David's Blog

Christmas Eve

Today Joy and I woke up at noon, ate breakfast, and went off to the Mueller's house. We got into a bit of an argument along the way, but it wasn't much of an argument, because I knew I was wrong from the start and didn't put up much of a fight. That seemed to be quite unsatisfactory for Joy, so she dug deeper until she found a fighting spirit. It wasn't much of one though. I was just in a discussion mood.

When we got to Muellerlund we did various things to prepare for the meal at 4PM. I hung out with Matt doing random things for the event and Joy did her thing.

At four the meal was served. We ate. Then there was dessert, and clean-up. At some point I realized Joy was gone and I went into her room to find her talking to her cousin, Lesa. I went in and Lesa told us that she thought we should consider changing the wedding date and gave us her reasons why.

After that people started to leave for church services. We left to get to Target so I could buy a last-minute Christmas present for my Dad. I also bought an XBOX Live! Communicator. Joy and I then drove to see Palmetto Pines. We got gas along the way and decided to go to church early. We sat in the parking lot there and talked about the possibility of changing the date of our wedding, and what we'd tell everyone when/if we decided to make the change. We talked and talked about that, but didn't arrive at any decision -- we just made a list of points and thoughts.

We went to the 7PM church service at CCF. When it was over we stayed and prayed for a bit. Then we talked to the pastor for a while. He was wondering how seminary was going and how the wedding plans were going along. I told him about the date change issue. He advised us that we should stick with the date that we had and gave us his reasons as to why we should. I liked his reasons too.

After we returned to Muellerlund, we found people all over doing different things. I wasn't in the most social of moods, so I decided to grab one of the many, many laptops laying around and play a game of flipwords. This lasted until the beginning of their present opening. We all sat in a big arc and opened presents.

I don't really remember what happened between present opening and the next event except for this one detail. I saw Goldie laying on the kitchen floor looking dead tired or something. She had been overeating all week long, and her stomach felt like a drum it was stretched so tight. I sorta teased her by placing a piece of cookie on the floor. She didn't even move for the cookie, so nudged it right next to her nose with my shoe. She just laid there and Andy was watching this whole thing so he started cracking up, which made me laugh too. It was a funny sight.

The next thing I remember after telling everyone about how funny Goldie was being was walking behind Joy into her room for something. Whatever we were going to get was completely forgotten because Joy was shocked by what she saw. It was a hammie massacre.

Goldie had gotten into Joy's room, flipped over the hammie hamper, and strewn hammie home furnishings all over Joy's room. The hammies went right along with the furnishings, but one was a bloody mess right at the entrance to Joy's room. The other was also a dog-slobbery, bloody mess but was still alive. Sorta.

Joy was standing in the middle of her room emoting by the time I was in the room, and I was following her. She was saying things, but she was shocked, upset, hurt, feeling loss, and a wealth of other things. I looked at the situation briefly, took both hammies for dead, and decided to comfort Joy. She kneeled down at her bed still very shaken up. Last Christmas Eve she found her favorite hampster (Dove aka Chubbs) dead. I forget something in the story there, but I remember getting up from comforting her and going out to find some boxes or something to hold the hammies for burial or whatever we'd do for them. When I was out I told her dad what had happened, and he got up to go help out too.

When we went back into Joy's room Joy was still griefstricken and in shock. The scene was pretty ghastly and gruesome. I grabbed some tissues and put the obviously dead hammie into a clean salsa jar, because I couldn't find anything else. The other hammie was sitting up cleaning herself extremely mechanically. She looked like a smashed up robot, a wet cat, and mouse all at the same time. It was unsettling, and I didn't want to touch her. When I came back from removing Iris' corpse from the scene, Joy's Dad had picked up Olivia and put her into the essentially empty hammie hamper and was verbally comforting Joy. He thought that Olivia would probably make it. I was suprised, because I didn't and I was already wondering how I'd go about putting Olivia out of her misery.

I thought up a way, but I am currently glad that I didn't go through with my plan, because Olivia seems like she might make it. Joy and Sammy (Joy's cousin) dried her off with tissues and found that her little legs probably weren't broken. She wasn't bleeding anymore an hour after we found her either. She was still having trouble breathing, but she was walking around and drinking water by midnight. I feel like she'll make it right now. I'm just not sure how long, because her breathing sounds so wrong.

Anyway, that's the story of my Christmas Eve for 2004.

Posted by David at December 25, 2004 02:52 AM