Someone brought in a plate of russian teacakes, still warm from the oven, and set them in the break room on Monday. I know they were still warm because I had one. I then whispered the news of the presence of such decadence to my cube neighbor, who also happens to be on Weight Watchers.

She tried to accuse me (laughing the whole time) of dragging her down with me, but I noticed she made a rather hasty beeline to sample the goodies as well.

Plates of homemade cookies and candy and fudge lurk in the break room, or in the separate ‘food cube’ just for our department. There have been boxes of peanut brittle and chocolates from See’s candy.

I don’t care what they try to tell you in any weight loss program. It is nearly impossible to resist temptation this time of year, and it’s not going to get any easier until after next Tuesday.

Wednesday morning I walked out of the shower to hear the sound of crunching. It took all my willpower not to let out a cheer of relief, which would surely have distracted her from the all-important task of eating. After nine days of being force fed, having three pills stuffed down her throat twice a day, and worrying endlessly, Tangerine is finally eating on her own again.

The good news is that she is eating, and I no longer have to sit on the floor and undertake the agonizingly slow task of stuffing gobs of baby food into her mouth. The bad news is that the only thing she will eat is the food that may have been responsible for her sickness. The problem is that we still don’t really know what happened. The vet and suspected irritable bowel, but it was never confirmed. Blood tests, fecal samples, x-rays all gave little or no information.

At least she is finally getting better, but I cannot help but still worry a little. This is the second time in as many years that she has scared us with some unknown illness which causes her to lose weight and her appetite and turns her intestinal tract into a war zone. The last time, we caught her having a seizure. This time I think we caught it before it got that bad. Next time we may not be so lucky.

According to NPR this morning, the thing about lemmings committing mass suicide every few years is a myth. In fact, it’s highly likely that in the documentary produced by Disney decades ago, the lemmings were ‘helped’ over the cliff in order to make it more dramatic. Turns out that while lemmings do migrate in large groups, and do occasionally cross small bodies of water during their migratory routes, they don’t really get a whim every few years to throw themselves to their doom over a cliff.

I’m sure you’re all relieved to know that. So relieved, in fact, that you are completely forgetting the fact that I just admitted that I listen to NPR. On a regular basis, no less. In fact, that’s usually what the radio is turned to these days. Um. Oh dear.

In my defense, I had no choice. It was either NPR, where I could be reasonably assured of getting actual news without the hype, or TV news, where the news (such as it is) is now given, not by newscasters, but by ‘news personalities’, and the truth of what’s spoken is not nearly as critical as whether it will boost their ratings.

Yes, I suppose I could actually break down and get a newspaper again, but for whatever reason, we never end up with time to actually sit down and read a paper. In fact, we never really end up bringing them in from the sidewalk where the carrier deposits them (and can I just ask why the heck it is that newspaper carriers cannot seem to throw things on the porch any more? Back in my day I….um….okay, I’ll hush up now).

So, anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The lemmings. Seems that this story – so long accepted as fact – should really be listed alongside the tales of people having their kidneys removed and waking up in bathtubs full of ice with notes saying ‘get to the hospital immediately’, or the oh-so-believable email that insists that, if you forward it to everyone you know, Bill Gates will personally send you $5000 (and there are apparently financial penalties if you actually *remove* the insanely long accumulation of headers and forwarding information from the email before subjecting it on your nearest and dearest).

Isn’t it comforting to know that urban legends extend into the animal kingdom? Imagine all those little lemmings, sitting around their radios this morning, listening to NPR, sobbing with relief. Finally, someone got it right! They’re not suicidal. They’re just misundersto

The problem with putting up lights on a house, I can already see, is that you are never really done. We already know what will be done in the years to come, once we finally figure out exactly how to scale the topmost part of the roof. The witch’s cap over the master bedroom bay window can be lined, and lights along the edges and angles of the roof will work wonderfully.

But even this year, after taking two weekends to scootch around on ladders and the roof, and making several trips to the store for more gutter hooks and suction cups, we’re coming up with more ideas.

The first problem is, quite simply, that we are swimming in lights. The ones currently adorning the house make up what was left from those used to decorate the reception hall at our wedding. However, this does not even begin to touch the five cases of lights sitting in our garage, purchased pre-wedding by a certain paranoid bride (um. That would be me) who was sure we wouldn’t have enough to light the whole room. In case you hadn’t already figured it out, we didn’t need those five cases after all, but it was too late to return them.

