A Warm Christmas

I think I'm suffering from Christmas fatigue.

Some of it may be my usual seasonal depression - largely absent this year, I realized a few weeks ago - and general exhaustion with our recent release at work getting me down. But although I've been enjoying the holidays, Christmas came awfully fast this year, and my heart just wasn't into buying presents, so I wasn't very creative this time around. At least I didn't order everything last minute, but I wasn't far ahead of the curve either. (In fact, I picked up Debbi's last gifts Thursday night.)

It's been unseasonably warm these last few weeks - but seasonably wet, with buckets of rain coming down from time to time. A strange mix. This past week we hardly had the heat on at all at home, and I often didn't need a jacket when I went out. This sort of weather at Christmas no longer bothers me - it's just the way the Bay Area is. If it would just thunder a little more often, it would be perfectly fine.

We had an astoundingly busy weekend lined up - so much so that we had to shove aside my plans to see Narnia.

Friday we went out to dinner, and then came home and I wrapped presents. Saturday, though, we had a Christmas party to attend in the evening, and before that we had to go do trailer care at Debbi's workplace. Debbi volunteers with a group that captures feral cats, spays them and gives them their shots, and then tries to adopt them out, or releases them back into the wild if they're too feral to be adopted. So they sometimes have one or more kittens in a trailer which we volunteer to visit and feed. Weekend slots are hard to fill, so we'll volunteer for a Saturday night slot every few weeks. This time around they have a gray kitten with white markings named Pouline. She's too scared of people to play or get petted, but I petted her with the tip of a fleece rod, and got some purrs from her! Hopefully she'll warm up over the next few weeks, and get adopted into a nice home.

I seem to recall that we did something else earlier in the day, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, now!

Christmas day today has been less busy, but still busy.

We opened our presents around the tree this morning. We got a pretty good haul this year! My Dad went a little overboard on the DVD collections, including Homicide: Life on the Street season 3, Star Trek season 2, and the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. Not that I mind, really!

My loot also included Will Eisner's final book, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which is okay, but not his best work), The New Way Things Work, several CDs including Joshua Redman's new one, Momentum (pretty good, though his previous CD, Elastic, was better). Debbi got me a set of Skyrails, which I'm looking forward to playing with. (I'm collecting a nice set of childhood or childhood-like toys, what with these, Hot Wheels, and Legos, and also a nifty tealight lantern which should put out a pretty good amount of light.

Debbi's big present was a fancy jewelry case she'd wanted, which turns out to hold all her jewelry and then some! She needed a new organizer in order to keep the cats from getting into her stuff. I also gave her some earrings which resemble her calico cat Roulette.

The cats were surprisingly low-key about Christmas this year. I didn't see Roulette dive into the pile of wrapping paper at all! The my cats mostly seemed just happy to have us home. They did go ga-ga over the catnip pouch my Mom sent.

After properly digesting the loot (to so speak), we drove over to Subrata's house for a Christmas dinner and gift exchange. We actually punted on the gift exchange due to our general Christmas exhaustion, but it turned out Subrata and Susan had bought extra gifts because they'd had so much fun shopping for them! So that was fun. Dinner was good, and we brought rum balls we made Friday night, since Mom had serendipitously sent a recipe for them that day.

I love any journal entry in which I get to type "serendipitously".

Unfortunately, I caught a cold on Friday and have spent all weekend drinking gallons (it seems like) of water, fighting off a sore throat, and expelling phlegm (mmm...). So that's been a bummer, but that's the way it goes. At least it wasn't the flu, which apparently bit one of my cow-orkers last week. Ugh.

So all-in-all it's been a nice Christmas. But boy, I'm looking forward to my week off!

And my birthday's in just three weeks... sheesh!