Bookshelf:

Recently Read & Reviewed:

• Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning

Currently Reading:

• Neil Gaiman, Coraline

Next Up:

1. John C. Wright, The Golden Age
2. Daniel Keys Moran, The Armageddon Blues
3. Joan D. Vinge, World's End
4. Margery Allingham, Flowers For The Judge
5. Ken MacLeod, Engine City

A Well-Earned Collapse

Ahhh, vacation at last! Today was my last day of work, and now I'm off 'til 2004. Yay!

It was pretty much dead in the office today. The bosses were gone, most of the employees were gone. Still plenty of people in the coffee line, though. Oh, well. I got a bit done, but I think everyone was feeling pretty undermotivated these last two days. Well, everyone who was in the office!

Debbi's coming down tomorrow for the long Christmas weekend. We have a holiday party to go to, which should be fun though I've kept forgetting about it. I have some errands to run and chores to finish before Debbi shows up (including the week's comic book haul), so it will be a moderately busy day. But not bad.

Sunday Debbi and I finally decorated the front of my house with lights. Nice solid lights running along the branches of the little tree out front (using the solids there was Debbi's idea!), and multicolored blankets along my boxwood bushes and a chain running around my garage door. It looks nice! Debbi really wants to run lights higher on my house, getting up there with the ladder. I wasn't up to it this year, though it occurred to me that blue icicle lights along the overhang leading up to my front door would look nice.

Debbi is a nut for Christmas lights.

The kittens have not shown much inclination to climb the tree, which is good. They nibble on the needles a bit, like my cats do, but haven't gotten into any other trouble. (My cats eat needles and then throw them back up, until they eventually remember that needles are more trouble than they're worth. The dummies.) So we put some ornaments on the tree, and Blackjack started trying to get to them, so we moved them a little higher. I think we've worked it out.

I think I've received all the gifts I'm expecting. Had to clip off and toss some ribbon since Newton was chewing on it. Shee! Life with cats is always a little game, I'll say that.

I caught up on watching The West Wing through this year's Christmas episode. Well, sort of. Somehow I missed taping the first several episodes of the season, so the first one I caught from this year is where Zoe gets interviewed and the Republican Congress forces the President to shut down the government. So I missed the resolution of the cliffhanger from last year. Shee! Anyone got a tape they can send me with the episodes I missed?

The three episodes I did see, though, were pretty good, even without Aaron Sorkin. His sense of humor is missed, but there's still some funny stuff in there. It's more serious, more nuts-and-bolts politics, it seems to me. I don't think it's any worse than last season; the first season is still clearly the best.

I also received a package with some Kona coffee which I ordered from Greenwell Farms on the Big Island of Hawaii. We went there on our vacation and I liked their coffee a fair bit. We also liked Bay View Farm coffee and actually Bay View's visitor stand is a lot nicer than Greenwell's to visit in person, but Greenwell has a much more convenient on-line ordering system, from what I saw, so I chose them. The Chocolate Macadamia Nut and the Full City coffees are both recommended.

Anyway, now we won't run out of Kona coffee over the holidays, which we were in danger of doing!

Boy, 2003 has just gone by so fast, hasn't it? I must be getting old.