When one is overweight, one does not usually particularly enjoy clothes shopping, because no matter how much you might try to delude yourself about your own weight, those dressing room mirrors – especially the three-way ones – never lie.

But the company’s holiday party is this Friday and my wardrobe – perfect for the rest of the year when I can get away with living in jeans or slacks or the occasional skirt and top requirement – is sadly lacking in evening wear of the formal variety. And since I actually *want* to go to this party because – unlike with the Big Fish – I actually like my company, this meant I had to go shopping. Dress shopping. Shudder. To say I was not looking forward to it is a rather large understatement.

By the time I came back from the store I was floating. I found a dress. Actually, I found several dresses, in a size smaller than what I initially thought I’d have to wear, and had the giddy joy of having to choose only one, instead of having to settle for simply something in my size. For the first time in a very long time I stood in the dressing room in the department store and I actually liked what I saw in that mirror.

I can spout all the good reasons for why I’m losing this weight. I can earnestly insist that it’s entirely health-related – that my appearance is really only a minor part of the whole thing.

But standing there in the dressing room, wearing a dress that made me smile at what I saw in the mirror instead of want to weep, I had to admit that sometimes, appearance is everything. And it’s so, incredibly, worth it.

I am not a big fan of heights. In fact, heights and I have never been what you might call friends, or even mere acquaintances. Richard can attest to this, considering that the drive up to the ranch takes those horrid twisty mountain roads that have a sheer cliff going up on one side, and another one going down on the other side. These are the type that we drive with me clenching the armrest on the car door with white knuckles, begging him to slow down and let the snails on the road pass us, and saying Unkind Things about the lack of sturdier guardrails on every curve of the road.

So, bearing this in mind, I was not exactly excited about the prospect of joining my husband on the roof to put up Christmas lights. Now that we’ve got this gorgeous house, all those slopes and bay windows and pitched roofs just cry out for lights. And clever me, I insisted that this was the job of the husband. My job was to bake – his was to climb around on ladders.

It was a good plan, really it was. It just didn’t work out quite as anticipated, as was obvious this morning when I sat on the roof outside our bedroom window, snapping little plastic hooks onto every other stupid little light on a string that suddenly seemed miles long, reminding myself over and over not to look down.

The problem, you see, is that putting up Christmas lights is really not a one-person job. EvilPheemy came over yesterday to help, but they didn’t get very far before it got too dark and his wife and I came and shooed them back inside. So unless we can wheedle someone else out to help him, I’m going to have to be the one to do it.

We’ve got a few strands of lights up so far. We’re going to tackle the garage next – something I’m actually a bit relieved about because that only requires standing on a low ladder and I won’t have to ever look down to help. We’d love to get lights on the second story gutters, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen this year. I’m convincing myself that this will be a long term project – that perhaps we’ll add a string or two every year…or at least whenever we get someone else over here who doesn’t mind flitting around on the roof or rickety ladders to help.

Every year, when my family would drive up to get our Christmas tree, we’d eye all the different varieties and do the traditional ‘what kind of tree did we get last year that we said we liked best?’ It was one of those little factoids that we all swore we’d remember *this* time, and then of course promptly forget shortly after the holidays were over and the tree taken down, until next December when we were faced with a list of ten different versions of evergreen.

I’m pleased to report that Richard and I did our own little version of this as we wandered the tree farm today, he with the requisite tree saw slung over one shoulder, and me peering at the map, trying to figure out the orientation so we could find the right kind of tree.

So this year I’m writing it down – in here, of course, where I will promptly forget that I ever recorded it. But hey, at least I’m trying. This year we cut down a perfect scotch pine, with a top sturdy enough to hold the pretty gold wire star we purchased over Thanksgiving.

The tree farm smells marvelously of pine. As you walk the muddy trails between the trees you cannot help but take deep gulping breaths, trying to inhale the cleanness off the air, and that hint of Christmas coming. We wandered through incense cedars and Monterey pines and rows of redwoods, eying several and considering some until we found Our Tree. Then we sipped hot apple cider while Richard went off to pay for the tree (luckily the kind we like best is also the cheapest. Woo!) and I followed my tree from handler to handler, directing which branches to trim on the bottom, and protecting it from those who wanted to put that nasty flocking on it.

