In my job, I regularly plan for future years.  Writing spreadsheets or negotiating fees for three to five years out is normal, so in my head it has been 2012 almost since last July when our fiscal calendar changed over.  I’m already planning for 2013.  The fact that it is just now 2012 is what is surprising to me!

Happy New Year!  We had a lot of warm days last week, and New Year’s Eve had a high in the upper fifties.  That is ridiculously warm for mid-Missouri in January.  I would like to get a little winter this year and I’m hoping for some snow.  It’s not too late!  The weather did turn chilly for the early part of this week, and there’s a chance of snow next week.  I hope it will come.

The New Year Christmas celebration with my family went really well- we had a great time.  Lots of food, lots of board games, and lots of gifts.  I received a lot of lovely presents, many of which were kitchen items.  Jay and I left a little early on Saturday night to join some friends for a concert by the People’s Republic of Klezmerica, one of the Columbia First Night celebration events.  They didn’t end up having any fireworks due to the wind (the cold front was coming in after the unseasonably warm weather), so we went over to Ragtag to see the New Year in with all of the Columbia hipsters.  And then back to more partying with my family on Sunday.  It was nice to have the day on Monday (yesterday) to sleep in, and clean up a little, and recover.

So I survived Christmas with Jay’s family, and he survived Christmas with mine.  We finally exchanged presents on Friday night- he bought me this little hair comb (which I had favorited on Etsy), and I bought him this analog synthesizer after much research and deliberation on my part.  It was a total surprise for him, and he seemed delighted by it.

And now the holidays are ending.  Epiphany is Friday, and I do really want to get a couple of photos of some Christmas lights before then (since that is usually the day when they take down the lights).  We’ll see if I can manage to get my tripod out before the end of the week.  One of my New Year’s resolutions is to take more photos, which also means processing more photos.  I hope I do!

It’s also time to get serious about the house again.  It’s been nice to have the time off since right before Thanksgiving, even though I didn’t spend any of the time on any projects.  Of course not.  The holidays always go so fast.  But there’s no way around it now- I want the house sold, and I gotta get back on the market to sell it.  It will be a slow winter, I hope, and then maybe things will pick up again towards the end of February as we head into spring.  I really hope it’s a good spring for the real estate market, but I will take what I can get.  Anyway, I already contacted the realtor to sign contracts.  I’ll put it on the market and fix what I can during the slow winter months.

In the meantime, winter!  Are you aware of Pinterest?  It’s basically a bookmark tool for pictures, illustrations, and images.  Some people use it to save clothing or design ideas, but I love using it to save pictures that are pretty and evocative.  I’ve been collecting winter images (both Christmas and winter) on this board for the past few months- take a look.  You can see all my boards here.

This is my third and last day of work this week, and I am off again soon for another long weekend.  I didn’t start padding my holidays with long weekends until last year, maybe, or the year before.  I used to just work every day if I didn’t otherwise have plans, but now I’m taking advantage of the fact that I have some vacation days to burn.  An extra day on a three-day weekend makes a four-day weekend!  An extra day before Thanksgiving is a five day weekend!  (Math.)  It’s great.  I really feel like I am celebrating the holidays when I have a day at home to sleep in, sit around, do laundry, take the dog to the park, and maybe have an afternoon nap.  (Afternoon naps are one of the greatest things known to man.  Even the dog likes it- she will always settle down for a snore if I am snoring nearby, though she often needs to jump up at some point to bark furiously at a UPS truck.)

Anyway, four day weekend ahead.  This one will be less stressful since it’s all my family and not Jay’s, and there’s no travel.  Just family and friends, late nights, hanging out, too much food, and good times.

Jay has been subbing in on bass guitar for a local band on some Friday nights for the past month or so.  Did I mention I am dating a musician?  He is a really great bass player, and it’s a salsa band with a big following.  The dance floor is always packed by the end of the night with people who can really dance.  It’s cool to watch, though it’s not exactly my crowd.  I have dressed up for it sometimes, and other times just worn jeans, but either way, I feel like the odd duck in the bar.  I’m not about to get out on the dance floor alone, even if I did know what I was doing.  Which I don’t!  But so far I have been lucky enough to be joined by friends for at least part of the show, and we can chat for a bit while the band is on.  It still makes for a late night after a week of work, because they don’t finish until 1am.  Late nights and late mornings sleeping in afterwards!

