Thanksgiving ought to come after Christmas. I have so much more to be sincerely thankful for once the damn Christmas season is over. Thankful not to have to listen for another year to “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Santa Baby” and “Sleigh Ride” being played over the sound system three times a day everywhere I go. Thankful to be able for another year to buy a bar of soap or some ballpoint pens again without having to make my way through crowds of people shoving to be first in line. Thankful that for another year we can all stop taking each other for granted as though all the other people in our lives are just just extras in the movies, all of them titled My Perfect Christmas, that are running in all of our neurotic little heads.

There’s a lot of right-wing hoo-ha over the so-called “War on Christmas” but if you ask me, what has destroyed any spiritual meaning in America that Christmas may once have had is all this insane emphasis on shopping shopping shopping, and if some department store decides that it wants to say “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” then why for Jesus’s sake would anybody who actually cared about Jesus’s sake want to try to talk them out of this? Wal-Mart announces that it will no longer use the word “Christ” as part of the advertising slogan for its annual campaign to make a ton of money for themselves, and those who claim to care more about Christianity than you or I do are trying to freaking put pressure on them to change their mind? Do they suppose that Jesus’s beef with the moneylenders was actually that they had just decided to move their business out of the temple?

Looks to me like the real War on Christmas happens when the thoughts and feelings we associate with Jesus are exploited as a means of persuading us to buy a PlayStation 3.

I leave tomorrow for five days at a retreat way the heck up in Humboldt County, an hour’s drive from Highway 101. A chance to unwind, spend an hour writing in my journal every day, meditate a lot, take part in workshops, give a workshop, take long walks through the woods, get a nice long massage, and so on. When I get back it’ll be a new year and hopefully I will be renewed and ready for it.

Someone on the WELL just wrote “I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear; what I meant was …” instead of the usual “If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote before shooting off your mouth …”

That’s it, the world really is coming to an end.

I am in the eighth hour of a headache I have had since I woke up at 5:30 this morning. For the last three hours I have also been feeling nauseated. Work is going slowly. Lunch is going to be ginger tea, a cup of soup, and a digestive biscuit.

Later: Closing in on the tenth hour. Mood not bad until a few hours ago, but now I am rapidly sinking through the Six Stages of Unkillable Headaches: Doggedly Determined to Irritable to Quietly Grim to Petulant and Whiny to I Gets Weary an’ Sick o’ Tryin’ to Maybe It Would Have Been Better After All If I’d Just Died on the Operating Table.

Still later: Whew. About half an hour after two more Excedrin and yet another big cup of coffee, the headache is clearing. I can concentrate again, I can focus again, life is starting to look not so crappy again.

I’ve moved my blog to TextDrive, an ISP in San Francisco, because they’re offering a nice lifetime membership deal — I figure the company and I just both have to stay alive for a little less than two years for me to break even, once I finish the changeover and cancel my other ISPs.

At the same time I’m switching my blogging software from Movable Type to WordPress. I’m not altogether sure why I’m making the change of software — WordPress has a few features that I find very appealing, but on the other hand it does mean learning a new interface and I’m not convinced that the plusses are really outweighing the minuses as much as all that. Maybe I did it just to shake myself and this blog up a bit.

Of course the new software means creating a new set of templates, and of course that means taking some existing template and tweaking it to my liking. I think 98% of the blog templates out there are based on somebody else’s template. Even the template that I’ve tweaked to create this one is based on somebody else’s, I’m reasonably sure — the CSS contains some odd, unnecessary lines that don’t make sense except as the fossilized remains of a still earlier version.

Since I liked the old look just fine, a lot of the tweaking has been a matter of changing the fonts and color scheme and so on in the new template to match the old one, and then adapting the rest so that it seems to me to harmonize. Everything isn’t perfectly the way I want it yet, but it’s good enough for now, and I figure I can keep tweaking as I go.

I haven’t posted anything in several weeks. Partly from being busy, but partly because I’m in the process of switching over to WordPress instead of MovableType as the software that drives this blog. I like some of the features WordPress offers, and maybe I’m also ready to change just for the hell of it.

So my blogging time lately has actually been spent lately in fixing up the style sheets and such for the new blog. Rather than write the files from scratch (does anyone write them from scratch?), I downloaded a “skin” that I liked the composition of, and have been revamping it. The new banner looks a lot like the old banner, and the color scheme of the blog is mostly the same, so the changes won’t be terribly striking.

It’s pretty nearly done, or at least I’m nearly satisfied enough with it to start putting it to use soon, maybe this weekend, knowing that I can still continue to tweak the colors and layout as I go. And knowing that however much I tweak, there’s going to be someone using a browser and/or settings that will screw up all my obsessive nitpicking anyway.