Christmasy

It's been a rough year. It's been an especially rough month. It's been kind of difficult to get into any kind of holiday spirit.

That's not to say that there haven't been bright spots, and things to be thankful for, because of course there have. We had a nice dinner with Bob's family on Saturday night -- turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes (that I peeled and boiled, but neglected to start early enough, so they were a little lumpy) and gravy (that Bob made). We had a dinner on Thanksgiving day at my brother's house -- my brother and sister-in-law and niece and nephew, me, our parents, my sister and her boyfriend and my niece and her boyfriend. Bob had to work -- he worked 1-7:30 on Thanksgiving day, and 5:00 a.m. to 3 on Friday, and he just left for work. Today he works 2 - 10:30. But, of course, we're thankful that we both have jobs!

My sister-in-law goes all out as far as decorating for Christmas; she had a lot of things already out, but she said she hadn't yet taken the pictures off the walls and wrapped them up like presents and put them back up. I don't intend to do that, but I decided that this year I'm going to go all out, too. I'm going to do my best to make this a really special Christmas. The last couple of years I've kind of slacked off on it, not made any particular effort, but this year I'm going to.

I'm going to send out Christmas cards early, not make it into a last-minute chore like I have the past few years. I'm going to make an effort to watch my favorite Christmas movies, and the ones I don't have on DVD, I'm going to find out when they're on television so I don't miss them (and I'm going to buy a TV Guide). I put up a wreath outside the front door this morning, and one on the downstairs bathroom door, and as soon as Bob goes to work I'm going to go to the basement and bring up more Christmas decorations. I might put the stockings up on the fireplace, too.

I cooked a big breakfast this morning--bacon and eggs and fried potatoes--and while I'm not sure if I'll be able to sustain this one, I'm going to try to cook more. I might even bake cookies if I get really ambitious. I'm making a list of things that I'd like to do this month, and "bake cookies" will be on it.

I've been looking through iTunes to see if there's any Christmas music that I don't have (Los Lonely Boys has a new Christmas CD out, I see), and I'm always on the lookout for Christmas movies. I bought "Die Hard" yesterday at WalMart for $5.00; I'd been wanting a copy of it for awhile, but it's one of those that I find a little hard to justify, but not for $5.00. I had lunch at Panera Bread yesterday and had a wonderful chai tea latte, which felt kind of festive, a little bit extravagant, and Bob and I met for dinner at On the Border for a belated birthday dinner for me.

Some of my favorite things during the Christmas season:

• Christmas music in the stores
• Special Christmas flavors of ordinary things, like peppermint McDonald's shakes
• Christmas-patterned paper goods, like paper towels, napkins, and paper plates (I got Christmas-patterned insulated coffee cups for Bob to take his coffee to work in the morning in)
• Christmas-patterned plastic ware--plastic storage bags and storage ware
• Cheap Christmas-themed notepads and pens
• Special Christmasy scented bath products like peppermint, chocolate and vanilla
• Spending a long time browsing the Christmas ornament aisles of stores like Hobby Lobby and Target
• Pine-scented candles (Yankee Candles' "Mistletoe" is the best)
• Christmas stickers to decorate my planner pages and stick on Christmas card envelopes
• Christmas movies, and Christmas episodes of television shows (I watched the holiday "Monk" and "Psych" episodes last night)
• Christmas mugs. I bought a new one from Stash Tea this year, it was on clearance. It's red and has a reindeer on it. I'll take a picture of it when I get back to work on Monday.
• Buying expensive wrapping paper, cards, and tags for a fraction of their regular price after Christmas and discovering them a year later (like today!)
• Putting a bowl of Christmas Hershey's kisses on the coffee table
• Painting my toenails Christmas colors (red and green!)
• Christmas wallpaper for my laptop and iPhone

I suppose it sounds counter-intuitive, but I'm going to make a big effort to enjoy this holiday season. I've got an idea of something special to do here during the month of December: stay tuned.

