I know I’m a tough guy to get gifts for. The Lovely Anna constantly reminds me of this. She says it’s not that I don’t want or need anything, it’s just that I have this habit of buying things I want for myself… Well, I hate waiting.

Lately Anna and I have been in the habit of getting something together and calling it our Christmas present to each other. This year it was a case of six bottles of Silver Oak cabernet sauvignon, 1998-2003 that had a Thomas Arvid painting reproduced on the case lid. Anna loves Arvid’s work, which is a realistic style of oil painting with wine bottles, glasses and trappings as subject matter… usually in a forced perspective, almost fisheye setting. Great idea to blend fine art with wine as a subject, since that attracts the interest of people with money for both interests. Anyway, we enjoyed one bottle on Christmas eve.

The kids all got iMacs, which meant Daddy Tech Support spent hours setting them up, installing Leopard, installing other software, transferring their files from their old PCs, blah blah blah. Next time I’ll just get them completely disassembled bicycles with instructions in French. That would take less time. The Lovely Anna is now the old PC holdout in the family.

I still got a few things under the tree, including some cartooning/art related stuff. “The Completely MAD Don Martin” (pictured) was one. I can’t wait to dig into that… His cartoons were some of the funniest things to me as a kid reading MAD, when some of the other stuff went over my head. I also got a nifty traveling case to carry brushes, pens and other art supplies in that keeps them from getting mashed (especially the brushes). That will come in handy, I am sure. I also got a pair of Grinch pajamas from my daughter Elizabeth, who loves to make me sing the Grinch song… year around of course.

I’m still under the gun in the studio, so I don’t have much time to blog right now. My apologies. I’ll make it up to people in the new year, with some caricature instruction tutorials I’ve been working on.

I’ve mentioned her many times here but I seldom blog about my oldest daughter Elizabeth, even though as a rule our days revolve more around her than any other aspect of our lives. She is autistic, and not the kind you see on TV where the autistic person is of a high functioning kind like Asberger’s syndrome, and manages to be an “America’s Next Top Model” candidate or write novels or otherwise basically function in society. Elizabeth is the rocking back and forth, hand flapping, repeat everything six times Rain Man sort of Autistic kid. I shouldn’t say “kid” anymore… she’ll be 18 in January. Of course in a way she’ll always be a kid, and she’ll likely always be with us.

There are lot’s of challenges with having an autistic child. Most are daily things like dealing with problematic sleep patterns, destructive OCD issues, extreme swings in mood or temper, having little or no response to you or anyone else or just trying to keep your cool when it all gets to be too much. Those things seem tough at the time but it’s the bigger issues that can really get to you… like is my child happy? Am I doing the right things to give her the best life she can have? How can I know what she is really feeling? Autistic kids have trouble internalizing and externalizing emotions. Elizabeth doesn’t often respond to anything outside her ordinary routine. We seldom find anything we can do for her that she will genuinely respond to… something she will peek out of her shell for. When we do, it is as magical for The Lovely Anna and I as it is for Elizabeth.

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