We wrestled our tree into the car, ending up with the top part handing out the window, netting flapping in the breeze as we drove quickly home. Then we got to wrestle it *out* of the car, and that’s where the fun really began.

Unfortunately, while we had them trim off the bottom branches, we didn’t think to have them trim the knots too. We got the tree inside, but trying to get it into the tree stand didn’t exactly work. The trunk was too thick.

No worries. I simply called my dad and convinced him to let us borrow a few saws in exchange for letting them borrow something of ours. The exchange made, saws in hand, we attacked the bottom of our tree. And attacked it. And attacked it. At one point Richard muttered something about maybe looking for a larger tree stand but I wasn’t to be deterred.

We finally got enough of the knots cut off so we could mash the tree stand on. I’m not sure if we’ll ever get it *off* again, but at this point we don’t really care. The important things is that the tree is standing now in our living room, in the bay window, covered in lights and all of our ornaments, and topped with the gold wire star. The house smells of pine and freshly baked gingerbread men (guess what I did *after* we put up the tree?), and there are tiny boughs tucked amid the gargoyles and swords on the fireplace mantel. The cats – after the initial inspection of Something New in the House – are currently ignoring it, but I know only too well that tomorrow morning I am sure to come downstairs and find a few stray ornaments that’ve somehow managed to leap to their doom, entirely unassisted by feline paws (yeah right).

We’ve lots more to do – lights to put outside, more cookies to bake, Christmas cards to write. But for now, this is a pretty good start.

I had an entry written up at work, and then forgot to email it to myself when I left. So you’ll simply have to settle for this little story instead.

This past Sunday when my older sis and hubby were at church with my nearly 3 1/2 year old nephew, they had the children’s time at the front, and they did a little Simon Says game. Simon Says, for those of you who didn’t grow up with this game, is when the leader tells the rest of the group to do things (like hop on one foot, or put your hand on your head), but the rest of the group isn’t to do it unless the leader prefaces the command with “Simon Says.”

They used the game to lead into a very simple discussion on manners, pointing out that in the game, Simon never says “please”, and maybe it would be better if he did.

Much to everyone’s surprise, my nephew did not agree with this and began to argue with the pastor on the subject (much to the amusement of the rest of the congregation). He wasn’t being naughty – he was being very serious. It took a few back-and-forth comments of him insisting that he couldn’t see why Simon had any need to say “please” at all, before he finally mentioned the one thing that cleared it all up.

It seems that, as this was the first time he’d played this game, he was still a little confused. This was only made worse by the fact that the only Simon he knows is their little shorthaired tuxedo kitty. And even at 3/12 years of age, he’s already learned that cats *never* have to say “please.”

Sniff. I’m so proud of him.

I want to sit in a little coffee shop and sip chai tea lattes and nibble scones. I want to order sandwiches on dense, flaky, buttery croissants, slathered with mayonnaise and piled high with lettuce and crisp perfect tomato slices and smooth avocado underneath bacon fresh from the pan, cooked til it is so well done that it crumbles if you try to break it. I want to become so engrossed in a book that I lose track of time and have no perception of the other people who sit at their tables around me, conversations condensing into a wordless hum of noise.

I want to go home and turn on Christmas music and then drag out mixing bowls and spoons and cups and spread out over every available counter space until I am covered with sprinkles of flour and there are mounds of gingerbread men piled in perfect little rows on the kitchen table beside lines of buttery cookies squeezed from a cookie press in holiday shapes, painted red or green with a few drops of food coloring added to the dough. I want to melt chocolate and stir in the sour cream and nuts and shape and roll it into truffles to be coated in powdered sugar only after they have chilled in the freezer. I want to twist almond-scented dough into red and white ropes and cover them with crushed peppermint, and bite into one fresh from the oven even though I know that the delicate flavor won’t truly set until they’ve been allowed to sit for 24 hours.

