Matt’s snowshoeing with Shiloh and one of our good friends today, and I’m allegedly staying home to clean this pigsty of a house (I have a funny story about with word “pigsty”; remind me to tell you about it sometime) and get other things done – like maybe wrapping some of Matt’s Christmas gifts, or taking care of the backlog of receipts that need to be entered in our financial records.  Or writing.  Crazy things like that.   

Naturally, I’ve made coffee and I’m sitting on the couch poking around YouTube and watching good movies followed by their mediocre sequels on cable.

On the up side, we mailed off the last major Christmas package last night, which means less pressure from that side.

And since I wouldn’t want to leave you out of the fun, this is the video my brother sent the link to this morning, which tipped off my morning’s YouTube explorations:

It’s snowing here today, and I have to say that the panoramic view from my lobby windows is quite lovely.  It would be more lovely if I faced the mountains instead of the parking lot and the office buildings next door, but beggars can’t be choosers.  I’ve got the lobby Christmas tree against a background of falling snow and whitened roads, with my space heater keeping my feet warm as I sip my tea and listen to Christmas music.  And they pay me to do this.  Remind me of days like this when I think about quitting.  As if I’d ever find a job like this again.    

Of course, I’m writing this entry in a blatant attempt to put off stuffing more receipts into envelopes. But it has to be done by the end of the year, so here I am, stuffing. Or here I will be, as soon as I get to work. But I’m enjoying my tea and snow for a few minutes more.

I had intended to include a picture of my view with this post, but for some reason my phone isn’t letting my laptop connect via Bluetooth and I haven’t got my USB cable with me, so you’ll all just have to wait.

I estimate that I’ll be done with the day’s stuffing at about 2:30 this afternoon, barring any other interruptions, and then I can get back to work on the other things on my list. In the meanwhile, I’ll be waiting for a call from the doctor’s office to confirm my appointment request for early next week. I’m actually feeling pretty good about life in general this morning, but that could just be because I love snow.

I give you – Shiloh!   

Isn’t she getting big?

Puppiness:

We had about four or five inches of fresh snow this morning, which seemed like an opportunity not worth missing for letting the dog run around. Now, she’s almost konked out on my jacket (she invariably chooses “beds” that smell like us) but seems to think she needs to stay awake, so she’s fighting the nap we all know is coming, which means every time I move she wakes up again. If I can manage to do it without her noticing, I’ll take a picture.

That’s right, I’m ‘fessing up.  I like shoes.  You might not know it by going through my closet, but if I had my way there could be 15 pairs of black pumps lined up, which of course my husband would have no idea how to tell apart. And then there would be all the others, too.

Fortunately for my closet space we have basically no money, which precludes my actually purchasing shoes very often at all. And, since I can’t afford to look like a Shoe Person, I usually browse the department store shoe displays in clothes that look completely at odds with the felt tweed heels I might be eyeing. Because who would suspect that the girl with her thumbs through the holes in her long underwear sleeves, the Ron Jons tshirt, and the bright blue down vest with cheap jeans and ratty old Birks might be a sucker for virtually all of Steve Madden’s classic styles?

Speaking of which, I found shoes to wear with my new dress, and I’ll also be able to wear them to work. Whee!

Last week was rather depressing for me, which is part of the reason I stayed quiet.  All of a sudden all the things I’ve been putting off in favor of more immediate concerns turned into immediate concerns with real, tangible deadlines looming far too close.  And the knowledge that as soon as I managed to finish all the things I’ve stuck in the wings, there will be a whole slew of new things waiting with deadlines didn’t help much either.    

So I made a list, and I put together a day by day schedule of how I’m supposed to spend my time – because obviously I’m not doing well flying by the seat of my pants lately – and I’ll be starting with following that either tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how today goes. The delay in starting is because I realized last Thursday that if I expected any of my Christmas packages with gifts to reach their recipients before the 25th, I needed to get that done this weekend.

I spent yesterday out shopping, picking up the bits and pieces I still needed to put all the gifts together. And, of course, there’s my butter toffee to make, which also needs to be done in time to mail to the relatives.

And it wouldn’t be Butter Toffee Season if I didn’t burn a batch right off the bat. I don’t know how I do it, but I do. It always smells vile, but at least I resisted tasting it this year, just to be sure it was bad. This year it smelled SO bad that I knew it couldn’t possible taste anything other than awful. It’s just that it’s so hard to believe that I really wasted a double-batch of sugar and butter. *sigh* I did managed to pull off two sheets of perfectly cooked candy later, though, and will be covering them in chocolate and nuts this afternoon.

Also on the agenda are wrapping gifts and finding appropriate ways to mail them, and possibly going to buy stamps for all our Christmas cards, which have also not been sent yet.

Then maybe I can think about all the other, non-Christmassy things on my list. At least I found a great dress for the two Christmas parties we’re going to in the next few weeks. That all by itself is cause for triumph.

Shiloh’s still growing, and learning quickly. Yesterday morning she weighed in at just over 25 pounds, at 15 weeks.

And it snowed yesterday, which is lovely. I’d like it a bit more if it were warmer (it’s about 20 right now outside), but the sun is shining and it’s a beautiful day.

Time to go melt me some chocolate and slather it on my candy. Hope you’ve had a productive weekend.

… okay not really back from the dead, or at least that’s not how I feel at the moment, but I am back from a great weekend in California.   

Unfortunately, it looks like life here at home didn’t stop while I was gone, and aside from the things I need to get done, Matt seems to be coming down with some kind of cold. For his sake, I hope it’s nothing more than extreme exhaustion catching up with him, but I have a sinking feeling it’s not.

Somehow, the paperwork still hasn’t gone through that will let us play new music at work, and it’s monthly statement time, which means I have thousands of envelopes to stuff… and since it’s the end of the year there will be more massive batches of receipts to take care of for the next month and a half. Now, if I can just use the mental goof-off time during envelope stuffing to work on the novel, things will be great. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t often seem to work that way.

Who knows how I’ll end out the year? Right now, I’m a bit pessimistic.