“Is it time to go home yet?”

“No. It’s not even 10 am. Unfortunately.”

“Can’t we call it a snow day?”

“Well. It’s not exactly snowing. This being Sacramento and all.”

“True. But somewhere in this country there is snow, right this very moment.”

“So we should have a snow day to show our support?”

“Exactly!”

********

“Um. Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well. Your eye is all red.”

“Oh. Well. Uh. You see. I was brushing my hair out of my face and I…um.. poked myself in the eye.”

“You poked yourself in the eye?”

“Yes.”

“With what, a pen?”

“Um. No. My finger.”

“I see.”

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“No. But I can hear you laughing.”

********

“There’s a sign on the door to the men’s bathroom, saying that it is out of order.”

“I noticed that. Any idea why?”

“No. I was here over the weekend and it was working just fine.”

“I happened to notice the doorknob is missing. Maybe they’re doing some kind of hardware swap?”

“Or maybe it’s the *door* that’s out of order and the toilet is working just fine.”

Happy Holidailies

At church every year we do a food fight, which is where the congregation is divided into two teams who ‘compete’ to see who can bring in the most food for the local food bank. This year they asked my knitting mom and me if we’d be the team leaders, and do it as a knitting theme. We tossed around a few ideas and at first we decided we would knit 1 inch per every 10 pounds or 10 ounces of cereal (the food banks really need breakfast cereal so to encourage people to bring that, we count ounces of cereal the same as pounds of other food). But then we switched the rules and decided instead we would make one scarf for every 100 pounds (all scarves to be donated to the local shelters), and we encouraged other knitters and crocheters in the congregation to join in.

The food drive’s been going on for a few weeks already and it’s usually pretty successful, regardless of how the teams are led. But all of this is a lead up to explain why it is that this morning I dragged Richard up in front of the church, and my knitting mom brought her little grandson, and the two of us gleefully decorated each of them with scarves – nine for my team and ten for hers. Which means that before this morning we had nearly 2000 pounds/ounces of food/cereal for the food bank, which is pretty awesome. And after sorting and weighing all the donations after the service, I’ve got 4 more scarves to make and she has 3, and we’re nearly to 3000 pounds total, which is even better.

It has been a very knitting sort of day, actually. It started with the scarves, of course, followed by meeting a friend in Vacaville at a craft store because she wanted some advice and recommendations on picking out yarn to make stuff for her family for Christmas. So we wandered up and down the yarn aisle and I was very, very good and bought no yarn at all (even though I was awfully tempted once or twice) but instead helped her pick out a whole basket full. And then we came back to my house, where I walked her through casting on, and also how to bind off and weave in the ends, and loaded her down with several sizes of circular needles to try, and my copy of Stitch and Bitch because it has very useful pictures and tutorials, and a skein of yarn for practicing casting on and binding off, and a set of tapestry needles because she’ll need those for the aforementioned binding off, and I am hopeful that I did not completely overwhelm her with information and that she will have fun finishing off her basket of colorful scarves-in-larval-form.

And then I pondered the fact that there are only two weeks until Christmas so I scribbled out a list of stuff for Richard because he is the one who writes our yearly Christmas letter, and then it was right back to the knitting. First I made pom poms out of sparkly green yarn and then I finished a pair of socks, and then I had a little fun with my ball winder (have I mentioned how very much I adore my ball winder?) and created a lovely little pile of perfectly cylindrical skeins of yarn, and then I cast on for the body of the very last snowman that I will ever have to make (this year, that is – alas, there are many more snowman in my future but those do not need to be done until next Christmas) and then I tried to work on yet another food fight scarf, but Sebastian sat on my lap and as I have recently discovered, he possesses the uncanny ability to make me fall asleep at any time of day or night just by curling up on me and it is very hard to knit when you are dozing off and in danger of poking yourself with sharp sticks. So instead finishing the last damn snowman I ended up sitting on the loveseat surrounded by three cats who kept purring at me and sapping my will to move or do anything remotely productive, and watched Grey’s Anatomy and pretended that I have oodles more time to get all my gift knitting (plus three more food fight scarves this week and who knows how many next week) done before Christmas than just two weeks.