Oh, so I just got back from my Tulsa Christmas.  The trip went very well and I had a really nice time.  Jay and I stayed downtown at a really nice hotel, which gave us some amazing deals for the holidays.  Comped parking and credit at the hotel restaurant, for instance, and it was a Priceline deal to begin with.  Nice!  The weather was warm, sunny and in the 50s.  If we hadn’t been so busy eating rich food, it would have been great for a walk!  I don’t know why we didn’t.  I guess we were busy with all the activities that come along with a holiday celebration, including food preparation and visitors and gifts and board-game playing and movie-watching.

We did take a driving tour of the neighborhoods in Tulsa where Jay grew up, and that was really cool.  This included Oral Roberts University- not because Jay went there, but because it is located in the general area, and is worth a drive-by for most tourists.  I think most people want to gawk at the praying hands sculpture, but personally I just adored the overwhelmingly retro-futuristic architecture of the campus.  How can something modernist be so ostentatious?  It was really amazing.  I would have loved to walk around there at dusk sometime, getting photos of the buildings at golden hour.  Really cool.  Of course, I think almost exactly the opposite of the mission of the university itself.  Not a fan, except of the architecture.

On Christmas Eve, we went to a megachurch for services.  Truly!  A megachurch is defined as a church that has an average weekend attendance of more than 2000 people, and this one had a sanctuary that seats more than 2000 people.  And the website lists at least six different services on a regular Sunday, including two held in the main sanctuary.  (The others are held in one of the other large locations on the campus- yes, campus- such as the smaller chapel, which only seats 500 people.)  I was pretty overwhelmed by the size of the sanctuary and the campus and the amount of people.  I have been to my share of rural churches, after all.  Maybe I should have been less vocally surprised, but it was pretty amazing.

I am interested that this church is not listed on the Wikipedia page for the largest churches in the United States, but it is a “non-exhaustive” list.  I am interested that four of these are in Missouri, but especially that one of them is in Ozark, Missouri.  Ozark only has a population of 18K (though it is in the Springfield metro area), and the Assemblies of God church has an average attendance of more than 8,800.  That is really amazing.

The church service itself, by the way, was very nice.  It was Methodist, which is a particularly non-crazy brand of Protestantism, and about 80% of the service was music.  That’s probably a conservative estimate.  There was a lot of music.  I really like that.  I like getting to sing traditional Christmas carols.  I like the candlelight traditions of Christmas Eve services.  It’s just pleasant and Christmas-y.

We did get home on Monday in time for the radio show.  It’s been a short week, but it’s been a busy one.

This weekend is my family’s Christmas events.  It will be pretty laid back, but does require a little bit of planning.  I have finished with gifts- they are wrapped and under the tree, ready to be packed up and taken north to my parents’ house.  Now is the time for planning food.  My mom took the reins this year and saved us a lot of back-and-forth negotiation on food types and delegation, so I already have my shopping list for the food.  It’s just a matter of heading to the supermarket at some point in the next couple of days.  There really isn’t even a rush, except that I thought I might make some cookies or fudge or maybe a cheeseball, and that takes some time.  We’ll see how that works out, though!  Lazy me on a weekend vacation.  But I’m looking forward to more holidays.  I like the holidays!

This is probably my last post of 2011.  I’ve already been writing 2012 on things for the last couple of months, thanks to a job that deals with finances.  We’ve been in the 2012 financial year since July, and I’m already planning through 2015.  Weird, huh?

2011 has been a good year, of course.  Some downs, but lots of ups!  Some great big ups!  I like the ups.  Some things are just in transition, and I’m hoping 2012 will bring closure.  We’ll see how it goes!  You never know about the future.  You just never can tell how it will work out, and I’d rather hope for happy endings than fast endings, in terms of closure.  2012!

Happy New Year!

I have the smell of onions and garlic in my nose this morning because I woke up early to make sweet potato chili for a family party at my house tonight.  I put it in the Crock Pot for the day.  It’s the first time I’ve used a Crock Pot unattended, and it makes me a little nervous.  What if it breaks and burns my house down?  But then I remember that it’s set on low, and low isn’t really hot enough to do much damage, and they’re supposed to be left unattended.  That is their whole point!  So I am not going home at lunch to check on it, even though I want to, because I have a lunch scheduled.  I will just have to worry all day.

