Made our fifth meal for ten last night. Two of which are gluten-free, five of which are vegetarian, two of which fear spice, none of which overlap. My nephews only tried to steal my daughter's legos twice and limited their breakage to horrible things I was going to have to regift anyway. All in all, total success.

The house is warm, the floor is clean - oh wait, my daughter just spilled beads all over but she's on it - and my desire for a wood chipper inspired my mother-in-law to go halfsies on one that I'm going to use to clean out my in-law's place and hopefully reduce them a number or two on the hoarder scale. Actually looking forward to that. Asked my wife for a honey-do list and have so far knocked out more than half of it. The drain clog was at least 12 feet down but as I now have reason to own things like drain augers again, I own a drain auger again and the drain clog is past tense.

On the minus side, my sister called this morning because apparently my father doesn't feel like talking on the phone to tell me that my cousin is going into hospice, so that's nice. I'm also finding out second-hand that his big move, from Hoarder Heaven to The House That Hasn't Been Touched Since Three Relatives Died In A Week In 2011, the move that he "needs all the help he can get", has been carefully selected to overlap the one gig I can't pass up, whose schedule has been iron-clad since 2007.

My sister is fond of saying "(kleinbl00) loves us all very much, he just doesn't like us." I've started muttering "maybe if you didn't make it such a pain in the ass things would be different."

Happy New Year, Hubski. Keep your friends close and your family as close as you can stand.