Happy Holidailies

I woke up this morning to the distinct realization that there was a Crisis going on. This was because both Sebastian and Rosemary were busily pacing back and forth across our pillows, purring as loudly as they could and sometimes yelling. I was more than a little annoyed because at the time it was barely past when I usually get up to feed them their breakfast, and it’s not like they were starving, what with two full bowls of kibble available to them. But then as I staggered out of bed and passed by their food dishes I realized that in fact, a Crisis had occurred. The bottoms of both food bowls were visible and there was barely any kibble to be seen. Oh, the horror.

This eventually led to the discovery that we were also practically out of their food, so while Richard headed off to go to a writer’s group brunch, I headed off to the vet to buy them a new bag of food. And then while I was in the area I did a little bit of Christmas stocking stuffer shopping, and proceeded on to Vacaville to go to CostCo and stock up on giant bags of rice and cereal for the church and work food drives.

My parents spent last week in Williamsburg, Virginia, so I met them for lunch and my dad brought along his laptop so I could see all the pictures. It sounds like they had a marvelous time, and I am even more certain that this is someplace Richard and I need to go, one of these years. Then it was off to the theater to purchase tickets for the Narnia film, since I was the only one of the group of us going who had the free time to get there beforehand so we could avoid any lines or crowds. I did this as well because I know that if one is prepared and gets tickets in advance and arranges to meet with plenty of time before the film, this will guarentee there are no lines or crowds at all, and of course I was right.

The movie is amazingly well done. I haven’t read the Narnia series in far too many years (in fact, now that I think about it, I likely have not read them since junior high), and I deliberately did not read the books again before going to the movie because I did not want to be distracted by making silly comparisons. But from what I remember (and from what others in our group remember of the books) they managed to remain quite faithful to the story. The four actors who played the children were perfect for the part, especially the little girl who plays Lucy, the CGI was moderately well done (it was a bit jerky in places, but nothing so bad as to be unforgivable) and the woman who played the witch managed to portray cold and evil brilliantly.

After the movie we swung by a friend’s house to meet her new little kitten – a fuzzy little calico with an adorable patchwork face, who thought that hair was a prefectly acceptable toy, and that her own tail was edible. And then we came back home and spent a small amount of time sorting through the box of Godiva chocolates I got last night, using the handy cheat sheet to figure out what each piece was, and we each had two pieces of chocolate for dinner, just because we could, and sometimes that is the best part about being an adult.

Happy Holidailies

This year for our office holiday gathering we went to The Melting Pot, which is a fondue restaurant. Richard and I have been there a few times before, and my boss and his wife have done fondue a number of times with their family, and I think maybe one other person there had had fondue once in her life. But for everyone else this was a brand new experience. And it was a pretty funny one because we are the most indecisive bunch of people when trying to pick a place to go for lunch during a workday, and here we were, faced with a list of choice a mile long. I think everyone was a bit overwhelmed, so, since I am such the shy and retiring type (ha!) I finally decided to play cruise director, and we picked three cheese choices, and then three cooking choices, and then finally three entree choices, and by the time we’d made it through all of that and were ready to choose three chocolates, we were all so full and relaxed that no one really cared as long as chocolate somehow magically appeared on the table in front of us in some form or another.

The entire dinner was a lot of fun. We ended up just getting up and milling about the table for all three courses, because we all wanted to try everything and it was just easier to do it that way than to try to play musical chairs, or move very hot pots of liquid goo around without spilling. Everyone got into the whole thing with great enthusiasm and we all ate far too much, but that is the way of things at a fondue restaurant. There was a lot of chatter and laughing, and one of the partners pulled out gift bags which held marvelous surprises, and each of which had a gift certificate for dinner at someplace nice. The bag I chose has a box of Godiva chocolates which I am almost afraid to open because then I will eat it all (yum!), and a gift certificate to The Slocum House, which is an extremely nice restaurant in Fair Oaks to which Richard and I have never gone. Amusingly, that’s where one of my coworkers and her husband go every year for their anniversary, and the gift certificate in her bag was to The Firehouse, which is where Richard and I go quite often for our anniversary, and at first we decided to do a swap, but then we came to the conclusion that obviously this meant we were fated to try new things, and everyone got to laugh at us because we immediately began swapping recommendations on what to try at each place.

