At least 15 young people dragged a motorist out of his car and kicked and punched him, causing severe head trauma, after he honked his horn to get them to move out of a street, police said.

… it’s not just for drivers, anymore.

A fairly uneventful three day holiday is, for me anyway, over.

Starting today, I’m working both jobs afternoon, evening and night through the end of the year and into the start of the new. I don’t mind so much — I’ve got rent due at the end of next week, and a host of Christmas-related debt to tackle. New Year’s Eve and Day are both busy times to work, and the tip average is generally pretty high because folks with severe hangovers are very appreciative that they’ve gotten their hot food and maybe, just maybe, the pizza guy’ll stop banging on the door with his flashlight now.

Hopefully, maintenance men from my landlord will show up sometime today (preferably when I’m at work) to figure out why the sink is backing up. I thought it had to do with the dishwasher — nope, I didn’t run the washer last night and there was some sediment residue in my sink this morning. Gaaaah!

Over the holiday:

I pissed off the Devil Cat. Simply by being in the house. I swear, if that cat was all I had to go by, I’d never get a cat. Never. It’s a hideous creature. Sunday night I tried to get from the guest bedroom to the bathroom. The cat was stretched out between the two rooms. I decided to wait until the morning.

My grandmother’s sight is just about gone. I was mistaken several times by her for my father, my Aunt Ann, her husband Bill, my mother, and (I swear I’m not making this up) our lord and savior, Jesus H. Christ.*

My cousin Maggie is also moving away from Oahu at the end of the school year, back to New England. She’s a northerner by heart — she misses seasons.

I read The Kite Runner and was pleasantly surprised — it was hard to put down when I finally finished the book. I also read — and will admit to being somewhat disgusted by — In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which describes the events surrounding the brutal murder of four members of the Clutter family in rural Kansas. When I bought the book (for myself) — Wednesday at Barnes & Noble in Towson as I finished some Christmas shopping, the clerk asked me, “Have you seen the movie?” I wasn’t really paying attention, so I just sort of faked my end of the conversation, then walking to my car realized he was talking about the film Capote.

Relating to In Cold Blood, my father had two antecdotes which he told me during the car ride to Scranton on Christmas Day. The first was that he’d once blown off a night of studying before a test in college because he was so engrossed in the book he couldn’t put it down. The second was that Robert Blake starred as Perry Smith — one of the killers — in the 1967 film. (That’s what those of us who aren’t Alanis Morisette call “ironic.”)

I’m wrapping up the evening watching one of my favorite war movies ever — the fairly recent Master & Commander: Far Side of the World about the crew of the HMS Surprise, and their skipper, Jack Aubrey played by Russell Crowe. Hunting a French man-of-war along the South American coast, a very brutal attack cripples the Surprise, which still must pursue the French into the Pacific and prevent them from carrying The War (in this case, the Napoleonic one) to those waters. I won’t claim to be an expert on the life of a seaman on a nineteenth century warship, but from what I have read on the matter (I have an illustrated cutaway, “Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections Man-of-War” and the collected works by CS Forester on the matter of one Horatio Hornblower) the movie is faithful to the way these men lived on the high seas.

*Either that or I startled her and she said “Jesus H. Christ!” as an exclamation, not a gasp of misinterpreted recognition. I’m sticking with my story.