Next year I could be just as good

Merry Christmas everyone!!


It's very quiet here - my parents left this morning (screamin deal on airfare on Southwest), and TJ is at the grocery store. Spike is not feeling well, so he's sleeping by himself on the living room couch and Peanut is as usual, holding down the rug in the upstairs living room.

I'm listening to a Christmas CD sent to us by a friend, and in the background the dishwasher is doing its thing with the first full load of Christmas Eve dinner dishes.

I'm actually really happy with how our dinner turned out last night - it was very simple - we grilled the Omaha steaks my parents bought us, and had them with mushrooms sauteed in butter and red wine. We had a simple salad (thank you Trader Joe's!) and I made some rosemary roasted potatoes. It was super-easy and really satisfying. Oh and we opened three bottles of wine: a Red Truck wine we've been meaning to drink for a while (thanks Doug!) and two bottles of Peller Estates dessert wine, a Cabernet Franc icewine and an oak-aged white ice wine. YUM.

We used our nice china for the second time (thank you Grandma Creath), so piles of dishes are waiting for me on the kitchen counter, but I thought I'd enlist TJ's help in tackling those once the first round of pots and glasses is put away.

I think the gift exchange went well - people seemed happy with their gifts. I got a ton of really nice semi-precious and glass beads from my mom so I can't wait to get back to my craft table and make some new stuff for the shop.

TJ said he liked the wool overcoat I bought him. More so, because now he doesn't have to actually shop for one. :) He'll probably only wear it a few times, but it should last him a long time. And yay for me for guessing the right size on the first try! He plans to wear it when we go to Canlis for New Year's Eve.

The whole family seemed entertained by The Dangerous Book for Boys, which I also bought for TJ. It's got all these things boys "should" know, like the rules of rugby, important battles, and 5 important knots. It was written by a Brit (though this is the American edition) and is quite funny. TJ pointed out there was only a page and a half on Girls, but 5 pages on how to build a go-cart. Awesome!

But the most technologically advanced gift went to my mom. We got her a lifetime subscription to LibraryThing, so she can catalog all the books she reads. She seemed pretty excited about it.

My Christmas gift to myself is an upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard. It's installing right now. I can't wait to put in some quality time learning how to use it, finally. Woo hoo!