People talk about how awful office parties can be – with people getting drunk, or having forced secret Santa gift exchanges or horrible white elephant games, so I guess I am very, very lucky. I like all my coworkers and I like my job and we all have fun together, even if it does sometimes take us two hours to decide where we want to go for lunch, and maybe there are annoying office neighbors and maybe some days I would cheerfully murder the damn pigeons who have decided to roost outside my window and Will Not Shut Up, but I wouldn’t trade any of it because when compared to all the horror stories I hear other people tell, I have it pretty damn good and I am thankful.

Happy Holidailies

Today at work I got an email from my boss asking for help getting a report finalized. Since I had most of the pieces available to me, I started putting them all together, and while trying to insert chunks of previously formatted Excel into a Wor document would make even the calmest person swear like a sailor, that was not remotely the worst of the whole thing. The worst was dealing with the dozen images that also needed to be inserted – except, of course, that the images exported to nearly 30 mb if I put them into jpg, Word refuses to play nicely with tif files (which was my only other export option), and trying to open the tif or jpg files with my usual graphic editors basically caused my entire computer to freeze up and make me do more than one manual reboot before I finally realized that it just wasn’t going to happen.

I eventually ended up opening the stupid files in Paint, saving them to gif (because it’s the only way I could think to compress them into something that Word would actually *recognize*. I run weekly processes on some of the remote servers that take quite a while, but at least with those I can be doing other things while they’re running. In this case, however (and I learned the hard way, boom, crash went the computer again), the only thing that would work was for me to open the files, save them in the new format, and then sit back and twiddle my thumbs for the several minutes per file it took to do all this because the process gobbled up nearly every single available bit of memory on my computer and nothing else would work.

Have I mentioned lately just how much I really adore Microscoffed?

Anyway. To counteract the grumbling, I give you an Azzie story. Azzie, for those of you new readers, is a very fluffy black cat who is sort of a perpetual kitten even though he is now six, and would likely lose a battle of wits with an overripe cantaloupe. Think Nermal (from the Garfield cartoon) – wide eyed and hopelessly adorable, but really, really dumb.

A week or so ago we were sitting in the breakfast nook eating breakfast, and Azzie suddenly got all excited and jumped onto the window sill. Turns out he’d found himself a fly, and even better, he managed to catch it. He bapped it around for a bit, until the poor fly could only sit on the window sill and buzz weakly, and then, ready to give it his mighty death blow, he stepped forward in anticipation, and to his great surprise, the fly disappeared. He could not find it. He kept backing up and lifting up his front paws and looking at the sill underneath until he nearly fell off the edge, but still, no fly. I had my suspicions, especially considering how he kept shaking one paw every time he’d lift it, but I was laughing too hard to do anything about it until a few moments later, when he finally gave up the search for the lost fly, and came over to sit on my lap, and then got really, really annoyed with me because I wouldn’t let him until I had removed the mangled fly carcass from between his very fuzzy toes.

Happy Holidailies

Normally, I can tune out the people in the office next door. Normally, upon hearing the laughing and the rearranging of heavy equipment (something they seem to do rather frequently), and especially upon hearing the thundering of tiny feet that heralds a visit from their children, who seem to delight in running up and down the stairs (which are right behind the wall next to where I sit), I can just shrug and do my best to ignore it. But on days when my sinuses decide that the abrupt shift in temperature outside requires a corresponding abrupt bout of intense and painful pressure inside my head, I become much more sensitive to all the thunping and thundering and squealing and yelling. I want to pound on the ceiling and force them to talk in normal tones of voices instead of hollering back and forth to each other. I want to ask them to stop dropping heavy things on the floor in the loft. And I most especially want to reach through the wall and hang up the damn phone because when you call someone and they do not answer even after it rings 20 times, they are not there, and putting them on speaker phone and turning the volume all the way up just so the rest of the world can also hear the phone ring-ring-ring-ring-ring will not make them magically appear to answer the damn thing. It seems unfair, somehow, that with the way our office is laid out, only those of us in the back corner cave are subjected to the neighbor noise – and not just the ones next door to us, but also the lawyers down below, whose normal mode of communication seems to be arguing with each other at the top of their lungs.

