I'm settling in this morning with a cup of coffee to catch up on email and various other cyber to-do's. It's already 11 o'clock, I'm still lounging around in my pajamas. Eric is on campus, so I have the place to myself. I love days off. This past weekend was my December Saturday-Sunday weekend off (usually I'm off Monday-Tuesday), so Eric and I took advantage of it and used Saturday to get our Christmas tree and decorate the apartment. The Christmas tree lot was predictably busy, but luckily the 7-8' trees weren't entirely picked over. We examined several candidates. Well, Eric got all dirty and sticky with sap while I examined them. That's his job.
After a few eliminations Eric's mom spotted a nice full noble fir in good shape. We shook it out to confirm first impressions, and once it was declared worthy we claimed our tree and loaded it in the truck. Well, Eric loaded it. That's his job.
There was the annual discovery of faulty strings of lights and the annual trip to get more to replace them, but before the day was out we had the tree decorated. It looks great--hopefully we can keep it looking good through the holiday season. We cleaned and decorated all afternoon and had the place cozy and Christmas-y by the time friends came over that evening.
Sunday was another busy day for me. I ran all sorts of errands, did the grocery shopping, more cleaning, and laundry. I even made my first batch of homemade candy (butterscotch haystacks) for the season. Having done quite enough yesterday, today I'm giving myself permission to do nothing at all. It's hard to believe that I have only two weeks or so before boarding a plane home. I almost can't believe I'm going to have two weeks off for the holidays this year--that hasn't happened in a very, very long time. I plan to make the most of it!
