perkins numbers as well as Larry Williams' Slow Down and Kansas City/ Hey, Hey, Hey. The old voice held up well, even on the latter two songs, which are punishing to say the least. We have now reached 30 songs. Ideally, we hope to have 45 down cold by the end of February, which is what we need to fill an occasional evening playing for an audience and a little money. One of our guitarists, who is also something of an amateur recording buff, is planning to commit half a dozen of our strongest songs to computer chip sometime in January, as a means of uploading some music onto the coming band website and burning a CD. Exciting stuff to say the least.

On other fronts, the Grand Duchess and I are having a small Christmas/Holiday open house for friends and colleagues tomorrow evening, so today will be spent finishing decoration of the house and running the vacuum cleaner around quickly following a final exam I have to give at 1:15 this afternoon. The preparation for these sorts of things is always time consuming, but the actual event is always worth the time and trouble taken. And somewhere in there, I must proofread the final four chapters of the translation and send everything off to the publisher on Monday -- plus finish and submit final grades for my current crop of students. Whew!

And finally, we come to the illustration above, showing Ebeneezer Scrooge enjoying some, presumably, Christmas punch with Bob Cratchit, following the former's re-education and rehabilitation by the three Christmas spirits. As I've mentioned here in previous years, I am generally something of a sceptic and cynic (somewhat like Scrooge?), at least in some instances, but the Christmas season makes me feel decidedly giddy, jolly, and, well, merry. It is, indeed, a most wonderful time of year!