I ended up going home early on Monday because I was in so much pain, and even though it eventually subsided, the pain returned in force last night. The joy of sinus hell is that when it gets this bad is is usually also accompanied by enough nausea that I cannot trust my ability to take medication, for fear that the introduction of a pill to my queasy stomach will be all it takes to spur the whole experience on, and having endured the fun of throwing up while in the midst of a sinus attack and feeling as if my head really just might explode from the force of the pressure, it’s something I’m rather loathe to do again.

It is frustrating, this thing with my sinuses. I have been on the allergy shots now for over a year, and while I no longer get the sinus congestion so bad I cannot breathe through my nose for days on end, the sinus pressure attacks have gotten progressively worse. Even more frustrating is that the only medication that seems to wrench my sinuses back into compliance is starting to not work as effectively any more, leaving me pondering ways in which to stab something sharp enough to penetrate my cheek bones, just so that I might reach the damn sinuses and clear them out once and for all.

Happy Holidailies

After the rain we had this week (rain for which the local news kept interrupting Lost on Wednesday night to foam at the mouth about how we are having a Winter Storm – um, not), I checked the forecast for the weekend and decided that since it was to be sunny and nice this weekend, we ought to take advantage of the break in the weather to take care of all the outdoor parts of decorating the house for Christmas. There are fewer pre-Christmas weekends this year, since Christmas falls on a Sunday, and the unfortunate thing about this time of year is that by the time we get home it is too dark to do anything like go tree-hunting, or climb out on the roof to put up lights, so if we are going to do either, it has to be the weekend, or not at all.

Thus, yesterday we got up and despite the overwhelming desire to just say to heck with it and loll around all day in our pajamas doing nothing remotely productive, we instead headed out and tackled the lengthy list of things to get accomplished. First stop breakfast, followed by Costco, since we needed to get stuff for the food drive at church (for which I am one of the team leaders), plus we’re doing the food drive again at work so I wanted to have something to bring in for that. And while we were in the area I needed to get a skein of brown yarn for a gift I am making for Christmas, so we first went to Joann’s, but they have apparently decided, in their infinite lack of wisdom, that the only people who want to buy yarn prefer to buy the foofy fluffy stuff that is only good for scarves, and have been slowly phasing out all their basic solid color worsted. Luckily Michael’s has a marvelous yarn selection – something I have tended to forget, but will remember now that Joann’s is no longer an option – so I found the yarn I needed, plus some yarn that I didn’t, but which needed to come home with me anyway. And then we stopped by CompUSA because even though neither of us can stand that place it is the closest source of ink for our printer.

We managed to get all of this accomplished before noon, so next was to swing by Blockbuster because while transferring all my stuff from the old purse to the new purse last weekend, I stumbled upon a Blockbuster gift card. I am not entirely sure where it came from, but we figured we might as well take advantage of the opportunity to score some free DVD’s, and they just happened to have a copy of Signs, which I have decided I must watch every Halloween, even though it makes me cry every time I see it. And then it was off to the local tree farm (because how cool is it to have a tree farm in your very own town) to cut down our Christmas tree.

I remembered that we prefer the incense cedar, so we went to that section first. But I was appalled to discover that the tree farm decided that trimming all the other types of trees wasn’t bad enough, so they also had to go trimming all the incense cedar trees into perfect, narrow cones. I can only assume that a majority of people prefer their trees to look perfect and fake and that I am apparently in a very small minority, but I prefer my tree to look like, well, a tree. If I am going to go through the bother of cutting down my own tree I want it to have imperfections – little bare spots, or branches sticking out in odd directions. A tree should have personality. If I wanted a perfect cone-shaped tree I’d go buy a damn fake tree, for crying out loud.

Poor Richard got to listen to me mutter and grumble about what the tree farm did to the incense cedars as we tramped around in a futile search for one they might have missed. Finally we headed for the tiny little patch of redwoods, where we discovered that at least the mad shaping monsters had not attacked them too (yet, I suppose) and we finally found our tree.

