Happy in a million ways

2005-12-19 - 9:03 p.m.

I've been amazingly busy over the past few days, just getting ready for Christmas mostly. It's such a lot of work, isn't it? Have to buy presents for everyone. Have to send out Christmas cards to everyone else. I actually like the Christmas card bit, though...so far this year I've sent out 15 and received 4. Ah well, I'm working on building my Christmas card base. When I'm 70 I'll have my walls plastered with them! I had a small issue with losing my entire address book (apparently I didn't have it backed up on my external hard drive when my old laptop died last summer), but I was able to gather most of the addresses I wanted from various sources. Except my high school friends, they seem pretty much lost to me.

This year I did my Christmas shopping all at either Amazon.com or at REI. I have one of those Amazon credit cards where everytime I spend $2500 on it I get a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com...so all of my shopping there was free to me. REI, on the other hand, was very much not free. And I also did a very poor job of not buying myself presents. I bought myself three pairs of socks (one for hiking, one for running, and one waterproof pair--yes, I came home and tested the waterproof socks in the bathtub--they work!), snow chains for my shoes, and a pair of shoes. Sheesh. I love the shoes, though. They were on the clearance rack--you know, that section where they jumble all the leftovers together.

Yesterday I had the day off so I made dinner for Lolo who had to work. I ended up making meatloaf. I've never made it before. There're about a million meatloaf recipes out there, though, and none of them looked right, you know, not like Mom made it. So I ended up calling my mom and asking for help. I think she really likes it when I do that--I do it very rarely. The meatloaf, in my opinion, came out very well. It cracked Lolo up when I took my first bite of it and exclaimed, "Wow, it tastes like meatloaf!" Yeah, well, there was some question in my mind about whether or not it would! Anyway, now I'm ready to start experimenting with the recipe!

So much has happened since I wrote here last (and at the same time, so little...), but I don't have time to tell you all about it. Did I mention that I went ice skating for the first time last week? It was so fun! Lolo and I met his friend (the one who he described as being like a sister and I'm going to call her Butiki from now on) and her co-worker at the ice skating rink at Seattle Center. It was small, but that was ok. I caught on pretty quickly and managed to not fall down at all. I would totally love to go ice skating again. Butiki invited me to go ice skating with her and her sister Friday evening. Just me, not Lolo since Lolo was working. I didn't go because I thought it would be weird to hang out with Lolo's friends without him. Like I'm stealing his friends or something. And if we broke up, that would be so weird for her. Flik says I'm being totally silly. She's probably right.