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Hope of a better day

We've spent the last few days getting the office spruced up for our open house on Friday evening, and I've been finishing up decorating my office. I had a windowpane mirror that I bought a few months ago but had never hung, and Kurt hung that for me last night. I'm in the kitchen, and the cabinets are painted white, so my theme has been white and cream. The mirror frame is white, I have a little off-white cabinet, a white painted wooden birdhouse, pale green candles, crystals, seashells.

And plants! The wife of one of the guys who works here runs a college greenhouse, and she brought me a hanging Wandering Jew plant this afternoon, which is hanging from the heat register. The ceilings here are high, and I was standing there holding the plant, trying to figure out what I was going to do with it. I figured if all else failed I could just sit it on a filing cabinet or something, but Aaron came in, stood up on the chair, and hung it from the register. It works pretty well there, actually.

I also repotted a plant that I've had on my desk for awhile. It's a mixture of several different kinds of plants; Bob brought it home from the funeral of one of his friends' mothers, and I brought it in, thinking it probably wouldn't live very long. But it has, so I got a new pot last weekend and potted it today. It looks pretty good. I really like the energy that plants bring to a space, and I used to have a lot of plants at home.

But I kind of got out of the habit of having houseplants, and don't have any at home now. I'm making up for it at the office, though.

I remember seeing Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and being very impressed with him, thinking, wow, he could be president some time. I didn't expect it would be so soon, though.

I've always voted Democratic, and I remember most of the presidential elections, watching and hoping that the Democratic candidate be elected, but most of them weren't terribly important to me. The first election that I really felt "belonged" to me was Clinton/Gore. I felt at that time that I might actually volunteer for the campaign, but I didn't, of course. This election felt like that, too.

I'm so happy, and hopeful for the future. I honestly didn't think it could happen, I thought that when the time came, we'd end up electing another old white man as president. During the convention, when the decision was being made as to whether Obama or Hilary Clinton would be the candidate, I wondered whether it could happen -- could the U.S. elect a black man, or a woman president? I had hopes, I just wasn't confident that it could happen.

But it did. The phrase that struck me the most from his acceptance speech was this:

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

I have hope.

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A good day

It's hard to believe it's the first day of November. I'm not sure how warm it got today, but warm enough that I turned on the air conditioner in the car for awhile this afternoon when I got back into it after shopping. It's supposed to stay nice for a few days, I think. I'll take it as long as I can get it.

We're sprucing up the office a little bit for an open house we're having next weekend. There is a all-female law firm that has offices on one of our floors, and the main lawyer is a plant person. The offices are filled with plants. I went over to talk to her about doing a website for her a few weeks ago, and I was amazed at the plants, and a little jealous. It made me think about getting plants for my office, but I hadn't done it.

I had mentioned to a couple of people that I was thinking about getting plants, and then one day last week she (the lawyer) came over and asked me if I would like to have a ficus for my office. Anna had mentioned my wish for a plant to her, and she had a big ficus that she didn't have a place for. I think she had brought it from her home, where it had been outside, and it needed a place to winter. So she loaned it to me, and I love it.

And just having that plant there made me want to get more, so I went to the nursery today. I'm always looking for a good deal, so I checked out the "scratch and dent" table where they have plants marked down. There were a couple of really pretty ficus trees -- not as big as the one in my office, but really pretty. They had had their trunks trained into curves, and they were $9.99, marked down from $34.99. I'm not sure why, really. They were a little bare of leaves, but not too bad.

So I bought one of them, and I also bought a diffenbachia which really doesn't look bad at all. One of the greenhouse workers came by and said that it was a little sunburned, and that it had also gotten a bit waterlogged the last big rain we had, and they don't like to have their feet wet. So it wasn't perfect, but I'm sure it will be fine with a little time and attention. It was $9.99 also, marked down from $29.99. I was a little concerned about getting the ficus into the car -- it's probably about 5 feet tall, although I don't remember exactly.

I put the front passenger seat down as far as it would go, and leaned the plant down on the seat, and it just barely fit, with just a few leaves peeking out of the sunroof.

I spent a long time looking around in the greenhouse, then spent an equally long time in the bookstore, went to the library to return books and renew my library card, had lunch (a big salad and a bowl of bean soup) at Sweet Tomatoes, and went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to pick up reed diffusers for the bathrooms at work (and a little one for my desk). It was a really good day.