We moved the plant stand from the living room to the dining room, where it lives each winter so that the tree can take the place of honor in the bay window. We got the tree into its stand with a minimum of effort and then we dragged down all the boxes of Christmas stuff from the attic (wow, we have a lot). Richard sorted through all the lights, which he carefully labels and wraps each year so that he knows now exactly which ones go to which window or spot on the roof. Then he tackled the lights on the garage and the porch while I started going through all the decorations, and between the two of us we managed to get all the decorations on the tree, and about half the lights hung, and most of the other decorations dispersed throughout the house, and all of that just in time, too, because who should call but Beth to say that they would be passing by our town in an hour or two and could they stop by. Since we haven’t actually been able to see them in a year or two, I immediately said yes, and then we zipped around and did some hasty child-proofing (which, in a house with five careening cats, doesn’t require much additional work at all) and threw together some chicken and black bean enchiladas because I wasn’t sure if they’d had dinner, and put a pot of cider on the stove to mull, and Richard vacuumed up the excess pine needles from dragging around a freshly cut tree, and by the time they arrived we were more than ready for them.

It was wonderful to get to see them; to meet their newest son (who is now about four months old and very alert and cute) and watch their little three-year-old happily entertain himself for nearly the entire visit with Richard’s set of antique cast iron trains (which are extremely sturdy and perfect for small people to play with as long as they don’t try to drop one of the cars on themselves because cast iron is a bit heavy). We chatted with Sabs about his job as a cook in a restaurant (he recently finished school to become a chef), and with Beth about what she’s been up to with work, and we talked about kids and cats and their new apartment and it seemed like they had barely been there any time at all when they finally had to go.

Today hasn’t been nearly as busy, although we took advantage of the remaining sun and nice weather, and Richard got the rest of the lights hung outside while I got most of the ones inside up and signed and addressed the first batch of 40 or so Christmas cards. We had the remaining enchiladas for dinner while we watched our usual Sunday shows and I was pretty happy that something I threw together on a whim turned out so darn good. We mulled more cider and turned on the lights on the tree and with all the decorations out and the house smelling faintly like pine, it isn’t too hard to believe that Christmas is only a few weeks away.

It has been a surprisingly nice week. Yes, there have been a few days of rather heavy rain, but even that hasn�t managed to change the fact that it’s been a nice week.

Considering we’ve got the cantata coming up and the director is usually pretty stressed by now, and especially considering that the cantata he picked for us this year is likely one of the hardest things we have ever done (the fact that at times we split into 9 parts might have something to do with that), the fact that choir practice last night was remarkably low key and even mostly enjoyable was a large part of why this has been a nice week. I am having a wonderful time with this cantata because, since there are only two of us tenors and he is more comfortable with the low notes while I tend to prefer the higher ones, when we split, I stay on the top line, and can remain blissfully immune to all the confusion the rest of the tenor and bass section have to deal with. I noted that this meant I got to pretend I was a soprano, not ever having to worry about which part I was supposed to sing, at craft night tonight, and one of the other people there reminded me that this didn’t apply to *all* sopranos (she happens to be a second soprano, so in a piece of music with sometimes nine parts, she *definitely* has to be paying attention). Plus this particular cantata has a number of men-only choral sections that are also actually challenging, so it is a lot of fun to sing.

Another reason why it has been such a lovely week is that I had today off from work. So I got to sleep in a little bit, and then, because I finally managed to schedule an appointment (I have been trying for weeks now) I got a long overdue haircut, during which she chopped off several inches and restored my blah hair to its former almost cute self. Then, because the stars were aligned perfectly and I not only had the free time, but am not even sick, I zipped off to the blood center and spent a few hours sitting in a chair watching Bride and Prejudice (which is the sort of movie that is only entertaining because it is just so truly bad) while they stuck needles in my arm and hooked me up to a machine and sucked a triple donation of platelets out of me because I may not have much in other respects, but by golly, I have oodles of those.

