CHRISTMAS, CAMBRIA STYLE

A ROOM WITH A VIEW: Santa Claus gets to come here tonight? Will he ever leave? This is what it looks like from our bedroom window...

Merry Christmas to the SLIFR faithful and anyone else who just happens to be lurking or stumbling past this site in a pre-holiday haze of indiscriminate Web surfing!

The missus and I are taking a break (and a well-deserved one, if I do say so myself!) with my parents and her parents, and, of course, our beloved daughters, on the Central California coast in a little town a half hour above San Luis Obispo called Cambria. The past two days have been foggy and thick with Carpenterian atmosphere—there’s even a persistent, lonely lighthouse visible from the deck of our bedroom for that extra frisson of winter ambience, or terror, depending on your perspective, of course. (Rumor has it that Adrienne Barbeau broadcasts illegally from there on Christmas Eve, only to disappear when the sun rises—I’ll be tuning around for that tonight, to be sure!)

But yesterday afternoon the sun cut through the pea soup like a samurai sword, bringing us our first day of clear, blue skies, allowing us to experience to ocean with senses other than our olfactory ones. And it is spectacular up here, don’t doubt it. If my Christmas is going to be of the California variety, much better to experience it seaside in a small town full of charm and friendliness (and, I’m sure, plenty of terrifying skeletons in the closet ready to rear their heads at the first notes of the RKO Radio Pictures orchestral fanfare) than in the dry heat of Los Angeles.

Yet, as happy as my fingers have been to have been away from a keyboard even for just two days now, I miss the blogosphere, and I miss the world of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and I truly look forward to getting back into the groove when we return to the “real” world. I’ve seen, now, that even a 56K connection in a seaside rental house works just fine, though, so now I may not be able to resist logging on and posting a few thoughts a little later on. The missus, my dad and I are just about to get in the car and head to San Luis Obispo for a screening of King Kong at the luxurious old art deco movie palace, the Fremont. I’ll be sure to post a picture or two of that outing, and let you know what I think about the movie too.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t send along all my best wishes to all my friends, contributors, commenters and various other malcontents and ne'er-do-wells who have made the last year of blogging on SLIFR such a rich and exciting experience for me. I hope the holidays find you safe and happy in the arms of loved ones, or even safe and content in the throes of the excitement of a great book or a superb movie, or just curled up in bed, able to rest peacefully while you await the loud thump and pitter-patter of reindeer hooves on your roofs tonight. There are many reasons why I feel I’m an extremely lucky person, and one of the big ones is that I’m able to write on this site, and that there are so many of you who have honored me with your readership and participation.

To all of you, merry Christmas, happy holidays, and best wishes for the coming year.


'TWAS TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and my father-in-law thinks life looks a whole lot nicer when viewed from the shores of Moonstone beach, Cambria, California