December hates me. 

Last year in December, my furnace stopped furnacing, my hot water heater stopped heating and my car's radiator stopped radiating... all between Thanksgiving and the first week of December.  Oh and that person who lives in my house and usually fixes these things?  He was having his head operated on during that time and wasn't really able to bend over... or get off the couch... or hold a coherent conversation (gotta get me some of those drugs).  OK - he was actually a lot of help.  He told me what to do and I did it. Which worked out, I guess because we eventually fixed all those things but it was kind of a pain in the ass.

In fact for many years now, December has bit the Big One so badly that we've been calling it Sucktember for almost a decade.  

This December, that one-year-and-twelve-day-old hot water heater also decided to stop working - exactly twelve days after the warranty ended.  And the internet stopped coming to our house that same day, which would have been super helpful in trying to figure out whether or not we could get a replacement hot water heater covered by the warranty and/or research buying a new one.  In the end, we bought a tankless hot water heater and installed it before the old one flooded the basement.  Which was funny because that same night it rained so hard the basement flooded anyway.  Not so much funny ha ha, just funny sad.

Anyway, the whole Christmas season isn't ringing itself in to happy warm thoughts in my house, but I am grateful that my husband doesn't also have a giant hole in his head this year, so I think Sucktember is maybe improving in small increments each year.  

This week, I took the teenage girls I work with at church to the LDS Temple for some forced fun holiday festivities.  And more to convince myself more than anyone that the holiday season is a good thing, I took about a thousand photos with my camera phone.  

I'm continually amazed by the quality of photos from a camera phone.  Who'd have thought when I was running around with my mother's old Brownie Hawkeye wasting rolls and rolls of black and white film that you'd be able to get this kind of quality photograph from something that fits inside your pocket?

It's a Christmas miracle.