The second problem is that some of the little extra spots that really could use lights this year need shorter strands than what’s currently sitting in those five unopened cases. So despite the fact that we have enough lights to illuminate the entire neighborhood, Richard went out light-shopping today. Or at least he tried.

When I came home, he began to rattle off a list of stores, including hardware, drug, grocery, and others. None of them, it seems, has any more short light strings. Oh, they had them in stock til last weekend, but not any more. If we wanted strings of huge lights, we would be all set. Ditto those light ropes, and those hideous icicle lights that I think should be banned on any house with only one story and a flat roof. Heck, if we wanted strings of big lit birds, we’d be all set as well (Although for some reason, the strings of lit birds really threw Richard. Hee).

So despite all my neat ideas for ‘finishing it off’ this year, I guess I’m just going to have to be patient.

Next year, though. Just wait.

We had a little talk at work today about policies and procedures. Our two friendly HR guys handed out thick notebooks and went over the most important policies. We were all required to sign papers saying we’d read the rest on our own time. Riiiiiight.

They discussed, among other things, workplace harassment, their policy on smoking, alcohol in the workplace, taking time off, and workplace violence. And there really were no surprises. I guess this just means that the company has grown enough to need an official handbook, instead of just assuming things.

The good news is that the CEO of the company really likes the flexibility and freedom we all have and wants us to keep it. That means jeans and sneakers are still okay (phew!), and the flexible schedule is still fine – we can come in as early as we want or stay as late as we want as long as we’re there between 10 and 3. And apparently he has no problem with the little group that does their fantasy football networked gaming after hours. In fact, I got the distinct impression that it was actually encouraged.

The bad news is that because of the new solicitation policy (which – except for one point – I really do agree with), I am not going to be able to count on finding someone at work with a Girl Scout in the family from whom I can order my yearly supply of Thin Mint cookies.

Later that afternoon, we were rudely interrupted by someone across the cube maze playing with their cell phone, obviously showing off each and every one of the 548 different rings it could be set to (including little electronic snippets of Christmas tunes. Shudder). This is not the first time this person – or someone sitting near them – has found great entertainment in the same insane annoyance.

After we’d been subjected to about ten minutes of this I fired off an instant message to my coworker one cube over.

“I think it would be completely justified to go and quietly take that thing and then stomp on it repeatedly until it’s smashed into little bits, don’t you?”

“But wouldn’t that fall under workplace violence?” came her reply, after I heard her laughing.

“Well,” I replied. “I’m not so sure. If you took the jury and forced them to sit in a cube maze and listen to the same thing for fifteen minutes at a stretch, do you really think any of them would side against me?”

The way I see it, if we’re going to get a huge book of policies and procedures, why can’t we add in one more teeny tiny little note? Cell phones in the office must be on vibrate or flash only. Surely that isn’t too much to ask?

We went to lunch with my parents in a little local restaurant. There is a waitress there who knows us all by name. She and my dad tease mercilessly back and forth, with my mom offering encouragement all the while. It’s obvious she’s well loved by the other regular patrons there, by the way she’s greeted.

There’s something homey and comforting about being recognized as a ‘regular’. Even the folks at the local Starbucks know us by sight, if not by name, and the name thing is really our fault. They’ve started asking for names to put on the coffee cups as they call out the order, and so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to give them different names each time (I think my favorite set so far was ‘Thing1’ and ‘Thing2’). This is becoming more of a challenge, however. Either we need to go to Starbucks less often, or give up and give our real names one of these days.

I did the second round of holiday baking this afternoon. Richard was roped into helping (although I think he enjoyed it) and got to roll sticky chocolate goo into truffles coated in cocoa powder, while I dropped globs of chocolate dough onto baking pans and slid them into the oven. There is the lingering aroma of chocolate and sweetness in the air now, and my need to bake is satiated for at least a few more days. At least one pan of fudge and two more varieties of cookies (the most time-intensive ones, of course) remain to be made. There are Christmas cards still to mail, and one final present left to complete, but overall, I feel as if this year I’m actually on track. It’s nice to not feel rushed; to feel as if I have time to do all the things I want and need to do. I wonder how long it is going to take before I finally get used to this feeling.

We got the rest of the lights up today – finally. We’d made a half-hearted attempt last Sunday, but didn’t get very far, mainly because neither of us really wanted to brave putting the lights on the second story gutters. Today, however, Richard got to be all manly and while I wandered around inside, armed with strings of lights and suction cups for the windows, he tackled the garage and the second story. And we got them done – while it was still light out and without either of us sliding off the roof. Phew.