I want to go tramp around in mud, in air so cold it makes our noses run and turn red, and our fingers chap, and pick out the perfect tree only after we have examined every other tree in the farm. I want to smell the scent of pine as we carefully trim the branches, intermingled with the aroma of cider left to mull for hours on a warm stove until the cinnamon and cloves and allspice and orange peel have imparted every last bit of flavor to the juice.

Or in other words, today I’m just not in the mood to be at work.

Things have been slow at work; slow now for weeks. Occasionally my manager will come over with an urgent project, but those are less than 2 days in duration, and far between.

I am not comfortable with being so un-busy. I am used to keeping active – trying to accomplish ten things at once and somehow juggle all that with mandatory meetings, reports, email to answer, code to monitor. I am not used to having twice as long as I need to complete a project instead of only half.

It’s not that I want to be as overloaded as I was in my previous job. It’s just that I want to feel useful. Call me crazy, but I just want to feel like I’m worth the money they’re paying me.

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A former coworker told me that the Big Fish just went through a round of layoffs. Sounds like it was primarily in the consulting division, which really wasn’t too unexpected. They hired on a whole bunch of new people and trained them in the ways of the Little Fish’s software during the past two years. However, once they announced that they were not only going to scrap the Little Fish’s version and replace it with a Big Fish version, but that they were also not going to support any old-version installations much longer, naturally any customer with half a brain decided to wait til the new version came out before actually wasting money on the software and consulting in the first place. And this, of course, meant that all these people they’d hired were now sitting on the bench, bored out of their minds.

Rumor has it that this is the only round of layoffs they’re planning, and I’m hoping that’s really true. Despite my feelings on the policies of the Big Fish itself, I’ve still got friends who work there, and I’d rather not see them unemployed any time soon.

I can at least say that I did my part to help keep the Big Fish in business. Big Fish stockholders should be filled with joy because today I finally exercised all my stock options (they gave me 90 days after I left the company). This means that the stock is now free to climb as high as it wants, since I can no longer benefit from the increase.

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By the way, I finally updated my Who Am I page to reflect the more recent changes. That ought to help out those of you who are visiting via the Holidailies ring, got completely lost with my Big Fish, Little Fish references, and assumed I was referring to some obscure Dr. Seuss text.

Last week started our foray into the world of fresh, organic vegetables delivered right to our door (or at least to my office, where I could then cart them home to our door). It’s something Richard and I toyed with for a while, and finally decided to do. Not because of the organic part (because in all honesty, I think the whole organic thing is a bunch of hooey anyway), but because we’re doing our best to eat more fruit and vegetables and this would cost about the same as buying them at the store, except this way we wouldn’t have an excuse because there they’d be.

Anyway, last week’s box had all sorts of yummies, including a rather large head of garlic. Since this week’s box comes tomorrow, and we still have a few stragglers left from last week’s box, I decided that we ought to use up that head of garlic (and a few other things) in a big way. This morning I tossed instructions at Richard via instant messenger to set up the crockpot with soup and chicken and pasta and onions and mushrooms, and oh yeah, some garlic (imagine your basic tuna casserole concept, but with chicken and garlic, in a crockpot). I used my time at work wisely, going directly to askjeeves.com to find out how to roast garlic, and then forwarded those little gems on to Richard as well. Then I took care of the one remaining factor in all our garlicky dinner plans – I stopped by the store to get a loaf of bread on which to spread that roasted garlic.

We live in a small town – so small, in fact, that we possess only one stoplight (You would be amazed at how many people find this a point of pride, by the way).This small town is home to two grocery stores. Normally we go to the one that is further away from our house, but has a much better selection. Every once in a while, however, I go to the closer one, if only to remind myself yet again why it is that we avoid shopping there. I went there tonight because I was in a hurry. I knew that the goo in the crockpot had a certain magic time beyond which the pasta would turn from pasta to pasta-flavored paste, so I figured that closer proximity to home would equal quicker dinner eating for me.

Ha! This place is dingy and tired and old. The cashiers are slow and always seem to act as if they’d rather be anywhere else but standing at their registers ringing up my stuff. Even the people who frequent this store seem tired, dirty, and wearing looks that state that they, too, wish they were somewhere else. I’m not sure why I can never remember that everything in that store takes twice as long as in the other. Perhaps my brain just erases the memory each time so as to spare me, or something, but I only remember when I’m already in line, groceries in hand, and it’s too late to go put everything back on the shelves and head off to the other shiny sparkly place where the concept of smiling is a good thing.

