The Ninth Day of Christmas

My true love gave to me: Nine Ladies Dancing

Every morning since Tuesday's fender bender it has been extremely difficult for me to drag myself out of the house. I think I'm just plain demoralized. Every night it snows, at least a little. Every morning the alarm squawks at me, and I go to the phone, hoping beyond hope that my boss has called it a 'snow day', and I'm expected to work at home. Every morning my boss's voice on the recording cheerfully says, "This is the generic message; MPHI is open for business."

I see the snow covering the van, and shudder. I note the 8-foot mountains of snow at the end of our driveway, and cringe. Next I warily look out our kitchen window at our street, which is buried under several layers of ice and pristine white snow, and I despair.

Some mornings it hasn't been as terrible as it appears, and I can get to work in under an hour and a half with relatively little stress. Some mornings it's just as bad as I imagine, and I spend the entire trip being glad I have the cel phone, so that when I get in an accident I'll only have a half hour's wait for the police to help me out.

As you can probably gather, I'm feeling quite a bit of distaste for my daily commute. This was brought all the more sharply into focus when the weatherman blithely reminded me that today is actually (only) the first day of winter.

That little bastard.

He became less and less popular with me as he brightly and happily announced that this week it is expected to snow 7 days out of 7.

*sigh*

On a brighter note, I have managed to swerve well enough to avoid three more collisions since I wrote last, and the body repairman has informed me that I can keep driving the van while I wait for the new bumper, hood, and grill to arrive.

And I'm listening to Jewel's Joy: A Holiday Collection, which is very nice, and helping me to adopt some moderate spirit again.

Forest and I completely finished our Christmas shopping last night! I'm so proud of us. We really are a lot more organized this year than last, and have managed to arrange all the schedules so that we will be happy with them, as will our families. It's downright amazing.

I'm pretty excited about Christmas, and it seems as though the time is just dragging by this week. I had hoped to be working at Natural Wonders, which would have made the time go much more quickly; but despite her promises, the manager still hasn't put me on the schedule. I am now going to have to hit the pavement and look for a job starting in January and lasting through March, when I can work at the Store again. I had planned on having the cash from the mall, and have hence charged a lot of things on my credit cards, assuming I'd be able to pay them right back off. The idea of carrying balances does not make me very happy.

Last night was a lot of fun; mostly because Forest and I didn't get to see our gaming pals last week, and it was fun to catch up with them. In other cool news, we ran into our friend Jeff (from taekwondo) at the mall, and it turns out that he's planning on moving back to Michigan in the next few months! It was great to see him, and its terrific that we will have him back; especially for Forest, since he will have someone to practice with again.

In one small victory, we finally got Forest a decent night's sleep last night. We've been running the humidifier 24 hours a day, and I think it's finally helping. Thank heavens.

As you can see, I'm jumping from topic to topic today with frightening speed. Honestly, I've been procrastinating on a lot of little errands, and they are making me feel very scatterbrained. I need to go the the bank, and to Meijer to get some water softner salt, and to enlarge the photo I'm giving to my dad for Christmas. I need to pick up some wrapping paper, put gas in the van, and get its oil and windshield wipers changed. I also need to write up the reviews of the plays I've read for LCP so that I can return the scripts to the office. I need to drop off Kirstin's glasses to her at some point, and find out when she will be with me this weekend. Oh, and I will need some groceries, too.

There's just no time for that in the next couple of days, though. Perhaps I can do a lot of it on Saturday.

Today I will be leaving the office a little bit early to take the hats and mittens we've collected to the St. Vincent's Home. I think it's great that so many of my coworkers were willing to make a donation. After that, I will be picking Forest up from somewhere yet to be determined, and then going to the semesters' end judo dinner at Huapei.

Then I have no idea what we're doing. Forest and I are trying to make time to see a few movies while they're in the theatres, and making sure we're spending a lot of time on each other, which, after all, is our first collective priority.