Then as I was heading to the grocery store, my last stop of the day, Bob called. He asked me where I was, and I said I was just turning into the grocery store parking lot. He said, "What's that tree in your car? You have a tree in your car!" I said, "Where are you??" and he wouldn't tell me. I said, are you going to go to the store with me? And he said he might. "But tell me about the tree!" he said. I said, "I'll tell you about it when I see you."

So I pulled into the parking lot, and I saw his van, but I didn't see him. I parked next to his van and walked up to the store, looking all around, and didn't see him anywhere. When I got to the door, he stepped out of a corner where he'd been hiding. Silly boy. I told him about the tree, and we grocery shopped together, then he left and went home while I stood in line to pay. When I got home I made "hobo dinners," an old Girl Scout recipe -- a pie pan filled with sliced potatoes, onions, and a hamburger pattie on top, salt and pepper and a few dabs of margarine, then covered with aluminum foil and baked at 400° for an hour.

And now I'm sitting in my chair with my new-to-me laptop -- my boss' old (not really old, though) MacBook Pro. He got a new one and handed his previous one down to me so that I can be mobile. It's been difficult lately, with the work I'm doing, to stay synced up between home and office. I've been emailing stuff to myself, or saving things on a thumb drive, but envariably I forget something. So he asked me if I'd like to replace my desktop iMac with a laptop, and I said sure.

I spent most of the afternoon at work yesterday transferring the applications and files from the iMac over to the MacBook, and quite a bit of time yesterday evening getting familiar with everything so I can jump into it on Monday.

It was a good day.

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Update

This morning Bob told me, "You need to write something in your journal. You haven't written in a long time." I said I knew that I did, and that I would try to do it today. He said, "You can write about your anniversary present, and what you're reading, and how cuddly Dinah's been, and what's in your purse, and how your thumb is doing."

So. Our anniversary was Saturday. Bob's had a cold, and we've both been kind of worn out, and our normal anniversary place (Stephenson's Apple Farm Restaurant) went out of business, so we don't have a special place to go. So we didn't do anything. We went to the grocery store and bought a pie and a few little special things, and had dinner at home, although Bob was watching something on television that I didn't want to see ("V for Vendetta"), so he ate in front of the television and I ate in the dining room. Hopefully we'll get it together to go out sometime this week.

But we did have presents! He got me some beautiful rainbow topaz earrings, and I got him a headlight (not for the car, but one that you wear on your head when you're walking around outside in the dark). 32 years. Sometimes it's hard to get creative after that long.

Tonight I was getting ready to leave work at about 7:00, packing up my tote bag, turning out the lights, checking to be sure doors were locked. My phone rang, and it was Bob wondering where I was, if I had left yet. There was one other person still there, Kelsey, and I heard her on the phone, and when I turned back to tell her I was leaving, she was packing up her stuff, too.

She said, "I just got the 'where are you?' call from my husband. I said, "I just got one, too!" She said, "How long have you been married?" and I told her 32 years -- I think she's been married less than a year. She said, "So I've got 32 more years of those calls then," and I said, "Yep."

Dinah: Dinah has been a much better cat since Pyewacket died. She's sleeping in between us in bed now, where before she would never do that. She snuggles with Bob a lot, and of course she's always on my lap. I suppose maybe she was intimidated by Pye, and maybe was afraid she was going to get attacked or something; I don't know. But whatever it was, she seems to be doing a lot better. She still hisses at Bob occasionally, but less than she used to, I think.

My thumb: I went to a physical therapy appointment last week and got some instructions for exercises and "scar massage." I do the exercises when I think about it; everything seems fine. I have good range of motion, and it doesn't hurt to move, although the scar is still a little tender and can hurt if I'm not careful when I pick things up. But basically it's fine.

Last weekend I went to the knitting shop to pick up some needles and ended up buying several balls of sock yarn. I told the woman at the shop that it was hard not to buy it all -- I told her that I had recently had surgery on my hand and now I can knit again!