It’s been a few years since I was able to do this sort of donation, so I’d forgotten just how much this tends to wipe me out, but that’s okay, I had the day off! So I went home and took a short nap and then camped out in bed and worked on my knitting and ended up sitting there far longer than I’d intended, all the while having to go to the bathroom more and more desperately but unwilling to move because Zucchini decided that after twelve years of being too nervous to do more than pace around near me and occasionally let me scritch his head before he has to run away in terror, he needed to sit on my lap! And not only was he on my lap, he was purring and batting at the yarn and letting me pet him and I think this means the world might end, but that’s okay, because after twelve years he has finally decided that he can trust me enough to sit on my lap.

I told this to the people at craft night tonight (where there were kittens to play with, which just added to the week of good) and there were enough people there who know about him to realize just how much of an amazing thing this is, and also people there who have cats who are not quite as invisible or as terrified as Zucchini is, but still pretty skittish, and so even though they might not know the whole story about Zucchini, they completely understood why it nearly brought me to tears.

Ever since we hosted Thanksgiving three years ago, Richard’s been wanting to try barbecuing a turkey on his grill. I wasn’t willing to let him try it on the year we were hosting, figuring it might not be wise to experiment with the turkey when one is supposed to feed 17 people with it. And over the years we’ve talked about getting a small turkey and trying it out, but we’ve never managed to get it together enough to do it til now.

Yesterday while I was off braving the (surprisingly uncrowded) malls with my older sister Richard headed off to the Co-op in Davis and picked out a 20 pound free range turkey, which was just about the smallest bird they had left. It was, however, quite frozen, so we weren’t able to grill it yesterday, as had been the original plan. As it turned out, that was just as well, since we managed to grill it up today and have a surprise dinner guest to share it with.

Richard had put the bird in the fridge yesterday to thaw, but it was still pretty frozen by this morning. So switched to the sink-full-of-water method of thawing, which meant by the time we got back home after lunch, it was finally ready to go. We’d pretty much just walked in the door when the doorbell rang, and who should be on the doorstep but Richard’s best friend. He chatted with us while we frantically rummaged through drawers looking for 9-volt batteries in order to swap out the dead ones in the two smoke alarms which had started to beep in a truly lovely manner (luckily neither of the dead ones were located in the most inconvenient smoke alarm, which requires the use of our tallest ladder, and a lot of swearing), and he chatted with us while Richard got the coals started, and I pondered the fact that it would be far more fun to make a dinner for three people instead of just two, and it didn’t take much coercing at all to convince him to stay a few more hours to share in the barbequed turkey experiment. And this meant I had a marvelous excuse for whipping out a few recipes I’d been wanting to try, so I zipped off to the store and loaded up on sweet potatoes and russets and apples and butter and cream and while Richard occasionally poked at the turkey and he and his friend chattered about school and writing and kids and everything else, I stirred together an apple walnut cake. We discovered just how little counter space we really have in our kitchen, because when there are three people in there – one peeling various forms of potatoes and one chopping up said potatoes and the third huddling in the corner where all the baking supplies live stirring up cake and biscuits and the topping for the sweet potatoes, it got a little crowded.

Somehow we managed to time everything perfectly, despite having no idea just how long the turkey might take, and despite the sweet potatoes taking twice as long to cook as the recipe claimed, and despite me having to recalculate the cooking time for the biscuits because I had to toss them in with other stuff which cooked at lower temperatures. Richard tossed the turkey giblets into a pan with a large mound of butter and when they were cooked I chopped them up into tiny pieces and spread them all over two plates and then lured the cats upstairs with promises of treats so we could eat in peace.

The barbequed turkey turned out marvelously, and the rest of the meal was pretty darn good too. I cheated on the gravy and just bought a few cans of pre-made stuff because I didn’t feel like trying to remember how to make my own (it was enough I remembered what to do with the potatoes, since I think this was possibly the second time I’ve ever made mashed potatoes in my life), and we all agreed that in hind sight we should have considered also making some kind of stuffing, but there was more than enough food on the table as it was, especially for only three people, and lots of it left over, even after we’d all done our best to stuff ourselves silly.