The pasta did, indeed, go past the magic moment and become rather mushy, but overall, my little experiment was a success (and next time I’ll just add the pasta shortly before we eat it). Of course, Richard and I probably shouldn’t go out in public for the rest of the evening because it wouldn’t be just vampires we would keep away with our garlicky breath. But that’s okay. We can pretend it was all in honor of Buffy, which is on tonight and rapidly becoming one of our favorite shows (And no, I don’t just watch it because Spike is a hotty. Shut up!).

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This one is all Richard’s fault, considering he forwarded it to me while I was putting the finishing touches on this – another of my highly intellectual entr….see, even *I* can’t say that without snickering. Never mind – just go look. I guess there’s an organization for everything.

Like good little (greedy) brides and grooms, we filled out wedding registries before the wedding. Okay, so it was nice to be able to let people know about stuff we wanted, and it was admittedly kind of fun to go around department stores scanning in stuff that we knew we’d never in a million years actually get. Then, once the wedding was over, I figured we would sit back and relax and forget all about them.

Silly, silly me. Thanks to having to put my name and mailing address on all those registries, I have now been signed up for every single useless catalog there is, geared toward females with nothing better to worry about than whether they possess enough settings of the proper china for casual vs. elegant dining, or whether their shoes are in style. I am getting them in droves. I never would have put myself onto their mailing lists, and since they’re coming to my maiden name, I am pretty sure I know where they are purchasing the information.

If I’m going to get catalog spam, couldn’t I at least get something cool? You know, more things from places like Dancing Dragon or Toscano? A catalog that might finally reveal to us the source for gargoyle stocking hangers?

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We watched Shrek tonight, sitting in front of the TV with our dinners, a fire in the fireplace. After watching Final Fantasy last night, I found myself paying more attention to the little details of the CGI animation – the imperfections in the characters’ skin; the way the grass actually ripples when they walk through it; the way the fur ruffled on the donkey’s back as he twisted and leapt. Shrek, at least, was created as a cartoon, but there were times in Final Fantasy when it was almost easy to forget that the settings weren’t merely constructs in some Hollywood set but instead simply pixels in someone’s computer (and considering how many ‘real people’ films out these days have CGI-created backgrounds anyway, it wasn’t hard to make the jump). They’ve got a lot of work still to get voices to match with actual speech movement, but it’s still pretty impressive.

I loved Shrek the first time I saw it. This time around I laughed even harder. I can’t imagine anyone who could animate a donkey as well as Eddy Murphy (that’s not an insult – honest!).

It has been raining and windy and foggy and pretty much bleh on and off now for the past several days. On the one hand, it’s always nice to get some precipitation in the winter so we’re not subjected to dour threats of drought and water rationing next summer, but on the other hand driving in this kind of weather has never ranked high on my list of fun things to do. And last night it rained so hard that when we woke up this morning there was a lake in the backyard, and as we drove to church, we got to do a bit of hydroplaning across the surprise pond in the middle of the street.

The good thing, I suppose, is that I did get my tires replaced before the worst of the storms hit. When your steering wheel suddenly develops a really cool wobble, that means that maybe forgetting to get your tires rotated as often as you should was a bad idea, and that now it is time to get brand new ones because the old ones have worn down to the steel belt. Yes, I am a bad, bad person.

We braved the rain and wind and fog, however, to do the requisite annual holiday trip to the mall. Although I’ve been good and already done most of the Christmas shopping online (I love me some Amazon.com, oh yes I do!), I was getting antsy to get out of the house, but I didn’t want to go all by myself. Luckily, I’m married to a man who actually likes going to malls on occasion. I figure this works out well, considering that I get a yen to go to a mall maybe two or three times a year, and usually only around the holidays because there is just something about Christmas that makes the mall so much more fun.