I like getting up in the morning and cooking.  Whenever I have to make something for work, I’d much rather get up a little earlier and prep and cook it before I go to work than to stay up late to cook.  I am pretty good about following specific directions first thing in the morning, half-awake, as long as I don’t have to think too much.  I wouldn’t be able to halve a recipe or double a recipe at that hour of the day, but I can follow a recipe where all the ingredients and tools are right in front of me.

So, yeah, party tonight at my house!  Sweet potato chili, crackers & cheese, and bread pudding.  Jay likes whiskey sauce on bread pudding, so I will attempt that too.  My sister is bringing a board game and we will have a nice quiet holiday evening.  It is the Solstice and the second night of Hanukkah, though I am not digging out any additional holiday ornaments.  The menorah got packed away somewhere and I refuse to go looking for it.  My low-key holiday this year will make for more nostalgia when I bring out that stuff next year.  Next year!  Next year in a new house, I hope.  Anyway, I’m looking forward to having family over since I will miss them this weekend.

Today is the last day of my week and then FIVE days off in a row.  Five!  Then three days of work and another four-day weekend with a four-day workweek after it.  The second week of January will be tough!  It will be hard to get back to the grind after all the holiday partying!

Tomorrow is really my only true vacation day over this weekend.  I have some shopping to do tomorrow, some packing and cleaning and preparing for the holidays, and then I leave with Jay to go to his hometown of Tulsa from Friday through Monday.  His parents and grandparents will be there, but not his siblings.  I am not sure if the cousins will make it or not.  Anyway, I have met them all before.  It will be nice to see them again, of course, and to see how Jay grew up celebrating his holidays, and also to see Tulsa.  I am looking forward to getting a tour of his teenage hangouts.

I guess I don’t have that much preparing to do.  I finished all my cards and sent them out.  I finished all my shopping and it’s wrapped and under the tree.  My parents will take the presents for the extended family, so I won’t get to see them open any of it.  I’m sad about that, of course.  I love to see people unwrap things.  But that’s how it goes when we can’t all get together.

I’ve missed extended family holidays in the past.  In fact, we’re moving towards the point with one side of the family where there really isn’t a specific time when the extended family gets together.  Thanksgiving and Fourth of July are bigger family gatherings than Christmas is, even though everyone ends up in the same fifty-square-mile radius over the same five days.  The other side of the family usually does put something together, and I really can’t remember when I last missed it.  I think I have thought about missing it before, but ended up going after all.  Anyway, I hope they survive without my spinach tofu lasagna!  It’s been a tradition with that family for Christmas since 2005, I think.  It’s certainly my tradition!

But this will definitely be the first year that I’m not going to be with my parents on Christmas Day.  That has never happened, even when I lived out East.  I was home for Christmas Day every year, even the last few years when we moved our celebration to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.  (Is this really the fourth year for that tradition?  Wow!)  So I won’t miss any actual celebrations with them, but I will miss them, of course.

We’re supposed to be back in town by Monday night in time for the radio show, barring any weather complications or unforeseen occurrences.  Gah, hope for none of that!

Happy all the holidays, all of them!  Don’t forget Festivus on Friday, either.

The Christmas tree is up at home!  As I posted on Facebook, it was a real pain in the ass, of course.  On a high shelf out in the cold garage, where the lights are currently both burned out because I am far too lazy to replace them.  It took all of three minutes and maybe 38 seconds, though I haven’t yet put the box back in the garage.  It’s cold out there!

But against all odds, I put up the tree this weekend.

And I bathed the dog.  It was a weekend to remember.

Yeah, it was a weekend of stuff I should have already done, really.  The house is mostly a mess.  I had all sorts of plans to get stuff done while it was off the market, and here it is mid-December and I just lived my only empty weekend between Thanksgiving and New Year’s and I did not open one paint can.

I did put up the tree, though.  And I bathed the dog.

And finished the Christmas cards, and did laundry.  It wasn’t that unproductive.  It just was not very productive.

I don’t know what I would do if my holidays were filled with sunshine and long days.  I guess it would make a big difference in terms of how I would feel about it all.

