Happy Almost New Year!

Man, I have been neglecting my blog since the holidays started. I'm back now! Hooray!

How was my Christmas, you ask? It was delicious. It was low-key (which was very necessary since the last couple of months have been WHOAAA busy...).

Also, I was good allllll year, so Santa (Kev) brought me the most WONDERFUL Christmas present! Wanna know what it was? 'Course you do...



HE GOT ME A KINDLE! It's wonderful, and awesome, and it means that I can carry hundreds of books around with me at once, and read whichever one strikes my fancy. Right now I'm reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That's right....and Zombies. Everything is better with Zombies. It also has ninjas.

I also won the office Christmas raffle, and won this little beauty, which will be an excellent running companion (note to self: start running again to counteract effects of yummy cookies).



In an annoyingly Grinch-like mood today at work. Lucky for me it's almost the LONG WEEKEND! Hooray! Time to relax and make home-made pasta from scratch with my fancy Kitchen-Aid pasta-maker, finish my Thank You notes (can you say delinquent bride?), and celebrate New Year's Eve at Dave and Lisa's.....

Grace

So with the Christmas weekend fast approaching, I've been thinking a lot of about Grace. I've started reading Andy Stanley's "The Grace of God", and in the first couple of pages, he's already really summed up what Grace is.

God's grace is something that I really find myself wanting when I'm in the wrong, and something that I'm less than likely to extend to someone if they've done or taken something from me.

I never deserve grace, but I get it way more often than my words or actions would merit.

This Christmas, I'm going to try harder to extend grace where it feels like I shouldn't. Maybe it will make a bigger impact in someone's life than I could even imagine...

It's almost CHRISTMAS!

Despite the fact that I'm still battling a some lingering nausea (a delightful remnant of my visit from the flu fairy last week - I am a fly-paper for germs and bugs), I'm VERY excited about the fact that it's almost CHRISTMAS! Hooray! Family, and presents, and wassail, my mom's raisin scones with butter and strawberry preserves, and things that smell like pine, and cozy sweaters and extra long weekends! I love it.  I have a little flower arrangement on my desk full of red and white carnations, and stuffed with different types of pine branches, and my desk smells like the holidays.


Not to mention, it's my first Christmas with my brand new husband!  I haven't entirely finished shopping for his presents yet, which I will have to do rather soon to get everything together by the end of the week.


Time to go get some Nutcracker tea, and try to mentally will myself to overcome the last bit of this nasty stomach bug.


xo


ps: next Christmas I might have to swing by the shop of the ladies over at 1canoe2 for some pretty letterpress things (a medium which I've become rather interested in lately):

There's no place like....bed for the holidays?

Oh boy. I've been sick. 

See, this is the magical time of year when people get all heroic and come in to work sick, spreading holiday cheer and flu germs. 

See, I can't really blame people for coming to work a little sick. Because we all get colds, and you can't just not come to work whenever you have the sniffles. But if you have the flu, and are basically hovering on the borders of coherence, and feel very uncomfortable being more than 20 feet from a washroom or trash can, you should not be at work. 

That is all. 

 

If Donna Reed were to read this, she'd confiscate my pearls....

I am a major procrastinator. Sometimes it makes me a little frustrated with myself, but I've learned to be a little patient.

For example, there are usually a few dishes in my sink. Some stuff that you just can't put in the dishwasher have been known to sort of accumulate in my sink for a day or two, while I systematically ignore them until guilt reminds me of their presence, and I dig into them with a scrubby sponge and a sink full of suds. It's not that I don't like to have a clean house, it's just that I like to do fun things, like bake, and make messes.

Every once in a while, I'll be seized by a temporary fit of cleaning, and I'll spend an hour or two going from room to room sweeping and dusting and rearranging, and I ususally manange to use the wrong type of cleaner on everything. But it gets clean. I fish all the scrunched up socks from under the bed. I find all the shoes that are hiding in the proximity of the front door, and return them to the closet to commune with their friends. I sort through the pantry and realize that I have two separate boxes of baking soda that I thought were a single box that kept migrating around on its own.

But if being a neat freak, constantly polishing the hardwood floors, and Windex-ing the windows, and fluffing the couch pillows means that I don't get to spend a little time in the kitchen making a nice cozy dinner for me and Kev, or that I don't have the time to make a batch of Mexican hot chocolate cookies (thinking about making those with the maple spritz cookies tonight...yum...) then so be it. Hopefully the people who love me best will thoughtfully ignore the very friendly dust-bunnies under my couch while they nom on a cookie or two.

Christmas lights!

Man, it's COLD outside.

This fact became particularly noticeable yesterday morning when Kevin's car broke down, and we ended up together standing at the QT gas station near our house (which was essentially a wind tunnel of cold and blowing snow). It wasn't really the best morning. I lost (and subsequently found) something expensive, then the front door wouldn't lock, and we jiggled it around until it opened for us, and then his car wouldn't start. It was like the world was telling us to go back in the house, get back into our pajamas, and get back into bed and snuggle for the remainder of the day.

On the BRIGHT side, however, there are some VERY nice things that come with the cold weather! Cookies! Christmas lights! Eggnog! Hooray!

Kev and I did a little running around last night and we purchased a cookie press with some of our wedding gift cards (yay!). So tonight I will be baking a nice big batch of Maple Spritz cookies with my fancy new cookie press, and those cookies will be coming with us tomorrow night when we go to Lake Lanier Islands with the new Mr. & Mrs. McMath (woo hoo!). Time for Chick-fil-A, and warm cozy scarves, and mittens, and hot cocoa, and walking around in the snow looking at Christmas lights...I think a few Maple Spritz cookies will fit right in!

Last night after Kev and I got home and warmed our tummies with a bowl of chili, we set to wrapping presents and packing them up to send to Canada. Everything in the house is covered in bits of packing peanuts and EVERYTHING Is covered in glitter. Everything. Glitter wrapping paper is nice, but messy. Why do I buy it every year? We packed and wrapped until 11, when I 'hit the wall', and crawled into bed and promptly fell asleep. What happened to the days when I could be up till 1am on a work night, and not bat an eye? Am I an old person now?

Hooray for Cookies! Hooray for Christmas lights!

Top 10 Reasons I'm Glad It's Friday....

1. Because it's been the longest week everrrr.....
2. Because on the weekend, I'm somehow able to be awake at my usual week-day time, but I don't have to drag myself out bed, mentally whining to myself while I get ready
3. We're going to Kev's parents' house tonight to help them put up their Christmas tree, and have chicken soup and a lot of cookies
4. I've been fighting a feisty cold all week, so it's time to buckle down, bundle up, rest up, and consume massive amounts of orange-and-carrot-juice-Airborne smoothies and large quantities of vanilla cinnamon tea to kick this cold's butt
5. Because this weekend I WILL get my Christmas shopping started (and perhaps completed?)
6. It's payday
7. It's CHRISTMAS BONUS payday
8. I get to spend the whole weekend with my scrumptious husband, and he wierdly enjoys running crazy errands with me all weekend
9. More baking. That's right. Last weekend was not enough.
10. Because I intend to blog more this weekend, since I recently heard that there's people who are reading and liking my blog, and until recently, I was pretty sure only my mom read this.

Hooray Friday! Somehow when I'm leaving work on Friday, I just hope some peppy rock-ish song comes on the radio when I turn the key in the ignition. It gets the weekend started right....