The apple cake recipe called for a homemade caramel sauce as well, so I stirred that up, after stuffing a stack of plastic containers at our friend and insisting he fill them up with as much of the leftovers as he wanted, since we figured starving college students should always get first crack at homemade food. And then we sat down to small slivers of the cake, drizzled with the caramel sauce and served with scoops of vanilla bean ice cream and ooh, it was good but so incredibly dense that I knew larger pieces would just make us all explode. I put half the remaining cake on a plate for him to take with him because he has roommates to feed it to and there was no way Richard and I would be able to plow through the rest of it by ourselves before it started to go funny (it is quite possibly one of the heaviest cakes I have ever had, but so very good that I am definitely saving this recipe for the next time I have to make something for a potluck or some other gathering where there will be a lot of people). And then we sent our friend back off to San Francisco, loaded down with boxes of leftovers that I am not sure even made a dent in the remaining pile of food, and now Richard and I have both collapsed wearily into our chairs in front of our computers and I am curious to see if I will be able to stay awake long enough to make it through Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy because I am so, so full, and somehow a huge turkey feast spent with one of our very dear friends seems to be the perfect way to end the Thanksgiving week.

It was absolutely lovely to be able to sleep in this morning to the oh-so-late hour of 7:30. That’s about when my brain simply could not stand being idle any longer, followed a fraction of a nanosecond after by the arrival of several of the cats, who all could immediately sense that I was finally awake. No matter – I had plenty of knitting to get done, and laundry to wash, so I got started on that, after first feeding the cats because making them wait any longer for their breakfast – even though they have two bowls of kibble upstairs, available to them any time of day or night – would surely have constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

My mom called first, it being Saturday and one of the first weekends in a while where we’ve actually been home to receive the traditional Saturday morning phone call. And then my older sister called, wanting to know if I was interested in going shopping, Christmas is coming and she actually had some time to take advantage of. I pondered my tentative plans for the day – more knitting (because by Christmas I will have made ten snowmen and you know what? They are cute but I am starting to get a wee bit tired of making them) and possibly dragging ourselves out of the house to run errands, and a husband who I knew would much rather hole up in front of his computer to continue writing because November – and thus Nanowrimo – is not yet over. And I also pondered just how long it’s been since my sister and I got to hang out together, just the two of us, so after about two seconds of thought on the whole thing, I noted that my only time limitation was in waiting until I had clothing that wasn’t still sopping wet (see above mention of needing to do laundry), but no problem, because she wasn’t going to be heading out until after lunch anyway.

It was actually a fun trip. I was half afraid the mall would be crowded and horrible with after-Thanksgiving shoppers, but if there was any sort of mad post-holiday rush, it must have occurred yesterday, and so today it wasn’t bad at all. We wandered around Mervyn’s first, and even though I was supposed to be looking for ideas for the few Christmas presents we have left to buy, there were sweaters on sale (and I have been needing some new winter tops) and miraculously I found a purse that meets all the criteria for what I need in a purse and it was also on sale, and then there were these really cute Christmas guest towels and even better, when we went to pay for our finds, even though we’d both managed to lose our 15% off cards, the clerk gave us the discount anyway, plus an additional $10 off the whole check. Plus she did not laugh (well, too much) when I asked for a pair of scissors so I could immediately remove all the tags from my new purse and start using it right away, and my sister also refrained from laughing (too much) at me when I insisted that I needed to go find a quite, flat spot to commence with the transfer of purse contents. So we got small caramel sundaes from Dairy Queen and bemoaned the rather glaring lack of seating in the mall and instead perched on the floor in an out-of-the-way corner so I could dump the old purse into the new one and use it as an excuse to also clean it out. And then we wandered around a few other places and eventually made our way over to Target, where stocking stuffer shopping commenced with great abandon, before we realized that it was way past the time when she said she really had to start heading back. So we both headed home in separate directions and I stopped by the fabric store on my way home so I could pick up a large sack of polyfill (to stuff all those darn snowmen) now I am home, where it is warm and there are cats, and there is pizza on the way for dinner and presents stashed away in secret places.

It is funny, that on Thanksgiving, when we went around the table to say what we are thankful for, my mind went blank and so all I could think to say was that I am thankful for my family. But tonight, it all comes clear. I am thankful for this – for being lucky enough to have a wonderful husband and a nice house, and a family who is (mostly) close enough to visit as often as I want; thankful for yarn and cats and afghans to cuddle into when it is cold outside, and for the change of seasons and most of all, just because.