Boom!  We got some winter this week.  The announcer on KBIA, the NPR station that I wake up to every weekday morning, even apologized yesterday for the lack of warning about the surprise snow on Tuesday morning.  It wasn’t much of a snowfall, just an inch or two, but enough to cover a thin slick layer of ice.  Everyone had a tale of bad traffic on the way to work on Tuesday, accidents that caused backups for miles.  I have the luxury of waiting to come in if I need to, so I gave myself an extra hour at home.  There was some traffic, but people were moving slowly and carefully, and I got to work without any headaches.  Lucky me!

As far as the holidays are concerned, I am slowly recognizing the existence of the fact that they are coming.  I am so much further behind than usual, though I have made some major headway in the past week or so.  I started working on holiday cards and I’ve finished a lot of shopping.  Today I finally figured out what to give Jay, and now I’m totally excited for it to arrive and to give it to him and see what he thinks.  Otherwise, it’s not been a very creative holiday season- I’m buying a lot of things off lists rather than coming up with my own ideas.  And I’m trying to buy a lot less than usual.  So I’m almost done just after starting, and I have to say that I like this a lot.

I haven’t done any decorating at home, though all the lights are staying up at Jay’s house and a bunch of my tackiest decorations made their way to my office because this new office decorates for the holidays.  I think there’s even a competition or something.  But I did my part with tinsel garland!

St. Nicholas Day was earlier this week, and I can finally tell you about my one big creative holiday project this year!  I made fruitcake for my mom, who loves fruitcake.  I wanted to make it last year, but then I didn’t start it early enough.  So the plan was made for this year, and I started gathering supplies in early October.  I was stymied by the need for some things that weren’t available until after Halloween (the first time in my life I’ve been anxious for Christmas stuff to appear in the first week of November!), but I finally was able to get the cakes together during the first weekend of November and they’ve been aging ever since.  I intended for it to be a St. Nicholas present, so it was exciting to finally bring it to her last Sunday when I went to put up their tree.  (A St. Nicholas tradition.)  And I got to try a bit, and it was pretty good.  Success!  Now that I have the supplies and I’ve done it before, I will do it again next year too!

So it hasn’t been a very creative holiday season, but it’s still early-ish, right?  I could still get into it.  I could still put up the little tree.  I could.  I might.  Maybe tonight!

I’m taking off work tomorrow, as I have done for my birthday every year since I’ve been in Missouri.  (I think.)  I don’t know what I am going to do, but it might involve a hike with the dog and then putting up twinkly lights at Jay’s house for the party on Friday.  I told him I was going to do that, so it won’t be a surprise except that I will do it without him.  But no more decorations than twinkly lights.

It was a good Thanksgiving and long weekend.  I took Wednesday off work, and got Friday off work anyway, so it was five whole days of vacation in a row.  It was tough to get up and return to work yesterday after all that time off, especially because the weather turned brisk and cold.  But last week was very pleasant weather for our trip up to northern Iowa.  We had a cloudy but warm day on Thanksgiving itself, with a high in the upper 50s at least.  That was great because Jay’s grandparents’ house was small and too warm with the ovens on high and the place full of people.  It was one of those little 1950s houses with a full basement rec room.  They were all champion ping-pong players, of course.  And then they basically passed a guitar around the living room with nearly everyone able to take a turn playing it.  I loved that.  But when it was too much, the weather was nice so I could escape to the backyard and cool off a bit.  And the food was good!  I was concerned about being the only vegetarian, but they were very nice about it.  Maybe another time I could bring something for myself.  I think they would have been nice about it!

The trip was fast.  We saw The Muppets on Thanksgiving night and were back on the road south to Missouri before Friday noon.  I liked the drive, mostly on Highway 63 north.  Two-lane highways are perfect for being nosy about other people’s property.  There’s even some Amish communities along that highway, which has wide dirt shoulders for the buggies.

On Saturday, I helped Jay clean his house for the party on Friday.  He has been talking about having a party for months and months, and finally I suggested we have one for my birthday.  He is excited to be having it, and I am excited to have it there.  He has a great house for a party with a couple of gathering spaces and a fire pit in the backyard.  I am looking forward to stringing up twinkly lights around that fire pit tomorrow.  It will look cool.

