Sleepy Dinah

For the longest time, Dinah wouldn't have anything to do with Bob. When Pyewacket was alive, of course, Pye was his cat, and Dinah was mine, and while Pye would cuddle with me as second best (except for that period of time when she was trying to kill me), Dinah didn't seem to like Bob at all.

That has slowly changed. Maybe for the last year or so, she's started sleeping in the middle of the bed, between Bob and me, rather than on the outside by me. And in the last month she's started sleeping on his side. And she wants to take naps with him. He said yesterday he was home in the afternoon, and she was walking around on the bed, hissing at him because he wasn't moving fast enough to lie down with her. The hissing thing used to bother him, but now it seems like that's her default "I'm not happy" response rather than something aggressive.

When I say, "Dinah really loves you now," he said, "just in bed," and that does seem to mostly be the case. She loves it when I come home from work and come upstairs to change my clothes. We have "cuddle time," and the three of us lie down on the bed. She can't decide where to lie, though. She'll start out lying on top of me, then go over and lie on Bob, then in the middle, touching both of us. She has also started going under the covers, like Pye used to.

She's mellowed a lot in her old age. As have we all, I suppose.

It's all worth it

This morning, Bob said to me, "I'm feeling Christmassy."

He always used to love Christmas, all the traditions and things that surround it, but the last few years, working retail, he didn't feel that way so much. It became something to get through rather than something to enjoy, and that made me sad. So I've been trying very hard to make the house Christmassy, and it is apparently working.

I asked him, "how come?" and he said, "you've been baking, and burning candles, and you bought candy, and decorated, it makes me happy." And that makes it all worthwhile.

The last nice day

Today was a beautiful day. I went out and sat on the bench outside the office for a few minutes after lunch and it felt like spring. Unfortunately, I understand it's going to be like -11 tomorrow and for the foreseeable future, but at least it was beautiful today!

In my effort to do something every day to move the Christmas plans along, I got out a box of craft stuff that I had started a couple of years ago, I think. I had bought some wonderful snowman paper at Archivers, and glued it to tags, but for whatever reason, had never done anything with them. So I made a few more, and started thinking about what I would need to do to make them be usable as gift tags. I haven't totally figured it out yet, and I need to get another glue runner and look for ribbon, but at least it felt like I did something.

I also downloaded what I think is a very cool iPhone app called Visionary I-Ching. It's free to download, and I think you can see half a dozen cards or something, and then if you like it, you pay $6.99 for full access. That's kind of a lot for an app, but it's beautiful, and I think it's definitely worth it.

Starting Christmas

Yesterday I:

• put out a bunch of my little Christmas decorations in the house
  
• had a cup of hot chocolate in a snowman mug
  
• watched "Christmas With the Kranks"
  
• started addressing Christmas cards
  
• decorated the mirror in Bob's bathroom with snowman window clings
  
• trolled Pinterest for inspiration and updated my Christmas board
  
• Put a Christmas wreath on the front door
  

I bought:

• Christmas cupcake papers and cake mix
  
• Hershey's Kisses to put out in bowls at home
  
• peppermint candy to put out in my office at work
  
• peppermint marshmallows for hot chocolate
  
• cranberry ginger ale
  
• a dozen vintage-looking mercury glass ornaments
  

Today I put up my little Christmas/winter wreath in my office at work and tonight I baked muffins. So I would say December is off to a good start!

As part of the "project," I downloaded a new iPhone app called InstaCC - Calendar and Challenges for Instagram. I actually downloaded a bunch of apps to try, and I liked the layout of this one the best. It automatically picks up the photos from my Instagram account and arranges them, and they also have the option of challenges. Some of them cost extra; I paid $1.99 for the "365" photo-a-day challenge. I haven't completely figured it out yet, and I think the developer is Japanese, so some of the language is odd, but I like having a daily prompt/challenge, so hopefully I can stick with it for awhile. There are overlays for the challenge photos, which I like. So, we'll see. Sometimes I need something like this to give me a some creative motivation, and I definitely need that with Christmas coming up. And I guess I also start thinking about the first of the year, and new beginnings, new starts, trying again to get it right.

Happy December!

November kind of sucked, well, quite a bit of the whole year sucked. November was the month of dental woes, and it was really horrible. I had the second of a series of appointments the day before Thanksgiving, where I was fitted for a temporary crown. Even though it was a little over an hour with two people's hands in my mouth, it wasn't nearly as bad as the week before, when I had a molar extracted. That one was so awful, so traumatic, that the nurse (?) suggested nitrous, and while she said my insurance wouldn't pay for it, she thought I needed it. I don't know how much it helped, but maybe it at least gave me something else to concentrate on.

Bob went out and got me a milkshake after that appointment, and since then I've been eating mostly soup and drinking tea. I had a broken tooth -- the one that is getting the crown -- and the dentist was out of town, so he told me to be very careful with it until he could get the temporary crown on. I'm slowly working back up to eating other stuff, like a turkey sandwich on a soft roll. My sister invited us over for Thanksgiving -- my parents don't want a whole house full of people anymore, so my brother and his wife took dinner over to them -- but I didn't feel up to it the day after the dental drama.

So I bought the smallest turkey breast in the store and roasted that for Bob. He had to work for part of the day, so I didn't really go all out, just the turkey, mashed potatoes, Stovetop stuffing, and I baked a frozen apple pie. Having the small dinner with just us was nice, and I put together a dinner for him to take to his boss at work that night.

My birthday was a week ago today, and we didn't do anything, but we're going to go out tonight, probably just somewhere like Culver's, but that sounds good. Bob brought me a beautiful spicy-scented candle and some chocolates, and Barb sent me a care package with Disneyland tea, a Vera Bradley shopping bag, and a "Sally" (from the Nightmare Before Christmas) doll, my dad and Bob's dad both sent me cash, and my niece Mallory sent me a gift card. It was a low key personal holiday. :)

I don't really have much money to spent on shopping, but I did go out on Black Friday. I had a $10 free coupon for Kohl's, and a 20% off coupon, so I went there and bought myself a sterling silver Disney bead for my Pandora-style bracelet. It's two interlocking silver circles that are engraved "Wishes come true."

I also went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy a humidifier that I ended up taking back the next day. It was horribly noisy -- Bob said it sounded like an aircraft carrier. As it turned out, they had humidifiers in two separate places in the store, and I only found one. I exchanged the noisy one for another one that is much better, and it was slightly cheaper. At the low speed, it's almost silent, and at the higher level it's just a low background noise that doesn't bother us at all.

Saturday was my "day of beauty. I had my nails done and my hair cut and colored, and that took up most of the day. I came home and made mashed potatoes for Bob to have with the leftover turkey when he got home from work at about 10:00. It's been nice to have these days at home.

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I decided I needed to do some kind of "project" for December to keep my spirits up. I'm not sure what it's going to be, except that for one thing, I'm going to take a bunch of photos. I started today, taking pictures of some of my favorite little Christmas ornaments that I put out each year. My "thing" is primitive snowmen, and I try to pick them up whenever I see them. They're usually pretty cheap, and I have quite a collection of them.


I also started reading some of my favorite Christmas books. I read Miracle and Other Christmas Stories the other night when I was feeling particularly down, and it cheered me up, as it always does. And I checked out Murder with All the Trimmings from the library, a "Josie Marcus, Secret Shopper" mystery set in a Christmas store.

I've started thinking about my favorite Christmas movies, too, and may watch one tonight. I'm thinking Christmas with the Kranks, or maybe Home Alone.