I HEAR RINGING IN MY EARS! MAKE IT STOP!!!

My brother has not come to conciousness from the Christmas party of last night and his blackberry alarm is going off on snooze alarm every 10 minutes! It has a regular telephone ring. ANNOYING!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I hate to admit defeat and, further, ignorance to the operation of this machine, but I cannot get it turned off and I cannot get my brother to wake up and do the same. I have tried putting it by his head and he is sleeping right through it! This has been going on for two and a half hours now and my patience -- and ears -- and nerves -- had just about had it when, all of a sudden, it just melted into the background noise of the TV which I turned on. Blessed relief. One thing is for certain...when said brother awakes, he will show me how to disable that thing for the future.

I have been busy working on Christmas shopping online, and a Christmas project for my son ...

a ceramic nativity. I'm doing it in chalks...a technique where it is sprayed with porcelain spray and the pastel chalks are applied with a brush and then sprayed and then more chalk and more spray until you get the desired tone. It's a rather large set, three camels, three wisemen, three shepherds, two donkeys, a cow, a goat, a sheep, Mary, Joseph and the baby. I hope to finish it today or tomorrow. I'm also using metallic paints on the camels and wisemen along with some jewels. The figures stand about 5 inches tall. So far so good except for some trouble with one piece yesterday when the spray started acting strange. I will have to get a new bottle of spray.

Finished a book by Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer. She is a good writer, so I went and bought The Poisonwood Bible. The book is good, but I'm not going through it so fast. I also picked up a book by Joyce Carol Oates Missing Mom. Middle Age was a good one by her. I usually like her writing. A not so new author but interesting book was Johnathan Franzen's The Corrections. If you like historical fiction, the books by Phillipa Gregory are good reading, like The Other Boleyn Girl. I also have been reading poetry of Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Merritt Malloy, and the illusionist poets. Anybody read anything good lately?

I still haven't heard from the youngest daughter. It worries me and I'm not sleeping.. Don't know if there is a connection there or not. My brother did make reservations for us to go to San Diego for Christmas so we will have the house sitters for the dogs. It will be fun to see my daughter and her family and, hopefully, it won't be colder in San Diego than in Houston!

I'm off to work on the ceramics. Peace to all of you. In the midst of this I finally managed to waken my brother and he turned off that DAMNED BLACKBERRY ALARM!