Then Sunday was my annual birthday lunch at Flat Branch.  I just like Flat Branch more than any other restaurant, and on my birthday, there is an excuse to have dessert.  So why choose anyplace else?  This was at least the third or fourth year in a row for it, though.  We were all going to see Hugo afterwards but it was only playing in one theater and the times were inconvenient.  So the family scattered and I saw it with Jay later on.  I thought it was great.  I would recommend not seeing it in 3D though… I didn’t like the 3D, especially in the action sequences.  But I would say that both The Muppets and Hugo were worth it.

And then this weekend.  Did I tell you about the party?  Yes, I did.  There is also Santacon, which is a big bar crawl where everyone dresses as Santa or something Christmas-related.  Just a hat won’t cut it in the costume department; you have to go all out.  I have a smattering of pieces that I am putting together.  I am not sure if I am going to buy anything new, but I will have to try on my smattering and see if it works as it is.  We will see!  And then, on Sunday, my friends are doing a Moveable Christmas Tree Decorating Party, and I will see how many Christmas trees I can help decorate without feeling a need to pull out my own.  I have a feeling the fiber optic one will make an appearance this year, if not the aluminum one?  The aluminum one is pretty fragile, but I do love that color wheel.

Yes, it’s brisk and cold out there.  I pulled out my short boots for today, short boots that I bought specifically to wade through snow on the way to work.  But I just wanted some warm shoes today, and my big down coat, and a wool scarf, and it’s not even really that cold today.  In February, if it’s this warm, I will wear a dress to celebrate!  But right now it feels cold out there.  Possible snow this week or next week!  It’s definitely turning winter on us.  And hooray for that, except I need to start bundling up more.  Gotta be warm to celebrate the cold, in my opinion.

Well, have a happy last day of November/my birthday!  Treat yourself to something on my behalf.  I will appreciate it.

I am trying to get myself into the mode of getting Christmas things done, because I have done little to nothing in preparation of presents and cards and all of it, and there are things to do.  I think I have the idea of the cards sorted this year.  Instead of making new ones, I have a stack of unused ones from previous years (going back to 2000) and I am going to use them up and send them out.  It feels right, actually.  I have been in a transitional state all year due to the house cleanout last spring and having the house on the market, and it seems right to use up the old cards this year.  Use them up and move on to new things next year with a clean slate behind me.  It feels very symbolic.  And, yes, it’s convenient, but actually it required vast amounts of time spent in reorganization last spring to have assembled the collection of unused cards all in one place.  So it really wasn’t easy.  I think I will put a sticker on the cards to say that I am using the old ones due to my current spirit/state of transition.  I doubt anyone would actually remember that I’d sent that card before, but I do remember.  And I love all the cards I’ve sent over the past few years, and I’m happy to revisit them.

I am not sure how motivated I am to spend time decorating my house for the holidays.  I am definitely not stringing lights into the trees this year.  I might put up one of the trees, maybe.  Time spent on my house in the next few weeks is better spent painting or fixing than in decorating.  But Jay is having a party at his house next weekend, and I might take some of my stuff over to his place to decorate there.  Outside lights, for sure.  Gotta light the house up- it’s kinda hard to find.

Jay and I head up to northern Iowa tomorrow for Thanksgiving in the small town where his parents grew up together.  He is from Oklahoma, but they are from Iowa.  I am really looking forward to it.  I always love traveling, but traveling for holidays is particularly great.  And I am imagining that this is a pretty perfect location for Thanksgiving, though we will see if my imagination meets up with reality.  We’ll be back on Friday, so it’s not a very long trip.  But I get to travel for Christmas too.  I like filling my holidays with hours and hours in the car.  Seriously, I do!

After that, we’ll still have the whole weekend.  And then it will be the last few days of November, notable because my birthday is in there.  And then, my friends, it will be December, and I will be officially behind on Christmas.  Officially.  Yuck.

Today was the office Thanksgiving lunch, and I’ve become involved with the organization that puts those events together.  When I asked if a vegetarian main dish would be provided, that somehow translated into me making the vegetarian main dish for the event.  So I was up this morning at 5 am, putting two Tofurkys in the oven.  I went back to bed while they were roasting, but didn’t sleep much after that.  They turned out great, and they were gobbled up by the vegetarians in attendance.

