I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

The weather forecast for Christmas in the Bay Area is "rain" and "more rain". Christmas Eve, too. Not exactly what I grew up with. On the other hand, if the rain ends, I'll be able to go out for some bike rides on my week off from work, and that's not exactly what I grew up with, either.

Debbi and I bought some more lights and put them up this weekend. I now have nets of nights on some bushes outside my house, as well as lights on a tree in my front yard and around my garage. Very extravagant! Well, for me, anyway. Debbi is the Light Queen, so this is small potatoes for her. It's rather pleasant, though, and it took some thought to figure out how to get them plugged in, since there isn't an exterior outlet at the front of the house. Taping the unused ends of the plugs so they won't short out during the rain was tricky, too.

I guess the previous owner also put up a bunch of lights outside, so my neighbors probably won't be terribly surprised. But hopefully they'll enjoy them - as I hope will all the through traffic on my street.

Man, I must get a new digital camera sometime so I can start putting pictures of stuff like this up in my journal. Add a little color to my entries!

The rain has been a bummer since it's blown all the leaves off the trees, but they're now sitting in my back yard because it's been too wet to collect them! We also had a mishap in the front yard a few weeks ago: Our evergreen bushes lining the driveways suddenly disappeared one day, apparently due to a miscommunication with the gardener. I came home at night and looked around and went, "Hmm, something seems to be different tonight." I'm not too choked up about it because I didn't really like the bushes anyway. It'd be nice if we can plant some nice flowers or something along those strips. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to having Christmas-to-New Year's off, but I'm also looking forward to the few days sandwiched on either end of the holidays, since it should be a quiet time at work when I can get a bunch of stuff done. It's not like I have many interruptions during the week, but this way I can hopefully clear some of my short-term projects off my plate and be ready to hit the ground running when everyone gets back after the holidays and the "real" work begins.

Maybe it's a sign of how much I like my job that I look forward to being able to get some interesting work done during off-peak times like this, rather than just twiddling my thumbs for a few days...

It's been pretty quiet here the last few days otherwise. Debbi and I have each pretty much finished our Christmas shopping, barring a last-minute inspiration. We caught up a little on some of out backlogged TV last night (Smallville and The West Wing), made a few little shopping runs, did some housecleaning (that was mostly me, not Debbi) and otherwise took it easy this weekend.

I wish I could say I've been reading lately, but I really haven't read much besides a few comic book collections. Not too good, Rawdon.

Well, it'll be a nice few days leading up to Christmas, and then I'll try to take advantage of the post-Christmas sales. Can't really complain!