I'm afraid the trees will start budding soon. It's still so dogburned warm! We did get a lovely bit of snow on Christmas Eve (my hubby and I went wandering through a graveyard while it snowed...very peaceful), but now there's not a speck to be found. Grrr.

I'm off work today, and I must admit I'm a bit bored suddenly. I think it's the jeans. All my (3 pairs of) jeans need washing, so I'm wearing the ancient pair with gawking holes in the knees. I used to love these jeans. But today they're assuring me that I have indeed gained weight this winter (I wish I didn't love to bake and cook so much), and that's made me a bit irritated with myself, and this led to not wanting to do anything and that led to being bored. I baked blueberry muffins this morning and watched L A Story (ED loaned it to me over break) and now there's nothing on except a John Wayne movie I've seen recently. I should drag the laundry down the hall and wash it, but it's full and heavy and I want to wait with it until noon when Cowboy comes back and can help me with it. He has to work today :-( But not tomorrow! I kind of want to watch a movie, but one I've never seen before. But I have several of those, and can't decide between them. Hmmmph. Hey, just noticed that it turned a new hour, so maybe now there's something on. Or I could figure out what to make for lunch.

We have snow, we don't have snow, we have snow, we don't have snow. CAN'T THE WEATHER MAKE UP ITS MIND?

Okay, it's the day before the day before Christmas. I'm so excited! I don't know how I'm going to survive work today.

Anyway, The Two Towers rocked!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In fact, it was so awesome that I didn't even once wish that Oded Fehr had played Aragorn instead of Viggo Mortensen (usually I spend lots of time bemoaning that fact). It was gritty and rough and funny and dark and I reallyreallyreally want to see it again. (Oooh, and Boromir was in a tiny flashback scene, so hurray!) Gotta run now, my break is over...

TODAY IS THE DAY!!!!! That's right, folks. At 7:05 tonight I will be entering a darkened theater to see The Two Towers!!!!!! Woo hoo! I went and got 7 tickets on Monday (had to stand in line for about 20 minutes), because a big group of us are going: me, my husband, ED, MB, DR (akaTSR), MB's cousin JC, and whoever TSR decides to bring. We plan to get to the theater around 6, because from our experience last year, there's going to be a gigantic line.

Our weather is being so weird. We should have mounds and mounds of snow by now. Today when I walked to my car at 6:42am, it was raining and felt like April or May. Really warm. I WANT SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Of course, my enthusiasm for The Two Towers is slightly lessened by the fact that my beloved Boromir is dead and won't be in this one. But that's just a tiny corner of my enthusiasm. The rest of me is bouncing up and down and wearing a little facsimile of the One Ring and counting off the seconds until I get to leave for the movie...

Bad, bad me. Look how long it's been since I've blogged! I do have a reason, which I will now explain. I usually blog during my last break at work, if I can get at a computer. I do email during my first break, read a book during lunch, and blog during the third break. But I've started reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and it's so fascinating and compelling that I want to read it during my last break too.

We still have no snow :-(

That's about all the big news. Our apartment is decorated for Christmas now, tree and everything. This weekend I'm going to start baking Christmas goodies. I've started wrapping presents too. It's so exciting!

The other reason I've been negligent is that I got a really nasty stomach flu last Thursday, and it wiped me out until Monday. I just slept a lot for about 4 days.

(BTW, the pie for Thanksgiving turned out fine, as did everything else).

My first solo pumpkin pie is in the oven. I've helped Mom make pie in the past, but this is my first time doing it all by myself. I'm a little worried about how it will turn out because after I started mixing up the pumpkin filling, I discovered we didn't have any ground cloves, only whole cloves. But I noticed some "clove dust" at the bottom of the clove jar, and I figured that would be about the same as ground cloves, so I dumped all the cloves in a bowl, and picked out the whole ones, leaving the little bits. But these only amounted to 1/8 of a tsp, and I was supposed to have 1/4 tsp. But maybe clove dust is stronger than ground cloves? We'll see tomorrow when we eat it, I guess. Actually, there was a little filling left over that didn't fit in the crust, so I ate it and it seemed fine. At least, it didn't seem overly clove-y

My friend ED had her very own art show up here at the college this past week, which culminated last night in her giving a gallery talk and lots of people eating cheese. It was fun, there was a gratifyingly large attendance, and I'm very happy for her.

NaNoWriMo is almost over! And I will definitely be clocking in at 30 single-spaced, MS Word, pages for our little version that our Writers Group has done. Writing this story has had a very surprising side-effect: I've fallen in love with Art Deco furnishings! They're so clean, jazzy, sleek, smooth...I love them! Someday I'd like to do a room in Art Deco (maybe a kitchen, since they're already full of geometric things like cupboard doors)...or maybe incorporate it into my Hollywood Haven themed living room? Hmm. See, I was researching Art Deco (particularly the early styles of the mid-1920's) because one of the characters in my novella gets an apartment furnished in that style.

I should probably go finish drying dishes.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just found out there will be no more new episodes of my beloved Angel until...January! How am I supposed to live for 6 weeks not knowing what happens next? How could Joss (Whedon, creator of Buffy and Angel and the person we blame--or praise--for everything that happens on the shows) do this to me? Not only am I barely working at the moment, but then I lose Angel? Grr. Aargh.

Oh, I'm a bad, bad girl (to paraphrase Wesley Wyndham Price from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Earshot" where Buffy can hear everyone's thoughts). I haven't blogged in days! The Creed concert ROCKED!!!! We had floor tickets, and we got there early enough that we were only 15-20 feet from the stage! We could see everything! It was just amazing. We were close enough that we could feel the heat from the pyrotechnics! And I mean, instantly feel it. As soon as they'd light the torches or start the sparks we'd feel it. Of course, it was really really really crowded there, so between all the people and the pyrotechnics it got pretty warm. MB says she almost passed out at one point. I didn't notice the warmness so much once Creed came on though (Stereo Fuse and Default opened). ED says she liked Default as well as Creed, but not me. The weirdest thing about being that close was how the bass affected us. It's like our chests became speakers or something. We could feel the bass reverberating in our chests and throats (and at one point in my sinuses, which sucked because I got a headache later). It felt like someone was knocking the wind out of me in time to the music. That was mostly with the opening acts though. They had their bass cranked way up. Creed affected me much less, or else I was just used to it by then. Wanna know the coolest thing about the Creed concert? We were so close that Scott Stapp actually heard my voice! Mine and mine alone! During a quick lull between songs, I screamed "SCOTT!!!!" as loud as I could with what voice I had left. He whipped his head around to look in my direction and grinned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How awesome is that? I made Scott Stapp smile! Of course, he's made me smile a lot more than just once...