And then once we had presents (well, more presents at any rate), I got it into my head that we really needed to wrap them. Last night Richard escaped to go hang out with EvilPheemy, and I stayed home and alternated between running upstairs to browse through the 70+ journals on the Holidailies ring, and camping out on the floor downstairs having happy fun with gift wrap and cats.

Wrapping presents in my house is an ordeal, and has always been so ever since I was claimed by Rebecca. As the numbers climbed slowly to the current level (that would be 7, for those of you who haven’t checked out my Who Am I page) it has become even more of a hassle.

Perhaps other cats aren’t nearly as ‘helpful’, but in our house, these are the rules. Wrapping paper must be unrolled, attacked, chewed, shredded, sat on, but most importantly, it should never actually be allowed to *wrap* anything, at least not easily. Because tape makes a funny noise when it comes off the roll, and Sebastian doesn’t like the noise, he must sit beside me and make gagging faces to make sure that I am well aware of how much he doesn’t like the noise. Empty plastic bags must immediately be pounced into, any shreds of paper must be destroyed, and pens must be quickly and silently escorted away into a different dimension, the opening of which is located either underneath either the refrigerator, or behind heaviest piece of furniture in the house – whichever is more awkward to move. And ribbon…well, let’s just say that I have learned that ribbon is evil and should never enter this house and leave it at that, shall we? You don’t want to know what ribbon looks like…er…second-hand, in other words.

Today we finished the great wrapping ordeal. The cats were in major nap mode – or perhaps they were simply scared away by the fact that Richard had put a Jingle Cats CD on – so we were able to wrap relatively unmolested. After all that wrapping, and since the soggiest part of the storm seemed to have finally worn itself out, we decided to try for our tree, even going so far as to drive out to the local tree farm. Unfortunately, they’d closed for the evening, so we must wait til next weekend to introduce the new house to its first infusion of tree sap and pine needles. Still, with the stack of wrapped presents in the living room, holiday music filling the air, peppermint candy in our hot cocoa, and of course the traditional dead rubber pig displayed prominently on top of the TV (don’t ask), it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

One of the reasons I began writing this online journal is because I enjoyed reading others. And throughout the entire time I’ve kept this thing, I’ve continually sought out new reads – adding to my list as often as I can whenever I find someone else I enjoy. What is most important to me is the quality of the writing, not the quantity, and with journal-writing rising in popularity as the latest fad, it’s getting harder and harder to sort through the piles to find the ones that are worth going back to day after day.

If you’re like me, you probably have stumbled on most of your regular reads by accident, or by hitting that ‘random’ link on some journal-related web ring. So let me take this moment to pimp one of my favorite resources for new reading material, to give a little free advertising to something entirely new that’s being put together for next year, and also let you all know that I’m going to do my best to make up for my sparse posting last month (even though I really did have a good excuse!). And all three of the links below should give you (and me!) lots of exposure to new reads.

Lives Online:
Every month Al puts this together, highlighting entries from as many new journals as he can find. Ever since I found this marvelous compilation, my reading list has grown significantly. I highly recommend taking a peek at the archives (although you should be warned that some of the older entries he’s linked to are no longer active), book marking it, and then setting yourself a reminder to check it once a month and see all the new gems he’s managed to find.

A-journal-a-day:
This won’t actually start until January 1, but I’m going to tell you all about it anyway, just because I think it’s that cool. Lisa has undertaken a rather unique project, and plans to post one entry per day every day of the year. However, each entry will actually be an entry written that day, but any year in the past, submitted from journalers archives. I know she’s still looking for submissions, so if you’ve got entries you’d like to see in a-journal-a-Day, or know of other journalists who’d find this interesting as well, pass the information along.

Holidailies:
Jette, in an effort to try to get herself to write daily at least through the month of December, created the Holidailies ring, and then challenged the journaling world to join her. I’ll admit that I waited til the last minute to join, but I figured that, now that Nanowrimo was over, I needed yet another reason to be camped out in front of my computer every night, trying to type one-handed while holding a cat in my lap because for whatever reason at least two of them seem to think that me in a chair = naptime for them. I’ll give it my best shot, so feel free to send me emails calling me lazy if I start to slack off. And hey, even if I don’t manage *every* day, at least you’ll have a whole list of other people to entertain you!