There is a house in town that does – in my opinion – the perfect example of truly classy lights. It’s two stories, with a steep pitched roof similar to ours, and all sorts of gables and angles, and they’ve lined every possible edge with tiny white lights. It might sound a bit overdone, but on this house, it isn’t. It’s perfect. They also line the branches of the little trees, and draw a perfect edge to their yard. They do this in both the front and the back, as both sides are visible if you know where to drive. It is a truly amazing sight. I have seen this house every year since my parents moved to this town and I’ve driven to their house during the holidays. It has always been lit. I have coveted their lights.

Of course when we drove out there tonight so I could actually take a picture of this incredible display, no lights were to be seen! I’m hoping that they simply hadn’t turned them on for the night, but there may be a more unappealing reason – that they simply didn’t put them up this year. Sob.

I did take a picture of our house in all its little white light glory, but it didn’t come out very well. So instead I shall leave you with this, just in case anyone out there needed some alternative decorating ideas.

The last thing I did before I left work today was sit down and make out a To Do list for tomorrow. That’s the first time I’ve had to do that. I was actually pretty excited about it. The logjam is clearing; work is moving down the pipe to us; it’s starting to get busy. Hooray!

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I am starting to think that perhaps I ought to try training my voice to sing alto. It’s either that, or I need to break down and buy myself some hydraulic lifts for my shoes. The choir director puts us tenors in the very back when we’re all standing, and even though we’re up on the top step, I still end up bobbing up and down between the basses and making the other tenors shuffle around until I can find the one spot where I can still see. Because the group is getting so large, they’re discussing building some temporary risers for when we sing the cantata this weekend. The two guys who were discussing it assured me they’d build an extra-high one for me. It’s either that or Sunday I’m going to break down and bring a milk crate to stand on. Heh.

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They are predicting a winter storm tonight. Wind advisories abound on the radio and rain’s a’ coming, so they say. It was sprinkling as we drove home from choir practice, but it didn’t look remotely stormy.

All I require is that if there *is* a storm coming, that it rain and blow itself out by Saturday. We have lights to put up, darn it.

Tangerine is sick. Since Sunday she has gone rapidly downhill, turning from purring, affectionate cat to this miserable lump hiding in the linen closet. Richard called our vet, but as she’s a house call-only, she thought this required more tests than she could run with her limited facilities. So she sent him and Tangerine off to another one – someone who comes with belated positive comments from people I spoke with after the fact. I have heard too many bad things about most of the vets in our area, after all.

He took blood and we discussed whether to run x-rays and other tests, but decided, ultimately, to wait, keeping her on bland food to settle her gut and try to minimize the severe diarrhea and vomiting she’s been having. And so since then, we are force-feeding her a mixture of baby food turkey and baby rice, which she takes without much struggle. It’s a delicate balance between how much she’ll let us feed her before she promptly returns it to the floor in a stinky puddle, or whether she’ll keep it down.

This evening, I curled up on the floor next to her and petted her. She moved her face closer and so I did the same. When healthy, this normally results in her trying to remove the skin from the tip of my nose with her tongue, so enthusiastic are her licks. This time she only barely touched me, but still, it was there.

The sheets on our bed right now are dark and medium blue striped flannel. I picked them up on sale last week while running errands and had wrapped them, intending them to be a present to both of us from the cats (the cats also ‘gave’ us a wedding present – one of the Red Dwarf tapes we so badly wanted. Yes, I freely admit I’m weird). But I couldn’t wait three more weeks for the warmth I knew they’d bring. So the present idea was scrapped, the sheets were washed to get rid of the smell and stiffness of being new, and last night we put them on the bed. I slipped into the freshly laundered flannel last night and, for the first time in weeks since winter hit, I wasn’t cold. It made it that much harder to leave bed this morning when the alarm clock yelled insistently at me, but that’s a small price to pay for such simple and luxurious comfort when it’s cold outside.

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I finally broke down and went to my manager Friday. She was a bit frazzled, running from meeting to meeting, but I managed to catch her and asked if she had anything at all that I could do. The simple fact is that I have not been at this job long enough to be able to make my own work. There are projects I could be doing, but I don’t yet know which things are fair game, and which ones would result in me stepping on toes. I did feel awkward and put it off for as long as I could, but there are only so many times I can read the product guides or poke around the new software.

Luckily she had something to give me, and an assurance that things will pick up soon, and seemed to understand my reluctance to not only ask for work, but to admit that I had none in the first place.