I think that was probably the only Tofurky I’ll make this year!  I usually do a vegetarian Thanksgiving, but can’t imagine I will put that together for just myself.  Jay is not vegetarian, and we are going to a non-vegetarian family Thanksgiving (to which I am not supposed to bring anything).  But I’m glad I did get to make some.  It’s probably one of my favorite foods, and it’s pretty nice to only eat it once a year or so.  It makes it special and celebratory.

But, oh!  5 am wake up calls are not my bag.  I am tired today.

Somehow it is the weekend before Thanksgiving!  Students will be leaving town tomorrow for break, and I love a quiet Columbia.

I have a few things going on tomorrow night, but the rest of the weekend schedule is empty.  Even emptier because I don’t have to worry about house showings!  The house is officially off the market on Saturday because the agreement with the realtor expires.  Since it coincides with the holidays, I am giving myself a break so I don’t have to worry about everything at once.  I’ve got a few projects I’d like to do, and I hope I’ll get around to doing them.  Either way, I will sign the new contracts in early January, and hope to sell the house in 2012.

My mom came over last Saturday, and we both put in a few hours’ work on my yard, cleaning it up for the winter.  It looks much better, all mowed short.  I pulled most of the dead stuff out of the flowerbeds.  All the leaves got mulched in the mower because I don’t really have a lot of mature trees.  So that is nice.  And the house retains some semblance of cleanliness.  We’ll see how long that lasts after the threat of last minute showings is gone for a week or two!

I haven’t dug out my winter clothes yet, so that should be on the list for this weekend.  It is turning chilly!  But that also comes with week-before-Thanksgiving territory.

Halloween weekend!  And it looks to be a busy one, too.  My costume is together, but I need to conjure up some Halloween party snacks and some food for a BBQ on Sunday afternoon, and I’m drawing a blank so far on anything creative.  I guess I don’t need to be creative, but I’m invited to a Party Prep Party tonight, with the assumption that I have creative things to work on, and I don’t, so there’s that.  I can just help out, though, and be a sport.

The weather turned chilly this week and fall is here.  Tuesday was warm and sunny, and then Wednesday was cool and dark and rainy.  It was a bad combination- I did not want to get out of bed, and I spent the day running behind and feeling crazy.

It was compounded by the fact that Jay* and I had tickets to a concert in St. Louis on Wednesday night, so we had to book it out of this town right after work and only skidded into St. Louis as the concert was getting underway, with a bite at Taco Bell in between.  I had rough time getting out of town between the traffic and my own ability to lose focus in my attempts to get an overnight bag together and get out of the house.  But we did do it.  We did it.  And the Adrian Belew concert was great, just great.  I only recognized one of the songs, and most of them were instrumental.  I have learned a lot in the past year, though, about music and music appreciation, and I think I liked the concert a hell of a lot more than I might have if I’d been to it last spring.  I was especially psyched to see a 25-year-old woman playing bass guitar and just absolutely blowing the minds of all the old men in attendance.  (About 78% of the crowd was men over the age of 40, and Jay said that it was even rarer to see a woman musician in a prog rock outfit, not to mention kicking some fucking ass at it.)  On the way home, I looked her up and was delighted to find out that she was part of the Rock School documentary back in the day… well, six years ago.  Awesome!  Julie Slick, you are fantastic; I love your hair and I’m reading your blog.

I am hoping to break out my camera a little this weekend, after several weeks of not taking or processing any photos.  It’s just not integrated into my life these days, unless you count the little vintage photos that I take with my iPhone.  I don’t really count those, even though a picture counts for more than no pictures, but it feels like a cheat to me unless I’ve put some work into it.

At the same time, though, I kind of hate taking pictures these days.  I mean, I love taking pictures, but I hate being the one with the camera at events, family or otherwise.  It just doesn’t feel good anymore.  I used to think people liked what I did, but mostly I get the sense these days that I’m harassing people when I produce the camera and take pictures.  Some people don’t like it when I post pictures online, but they don’t actually say anything about it to me, so I get passive-aggressive comments that are hard to interpret until someone snaps at me about it, which makes me never ever want to take another photo of them ever, or even be seen in their presence with a camera in my hand.  Or they criticize the fact that I only take photos of kids (because kids don’t just sit/stand there like slugs), but when I go out of my way to take pictures of adults, I don’t ever hear any good feedback about the photos.  I just hear negative comments, and it weighs on me these days.