What I'm reading: Right now I'm reading Lost and Found, by Jacqueline Sheehan, and enjoying it a lot. It's a book that I had picked up awhile ago at the bookstore, and thought it looked good, but I was trying to be good about not spending too much money, so I didn't buy it. But it was on the clearance table at Borders a week or so ago, and I grabbed it.

It's about a woman who, after her veterinarian husband dies suddenly, gives up her job as a college psychologist and goes off to become an animal control warden in a small town. One of her first animal rescues is a big black lab who's been shot with an arrow. She takes him into her home while he heals, and in return, he helps her heal. She believes that he's grieving a loss also, and tries to find out what happened to him.

In the process she meet a lot of interesting characters, including the chief animal control warden who is also a minister, a body worker who has Synesthesia and sees emotions as colors, pain as shapes, etc., and a young girl with an eating disorder.

I haven't finished the book yet, so can't guarantee that there's a happy ending. The book is, at times, emotionally wrenching, but it's very good. As soon as I finish writing, I'm going to head up to bed and read.

And lastly, I leave you with this:

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It worked!

I had the hand surgery on Monday, and everything went fine. I was a little apprehensive about it, although I don't really know why. I guess just going under general anesthesia is kind of scary. But it was fine.

We got to the hospital at about 8:00 Monday morning and checked in, and were almost immediately met and taken to a room. A nurse came in and took my history again, checked medications, and told me to take everything off and put on the hospital gown that was left for me. Bob liked that, and thought it was kind of funny that she didn't ask (or tell) him to leave. I guess she figured I could do that if I wanted to.

I put my clothes in a little locker/closet, and pretty soon another nurse came in, then the doctor, then the anesthesiologist. It was kind of a parade through the room, and everyone that came through checked to be sure that they had the correct hand. The doctor wrote her initials in Sharpie on my palm, with an arrow pointing at my right thumb. Then we waited a little bit more, and she came back and said they were going to take me early.

The surgery was originally scheduled for 10:10, but she said that the surgery she was going to do before mine had been postponed because the instruments that she needed hadn't arrived, and she was going to do me first. So they started an IV, Bob gave me a kiss, and they rolled me into the operating room.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery room, with a HUGE bandage on my hand. Bob was coming back from the cafeteria where he had gone to get some breakfast, just as they were bringing me back into the room. Bob helped me get dressed (he liked that, too), then he went to get the car while a nurse came back with a wheelchair and took me outside.

We went to Target to fill my prescriptions, and I actually felt pretty good, and was hungry, so we went to Panda Express and Bob got me Chinese food. We went home, I ate, then went to bed, and slept the rest of the day. I never really had any bad pain, but I had to go into the office for a meeting on Thursday (didn't have to, but thought I should), so I stupidly took a pain pill that day, and it made me HUGELY sick. I think it was a combination of the pill, and not really eating very much--I have a hard time actually having meals when I'm on my own--and I felt awful the rest of that day and on into the next. It's only today that I'm feeling good again.

And then this morning Bob took off for California to help open up a new store in Manteca. Tonight he and his friends are hitting Chinatown in San Francisco for dinner, the only night they'll probably be able to get away for a nice evening. So it's just Dinah and me for the next ten days. I'm going to do my best to try to eat well. I went to Target tonight and got stuff to make macaroni and cheese, but by the time I got home, I didn't feel like it, so I microwaved a potato and some green beans.

I got a few other things -- melba toast and cream cheese, some Chex Mix, a couple of frozen gourmet pizzas (chicken caesar and roasted vegetable), chocolate croissants, cheese streusel muffins, some bananas, and a lot of cranberry juice, which is my favorite right now. I'll try to make macaroni and cheese tomorrow night, although I wouldn't count on it. I always have good intentions, but when it comes right down to it, cooking is way down on my priority list.

I could probably have taken off the bandages -- when I called to make a follow-up appointment for next week the nurse said I could take them off in "24 to 48 hours," then put on a smaller dressing, but I think I'll try to leave them on until my appointment on Tuesday. It just makes me feel a little better to have that protection on there a little while longer. I can bend my thumb now without that horrible click! The surgery worked!

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