My wonderful family -- husband, brother and daughter -- pooled their pennies for my Christmas gift and smuggled my new PC into the house wrapped in a bedspread. Several times they discussed giving it to me earlier, they said, after watching me struggle first with a dying desktop, then with a laptop gone mad. And reading here about this stint in computer hell.

This crew obviously had fun planning the surprise, and keeping it a secret. Even the guy who was allegedly fixing my desktop was in on it. ("He can't get to it till after Christmas" was the cover story. The old box was actually in pieces in my daughter's living room -- she copied its old drives to the new computer so I'd still have all my familiar files.

I burned the Firefox and Thunderbird directories to a CD, and copied them to the new /windows/Application Data/ directories, so the settings, bookmarks and extensions are my old familiar ones, and the mail's all there.

The 8-year-old has a giant stocking as big as he is, but his runaway-hit gift was a little $2.49 Mini Remote Control Skateboard Car from geeks.com. He ran that little guy around the house for hours, using duct tape to turn shipping boxes into ramps and occasionally following the dude into the tunnels. Online shipping is precise in its box shapes, and large, to accommodate buffering air packs and sometimes those wretched foam peanuts that fly. Telescoping sizes introduced jumps for the dude.

Everybody got to be part of the obstacle course. "Don't step on the little guy" was the meme of the day all over the house.

I'm blessed to belong to these people.

I hope your holiday was as warm and fine, and that the feeling sticks around.

I'm on vacation this week, time to read, think, clean house, dole out catnip, live the timeless life...