Negatives.  Ha ha.

So generally all I want to do is take pictures of nature or whatever, but I don’t have the time to do that with the same kind of frequency as in the past.  I hope I do pick up this part of it again- it does make me happy to get good photos, and I like the peace and quiet of going out for a walk with my camera.

I haven’t inundated my friends with picture-taking as much as I have with my family.  If I pulled out my camera and went nuts with it around my friends, they’d be mostly surprised, and happy to see the photos, probably.  But there’s still residual stress about it for me, and so even if I manage to remember my camera to events, I usually either leave it in the car or don’t work up the nerve to pull it out of its bag.  At the same time, I’m enjoying myself instead of spending all my time behind the viewfinder.

I am particularly interested in getting some photos of Jay this weekend as he is taking to the stage to play bass guitar in a reunion show with his now-defunct band on Sunday night.  I haven’t done a lot of concert photography, but I am hoping that I will have the chance to take a few shots on Sunday night, while I’m rocking my socks off.  So that should be the very least of camera-using this weekend, and maybe there will be more.  Maybe!

The one upside to the whole not-doing-Halloween-at-my-place thing this year is that I have only bought a small amount of candy.   Just fun size Butterfinger Crisps, specifically, because the full size Butterfinger Crisps are really hard to find these days!  If they are discontinued, it will be the worst thing that ever happened to anyone ever.  Specifically, to me.  And I finished those a few weeks ago and still have managed to avoid buying bags of Kit Kats in the meantime.  Which is good news!  Next week will be time for Christmas candy already, and it’s one thing to be able to avoid bags full of candy bars that are easily purchased in single serving amounts (Kit Kats and Snickers are my weaknesses), but it’s another to only find large bags available of Cadbury, whole chocolate oranges, and boxes of Almond Crescents.  At least with single servings available, I limit the craving.  Whole boxes of Almond Crescents just disappear in an afternoon.

Christmas.  I am somehow ready this year, but only because I have been looking for some things that I need to buy that are only available locally with the seasonal Christmas items.  I have even already put all my Christmas music on my iPod.  And I started Christmas shopping this week.  I still haven’t ordered cards, though.  Yeah, I know.  I don’t want to hear it.  It’s fine if you’re not there yet, but I am somehow already ready already.

*Getting tired of calling him “my boyfriend” in every post, so he is getting a nickname.  It is not his real name.

So, hi.  Happy New Year.  I know I usually do a year-end wrap-up, but I’m barely holding it together this time around, and I will probably give myself a pass until such a time comes that I have the energy for that kind of thing.  I’m just managing to handle a wrap-up of the last few weeks here.

I had a Christmas party!  My house was clean and warm and bright, and I had a fire in the fireplace, and I think everyone had a great time.  I managed to finish all my preparations with plenty of time before people showed up.  People chatted, we played trivia and watched Christmas Rifftrax shorts, and exchanged White Elephant gifts, and some people left drunk and some people left irritated because of drama, and so generally it was a good party, I think.  The house was not entirely a giant mess the next day, and nothing got broken, so it was a success from my end of things as well.

Then it was Christmas, somehow, weeks ago.  My Someone left to go home for the holidays right after my party, on December 21, and then a death in the family kept him at home until just this past weekend.  So while it seems like it’s been three weeks since Christmas for everyone else in the world, I just finally opened presents with him on Monday of this week.  I still have my Christmas trees up at home, though I did turn out the lights on the trees in the front yard last week on the 6th.  But I will leave the indoor trees up until this weekend, probably.  It was still Christmas at my house.  I’m still working on Christmas cookies!

We got snow on Christmas Eve- a lovely beautiful snow that stuck to all the branches.  It was gorgeous.  I spent the day making fudge and cake balls at my house, and then my family came over in the evening for dinner.  We had soup and then we went out to look at lights around town, then came home for ice cream and hot cocoa.  It was really nice.

