I normally don't have much empathy for the harried soccer mom protagonists of Connie Willis XMas stories. I always wonder "If all this stuff is such a burden, why don't they just not do some of it?" Yesterday I had one of those, though. Errands all through Chicagoland, picking up presents, running the dog to the groomer to be prettified, etc. This included my first ever trip down to Devon Street. We never did go to the Indian section to eat, but I had an errand down near there. It seemed a lot like Tijuana, actually. The buildings seemed in about the same level of repair and had about the same garishness of sign.

If all the last minute XMas shenanigans weren't enough, my Handspring Prism picked this morning to crap out on me! I was planning on using that for reading material in the car as we ride around. Oh well. It is really flaking, and I'm pretty sure it is physical inside the device. Pressing certain parts of the case made it throw a fatal exception. This doesn't look good. I'll have to backtrack to paper books for the holidays. Yowza!