1:46 a.m. Well, I am just as pleased as punch, and let me tell you. I am, in fact: bursting with joy! And why, you may ask? Well, let me tell you:

I won an award!

And not just any old award -- nosireee. This award is the neatest, the epitome of cool, the best damn award in the whole journal-writing-on-the-internet gig: The DJR Award.

And guess what is the sweetest part of all, in addition to the award itself being so prestigious and so intrinsically connected with the lovely and multifaceted Xeney?

Well, you don't just get the award and have a nice day and goodby. No. You also receive this free, nifty logo that I will proudly display until the end of time, or the end of electricity, whichever comes first.

In closing, let me just say that I would like to thank the Academy, my mom, my first-grade teacher who believed in me, and all the little people who've made my life such an interesting place and without whom I would be bereft of material.

But most important, I would like to thank Beth, who got fed up one day in 1998 and made up these awards.

Now there was only one teeny tiny dark spot on my sun today, and I must in good conscience report it.

The last time I decided to invite a whole slew of friendly strangers and strange friends to my humble home, I merely had to contend with a kitchen counter that tended to flip drinks to the floor and a few stray chairs with loose cushions that could collapse in a buttocks-pinching frenzy.

But now, merely one week before another festive extravaganza, I find out that I have a mouse loose in here somewhere. A small, brown mouse that I came face to face with this afternoon in a most horrifying, stomach turning encounter when I went into my formerly benign cupboard to grab the canola oil.

I heard a slight scrabbling sound and I thought: Could it be the refrigerator? I don't have an ice maker, but there are coils ... could it be ... well you know what? There's only one thing on the earth that makes that sound. Gnawing.

Right through a vacuum, foil-sealed container of velvety soybean curd, which then leaked all over everything. And then he hid. Scurried.

I hate that in a mouse.

So I had no choice but to remove, quite gingerly I might add, everything from the pantry. Today was not the day I was in the mood to soul-search my choice of ethnic staples or decide whether my impoverished inner child really needs protein powder for Y2K. I was all set to be safer than sorry come the millennium, but not if I'm sharing my stuff with a beady-eyed rubber-fingered furtive thief of a life form.

And I got most of the shelves emptied, looking the whole while for the entrance/egress point so that I could seal it up, when all of a sudden, out from behind a big jar of Progresso: he sprang! He leapt. He squealed and I screamed and got on the handy stool which I'd dragged over to the cupboard for just that purpose.

Then I thought of the camera, of course, as he was running back and forth on the bottom shelf ... and since he is so small and I'm up on a stool ... I actually started to feel sorry for the little critter and tried to talk to him to calm him down, but ...

Well, that didn't work. He got away. He's now in the house somewhere, and I'm wearing slippers and being very deliberately noisy. Maybe, if he has a brain in his little 1-inch noggin, he'll run outside the first chance he gets. But you know that's not going to happen.

I'm giving a party, right? Twill be the night after Christmas and of course there's going to be this creature, who will, of course, be stirring. All through the house.

Welcome to the storybook.