I’ve known for months that I needed new tires on my car, but I kept putting it off.  It was underlined on Christmas Day when I got stuck on two different driveways- my parents’ and my grandparents’.  But it was a pretty good day after I got unstuck on my parents’ driveway.  I baked cookies while my sister’s notboyfriend played Elf in a loop on the main television set.  I don’t think it was set on Infinifilm, but he just kept pressing Play.  It must have played four times.  We baked lots of cookies and then left to go to my grandparents’ house for dinner and visiting with families.  That was really nice.  Got up on Sunday the 26th to go to Kansas City to visit with the other family, and that was nice too.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is usually a slow one at work, but my office moved and so we had plenty to do.  We are set in our new offices now.  My office is still downtown, but it’s a few blocks from where it used to be, and not so close to my favorite breakfast and lunch haunts.  Probably this is for the best, checkbook-wise.  I am now living in a true cubicle farm, but it’s quiet and there won’t be quite as much need to don a coat to go get a bottle of Coke or take mail to the mailroom, since we’re in a real office building now and everything is here for us.  I do like it a lot, but we’ll see what the future holds.  We already know that it will be a year of upheaval in our office.  I don’t really know what my job will be like a year from now.

I finally pushed myself to get new tires on New Year’s Eve, which was a brilliant move.  I also got sick with a bad cold on New Year’s Eve, which was also a brilliant move since Someone wasn’t around to be infected.  Nice planning there as well!  It’s like I know what I’m doing.

So New Year’s Eve was mostly a bust.  I hung out with my family, which was the plan all along anyway, but instead of playing board games, I didn’t stray far from the couch, where I watched movies in a haze of cold medicine, eventually outright sleeping.  Around 10:30pm, I finally woke up and realized that I should go home.

The next morning, New Year’s Day, I did not take any cold medicine, so I was a little more awake for the trip back up to my parents’ house.  New Year’s Day is the day we celebrate Christmas together as a family, so we did the whole traditional thing- breakfast, presents, lunch, board games, and more board games.  It was really nice, and not being too medicated, I was mostly conscious the entire day.  I had a nice Christmas- among other things, I got a Roku and an electric water kettle, which turned out to be extremely prescient gift-giving!  I have watched a lot of random television shows through Netflix over the Roku and I have drunk a lot of nice hot tea with lemon over the last two weeks while sick on my couch.

This past weekend, I was scheduled to go to the ALA conference in San Diego with my boss, and there was really no getting out of it for a bit of chest congestion.  So we flew off on Friday and returned Monday.  I am very glad that I chose not to stay extra days in San Diego, which was originally the idea, because I was pretty ill during the trip.  DayQuil kept me going.  Hot tea kept me going.  Curry at two different Thai restaurants kept me going.  We had a lot of meetings over Saturday and Sunday, and the rest of the time I slept and watched the trashiest trash television in my hotel room and made short trips to the nearby RiteAid for various cold medications.  I didn’t really see much of San Diego at all, except that my room at the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown had a pretty good view of the Gaslamp District.  There was a big window in the bathroom and, from the toilet itself, I could see the ocean beyond Coronado Island.  Not much, just a glint of it, especially at sunset.  (Not that I sat on the toilet looking at the ocean, by the way.)

We flew home on Saturday morning, home to Kansas City.  It was snowing in Kansas City, and I was a little surprised we weren’t delayed on the flight.  I had parked at the airport, and in the uncovered lot.  Exciting to get home to drifts of 6-8″ of snow around the car.  I was smart enough to put snow boots in the trunk before I left, so I could change and clean off the car before we started home.  And then I was happy that I had been smart enough to get new tires over New Year’s, because it was a long, snowy, slippery, slightly scary drive back to Columbia from KCI on Monday afternoon.  A trip that should have taken a little more than two hours ended up taking five hours.  I was gripping the steering wheel, tired but trying hard to focus and drive carefully, still riding high on cold medicine.  Not a good combination.  We saw a lot of cars in the ditch and in the median, and we were right behind one SUV that was acting erratically and ended up doing a 360 spin and landing in the median.  No one was hurt, thankfully.  We took it pretty easy, but the windshield wipers kept freezing up.  We ended up in Columbia at rush hour, and it was a long trip across Columbia to get home, but eventually I made it.  I was very happy to be home.

Now I’m trying to catch up with everything, but there’s a lot of stuff to catch up with.  I managed to gain some weight in the past few months, so it’s time to head back to the gym or start tracking my diet again.  My boss is out of the office at work for the next few weeks, so there’s plenty to do there too.  All in all, it will be a busy January, I think.