Today could have been another long day, and the morning, at least, was long and involved significant amounts of under-the-breath swearing on my part (due mainly to attempting to get Sharepoint to do what I wanted it to do, despite its best efforts to thwart me). This afternoon, however, was much less stressful, because today was our office’s holiday lunch.

I bought the stuff for the annual gift exchange last year at the day-after-Christmas sales, but naturally forgot to bring it with me to the office this morning. Luckily the restaurant to which we went was pretty close to where I live, so I just dashed out the door about ten minutes before everyone else, and managed to get home, get the thing wrapped, and get back to the restaurant before the half the others arrived.

Lunch was delicious, and we all sat around the table and talked and laughed and had a very nice time. We did the gift exchange (we always do a white elephant sort of thing, except everyone brings nice presents instead of tacky crap) and we ate dessert (oh so good) and then I pondered, briefly, going back to the office, but by then it was almost 3:30 and it was so very close to my house, and the lunch was deliberately scheduled late so we could all just take the rest of the day off, so…I did. I wish I could say that I came home and took care of things that needed to be done at the house, like laundry or dishes or putting things away, but instead I came home and I curled up on the sofa with several cats and an afghan and I read a book. When Richard came home we peered into the depths of the fridge and the freezer and finally decided on hot dogs for dinner (we have been extremely uninspired to cook this week), except we didn’t have any buns, so instead we wrapped them in tortillas. Richard made noises about white trash dinner, except that, as I pointed out, a white trash dinner would use regular flour tortillas, and the ones we used were the high fiber, whole wheat, hippie tree-hugger variety, so at least there was some nod to health, however small. Of course, then he took a bite first and looked thoughtful, so I asked him how it was and he said it tasted about like what you might expect, and now I have been giggling about that all evening.

He had his writers’ group over for a meeting, which meant the house did get a rather hasty tidying, at least, and I went off to my weekly knitting group and drank coffee and worked on the big, giant project that is sucking up all my free time as well as my life, until one of the women who’s most recently given birth showed up with her adorable new little baby boy, and then we all took turns passing the baby around and cooing at him and admiring his little knit hat and booties (a hazard of being a baby born into a knitting group), and it was a very lovely way to end a very nice day.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies