cookies galore

My parents are here! They got in yesterday afternoon, we went out to eat and then headed to a shopping center and played some chess. Because that's what you assume you would do at a shopping center: play chess. My dad won.

Today we spent aaaaaaalll day making cookies! To be more specific, my mom and I made cookies while Alfred watched and drank and my dad played a hunting game on their Wii. We made those peanut butter cookies with a Hershey kiss in the middle, almond cookies with almond frosting, peanut butter oatmeal M&M cookies, peppermint sugar cookies (I started making them in the shape of candy canes but didn't like how they were turning out, so I made the rest as pinwheels and didn't like those either, oh well), cut out sugar cookies, and cut out anise cookies.

We frosted all of the cut outs and decorated the anise ones.

Katie's going to decorate the sugar cut outs when she gets down here. As we learned when making our Easter cookies last year, she's much better at piping than I am.

Now we're *watching* (thank you, mom and Ro) Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Interesting choice of movies to watch with my parents, yes. It's good so far. They're dropping quite a few f-bombs.

I need a Christmas ring tone

Sorry I slacked yesterday. I was busy. Every day I've had a list of things to accomplish before going to bed, and every night so far I've been pretty successful. We're almost ready for Christmas. The house is ready for all of our guests, we have almost all of our gifts bought and wrapped (they're all sitting under the tree right now, it's so damn precious), I mailed a package off to MN with their gifts, our cards went out this week, and we have our Christmas menu all set. I just have a few little things left to buy, and we have to buy most of the food for Christmas day. So not much left, really. We've gotten a lot done. I was going to make some cookie dough tonight to have it ready to bake this weekend, but then we decided it would be more fun to do it with my family here. You know, bonding and stuff. Really, my mom and I will make cookies while my dad fishes and Alfred is busy on his computer or something. But it will be bonding in our own way.

I feel like Christmas always sort of sneaks up on me. I look forward to my birthday, and then when that's over I have a few more days of birthday celebration time, of course, and then suddenly Christmas is a week away. Cards and packages are what always get me, because they stop guaranteeing the delivery date and make you all nervous that your stuff won't get where it's going on time.

I'm excited to have a few days off of work, but at home. We might go to Universal for a day while everyone's here, which will be fun. We haven't been to a theme park at all since I've gone back to the museum, if you can believe it. I barely can. Especially considering how much Ilya loves going. Ok time's up, got to clean up the wrapping paper in the living room and then go to bed!

I found a dog

Today, just as I was coming out of the new museum with a couple of teachers that I was showing around, this dog came out of nowhere and started trotting around with us. She was white with some tan spots, and had a pink flowered collar, which made me guess that she was a she. She was cute, and not all jumpy and annoying, which was good. She sort of wandered around, sniffing things and going up to people, and I forgot about her, since there are a few people that walk their dogs without leashes around the museum. Well, a few minutes later she wandered into the store. There's a big hole in the screen in the bottom of the store door, so she just walked right on in. Kara (the new girl) started freaking out a bit, because she's sort of afraid of dogs, and started trying to shoo the dog out. I went outside and filled a little bucket with some water, then took it outside to the dog. By then the stupid thing was standing smack dab in the middle of the street, watching the cars drive around and try to avoid hitting her. So I went and grabbed her collar and pulled her out of the street and over to the water, which she seemed to appreciate. I found a tag on her collar with a phone number to a pet tracking service, wrote it and what I assumed was her ID number down, and went into the store to call. While I was on the phone the dog took off again, so I had Kara get on the phone and I went after the dog, who by now had found the group who was eating lunch at our picnic tables. I grabbed her collar again and brought her into the museum, then had the genius idea to tie a piece of twine around her collar so I had a leash for her.

So, I had a dog. I named her Jingles. We walked around the museum a bit, took some trash out to the dumpster, sniffed some stuff. After the group left we sat at the picnic tables, had some water, watched the world go by. Just chillin. Then I got kind of bored, Jingles was just lying on the ground and not playing with me anymore, so I closed her into the picnic area and went outside. Of course, right then her owner showed up, so I took her out to the dog, whose name turned out to be Sassy. I liked Jingles better personally, but whatever. Then her owner told me that this was the third time TODAY that the dog had escaped! I mean ok, it happens, but 3 times by 12:30 in the afternoon? How the hell does she get anything done at work if she's always having to go pick up her damn dog? Plus the lady at the pet tracking place said the dog had been reported found last night. Seems kind of irresponsible, if you ask me, but nobody did, so never mind. :)

catching up

First, thank you all for calling/emailing/texting on my birthday. I had a great day, Alfred made me a delicious breakfast (burritos with egg and sweet potato), I had nothing but junk food all day at work (2 kinds of brownies and a cake), and then we had a fantastic dinner. If anyone still needs a gift idea for me for Christmas (or my birthday, as some of my siblings have yet to get me anything) a gift certificate to Barbara Jean's would be awesome. Then on our way out, we passed a real estate place - check out the lamp in their window!

Friday was super busy at work, and we pretty much just crashed that evening. I think that was the night we had liver for dinner, which was not quite as good as we had hoped it would be. Saturday we spent with Alfred's family and Ilya and Mercedes for my birthday. We had fried green tomatoes, mac and cheese, tomato pudding, crab cakes, and 2 types of cake (both baked by Mercedes, with help, apparently, from Ilya). It was all fantastic and I almost exploded afterwards. Seriously, my stomach almost burst. It was painful. But oh so tasty.

Yesterday we went into preparation mode for next week, cleaning and getting things ready. Katie's former abode took quite some work, but Mom, your holiday suite is now ready for occupation. We also put up and decorated our Christmas tree! We bought it Saturday morning (for only $30!) and spent all last night decorating. It's such a cute little tree. I'm all sorts of fired up for Christmas this year!

Tonight after work I did a little shopping, then came home and whipped up some meatloaf and mashed turnips (like mashed potatoes but healthier) for dinner. We're eating it right now, and it is rather delicious. After this we have some laundry to fold, and we got our Christmas cards today so we probably need to start addressing envelopes. Fun times!

happy birthday Katherine! and me!

It's the big day! I have my ring tones all set, for my phone and for my emails and text messages. I got to sleep in, I took this morning off of exercising so I could sleep an extra hour. Alfred's making me breakfast and taking me out to dinner tonight, and I've got presents and cards to open before I go to work. I love my birthday! I hope I never come to hate it. I don't understand how people don't like their birthdays. I mean, it's a day everyone gets to celebrate me. How can anyone not like that? And it just so happens Katherine was born on the same day, although 2 years later. She's such a young'un. I hope you have a good day today too, Katherine - happy birthday!

So, now that you've read this, you can go ahead and call me and wish me a happy birthday. You don't need to leave a comment here, too, but if you want to, I won't stop you. You could text or email me too so I could hear both of my special birthday ringtones, but that's not necessary either, really. I'm not picky. Actually if you leave a comment here I'll get an email about it, which will let me hear that ringtone, so really, you can go for either a comment or a text/email, both are not needed. And of course, as long as you call, that's plenty. :)

it's what's for dinner

(I'll warn you now, there may be a few "that's what she said" moments in this post. Enjoy.)

Last week we got our 1/4 cow worth of meat delivered. It's from the same place we got our lamb from that we visited this summer. (We're eating one of the guys in the last picture of this post.) I had to leave work early, and then they ended up not getting to our house until 3 hours later, so that kind of sucked. But hey, with all this beef, I wasn't complaining!

And so we now have a very full freezer. Full of beef. Grass fed, healthily raised beef. Which is good, because I've decided that beef is my favorite meat. I think I could live on hamburgers and steak for the rest of my life. I mean, I'd probably like to have a pizza now and then too, but if I had to make a choice, it would totally be beef. Incidentally, I decided the other day that if I had to choose one drink for the rest of my life, it would be Kahlua and cream. So apparently I'd be living on Kahlua and cream and beef. Awesome!

We also got our shipment of this really nice wine that we've been getting since our trip out to Napa. So we had a fancy little dinner last Monday to celebrate all of our new food items. We didn't actually drink our new wine, because it came with a little note asking us to let it rest, so we drank last year's wine. Still, it was all quite delicious. Feast your eyes on this.

winter wonderland

I've had a lot of picture-heavy posts lately. I think I'm going to have to have some picture-free posts to even it out soon. I don't want anyone getting too used to all these pictures, cause when my supply dries up I don't want any complaints. Anyway, on to the post.

We put up our Christmas lights this weekend! Yes, I did a lot of work too, but the only picture of me working is from a very unflattering angle and since I'm in charge here, I decide when to post unflattering pictures of myself, and today is not one of those days. There's a total of almost 900 feet of lights up outside right now, and we have another 50 foot strand we could put up. We ran out of daylight and just haven't decided where it will go.

We also did a bit of cleanup yard work. Alfred cut down a bunch of dead palm fronds, I blew off the roof, and Alfred cleaned up branches from the yard. It looks a lot nicer now, plus it's less flammable. We plan on having a few bonfires while my family is down here for Christmas, and thought it might be helpful if the yard wasn't full of dry branches. Palm fronds burn really fast, too. I discovered that while we were working on our house a few years ago. We started a fire in a metal trash can to keep warm (it was some night in November) and when everyone else was in the house I threw some palm fronds on top. The fire was taller than the roof of the house within seconds. I was so afraid someone would look out the window and see this towering inferno and I'd be so busted. I almost shat my pants. Luckily palm fronds burn out pretty fast, too.

We ran into a bit of wildlife around the yard as well. Alfred unearthed what he first thought was a snake, but turned out to be a skink. He was hiding in a palm tree that Alfred was destroying, I mean trimming. Poor little guy lost his home. He eventually fell from the second story roof, but I couldn't find his body so he either vaporized on impact or ran away to safety.

Then when I was blowing off the porch (cause I made a mess from blowing off the roof) this gigantic thing was on the picnic table. I don't know if it was dead or what, but it didn't respond when I gently blew on it with the leaf blower. So I turned the blower on it full blast. That sucker's long gone.

And last, but not least, a dead opossum. At least, that's what I'm guessing it is, judging by its pointy little teeth (at the left of the picture) and its tail (at the right of the picture). I know it's not a bird!

But enough dead animals. Back to the decorations. I put up some garland inside the house, but haven't really gotten much else done inside.

The lights outside took up most of our time. We worked so diligently, then happened to notice that the ones we had lined the walkway with looked a little... suggestive.


It was totally by accident, I swear. Anyway, we adjusted them a bit, and got a couple more strands up, and voila! A winter wonderland!


And next weekend, we get our tree!