Good day today. One of the best even.

This has been about the most perfect holiday season I've known in many years, and I'm really hating to see it come to an end. Tomorrow Lisa and I head back to our teaching jobs. We'll keep the tree up for the rest of the week, and then it'll come down until next December. A lot of songs from Trans-Siberian Orchestra's The Christmas Attic CD keep playing in my head, especially "Christmas Canon", "The Music Box" and "The Three Kings And I (What Really Happened)". Those three, along with a few from the new Enya CD that Lisa got, really express the whole range of feeling I had this season.

So today we made the most of it, and got out for awhile. We wound up driving to Burlington for some reason or another, then headed back to Greensboro, stopping at Four Seasons Mall where Lisa got a new purse and I racked up some Star Wars Christmas ornaments (and two Galactic Heroes keychains that Lisa thought were too cute :-) then got a big box of cinnamon rolls from Cinnabon. We got home and while flicking through channels I saw that Time Bandits was playing on one channel... Lord only knows how many people are still in therapy since that first came out a quarter-century ago. As I tried to explain this weirdfest to Lisa she made chicken alfredo for dinner. And then about 7:30 I headed out to pick up a few things from a nearby store before going to my parents' house to watch Monday Night Live. Had a good evening with them and I even wound up calling the show to offer my moral support (long story but if you go to the show's blog that'll fill you in on the raging controversy that has blown this area wide open).

It was on the drive back home, which takes about 16 minutes or so, that for some reason I dialed up Wagner's "Prelude to Parsifal" on my MP3 player through the car's stereo. And it brought out a lot of the emotions I've been feeling the past few days or so. Between some other things going on in my life and the past week especially, this really has been the most wonderful period of life that I've known for some time. I don't want this to end. I don't want things to change from where they are now. But they are going to change and I can't stop that. There will be some bad, I know this. But there will be some good too. And the bad is going to work with the good, I must have faith at least, to yield an even greater good than I can realize right now. Eternal blossoming, becoming something new from that which we have been, unfolding according to God's design... if you've never listened to "Prelude to Parsifal" before, that's what this piece of music is all about. Not fighting the change but instead letting it happen. To hold onto things that will eventually be lost, that's not the way to live the full life. You can't even really hold onto yourself. You have to be willing to die a little each moment so that you can experience continual rebirth and re-creation... until we fully become that which we were meant to be.

I'm not the same person tonight that I was a year ago, or even probably six months ago. That Chris Knight is gone forever. I'm someone who has a lot of his characteristics, but I've also grown a lot too. And the Chris who types on this keyboard a year from now will be a different person then, hopefully for the better.

But however long this time lasts, today was a beautiful day (even if it's been raining and foggy all day). It was just about perfect. The past two weeks have been perfect. And that's something that nothing will ever be able to take away from me.

It's nearing midnight now, and a line of thunderstorms is coming through. Yes, real thunder (and pretty loud too) along with lightning in early January. For most of my life I've heard that if it thunders in winter it'll snow ten days later. The first time I heard that it was 1993 when we had a thunderstorm... exactly ten days before the Storm of the Century. And it's happened four or five times since then that I can recall. I'll make a note of it here if we get snow a week and a half from now.

I wanna make a note of something: I'm quite proud of the "home improvement project" that my friend Johnny conned... I mean, asked me to help him with this past Thursday night. We coulda gone to see King Kong (which I did see for the third time yesterday afternoon) instead we put up shelves in his walk-in closet. So years from now instead of remembering seeing a movie about a big ape, he and his wife can look on those shelves and remember Chris coming over to help. Well, it's a neat deal to me to make a note of that anyway :-)

So here it is, the perfect day drawing to a close. But it had to if it's going to remain forever special, right?

Signing off for now. I pray tomorrow is just as good as today was.