Tracey

Back to work for me today after being off on vacation for about 2.5 weeks. It's been great, my last day of work was December 19th. I felt like I was in school again getting this much time off for Christmas. That's the way I love to do it though, I hardly take vacation in the summer, I save it all up for Christmas. I am now officially out of vacation days now until July 1st, but that's okay. It was worth it to have my time off for Christmas. It ensures that I get to see all of my family and friends over Christmas without feeling rushed or stressed about time. And really, that is the most important part about Christmas for me.

However, I'm now back at work with the stomach flu. Any other day, I would have called in sick but I didn't really feel I could do that after having been on vacation for the above mentioned 2.5 weeks. So I'm here, just trying to get through the day. I'm armed with gingerale and crackers.

I'm feeling even better today than I did yesterday. I can't believe how quickly I recovered from this cold, from the way I felt on Friday and Saturday I thought for sure it would drag on for weeks!!

Pretty good day at work yesterday. It was busy, but not because of the phones ringing lots, it was paperwork at my own pace, so that was nice. I like busy days, being bored at work isn't much fun. Today I think I'm going to be re-arranging a bit of filing stuff here, to make it more convenient for me so I have less excuses for procrastinating on my filing. I'm bad for that.

Last night was good. I had lots of energy after work still. Before going home Dan and I made two stops. One for me to pick up a box of books from freecycle and the other at Home Depot for him to buy some more cement. Then we went home and heated up some leftover beef fajitas for dinner and Dan went out to mow the lawn and I baked some cookies from a recipe in one of the freecycle books. This is a pretty big deal for me, I hardly ever bake. The cookies turned out really well though, they have a bit of everything in them: oatmeal, rice krispies, chocolate chips, Peanut Butter. People here seem to like them too which is good.

After the cookies were all made I made my lunch for today and then chilled out on the couch and read for a bit. Then I moved to bed to read and I was sleeping by about 9:45 last night. Nice!

Tonight the plan after work is to go to the grocery store and get a watermelon to cut up for Dan's frisbee team tomorrow night. Then we'll go to Rona and buy the rest of our floor tiles and look at french doors there. We'll go home and heat up leftover lasagna for dinner tonight and Dan will probably work on the hearth in the basement and I should really do some cleaning upstairs. I didn't do any all weekend when I wasn't feeling well and now it's showing!!! I may also bake some banana bread with some overripe bananas I have, and freeze it for Dan's frisbee tournament on Sunday. I'm going to get my year's quota of baking in this week alone!!!

Oh...and also after work I'm going to be stopping by Sears to pick up the wishbook. My card came in the mail today to say that it's ready for pickup at the store. The Christmas madness starts now!!! Hehe...actually it already started on the weekend, I didn't want to admit it but I spent some time on the weekend writing up ideas for people for Christmas that I'd had come to me recently. I'm a sick puppy!

I was wrapping some Christmas gifts the other night and I started getting a guilty conscience about the whole experience. I just felt bad using all that nice paper to wrap gifts knowing it will just be thrown out again. My mom and I were really good about trying to save the wrapping paper for a few years, and we even went so far as to iron it a few years so it would look nice again the next year. There's only so many times you can do that before you just have to throw it out anyway, and it never looks quite as nice as the very first time you wrap the gift anyway.

Then I had an idea. When all the pretty Christmas fabric is on clearance after Christmas I'm going to buy a bunch. I found some patterns online for making fabric gift bags, and I want to experiment with using fabric as wrapping paper as well! I can get some nice matching fabric ribbon and see what I can do! I'm struggling with how to attach the packages shut, I'm thinking maybe velcro, but I'd have to pick a few sizes of fabric and sew the velcro on, because I don't think peel and stick velcro would stay on the fabric. I could just use the ribbon to tie the packages shut as well, but that gets to be a little bit of a challenge to get all the edges closed to tie a bow with just one person. I'm sure I'll have some fun with experimenting though!

Then, when Christmas is over, I really can iron the wrapping paper and it will go back to looking as good as new again! I could even learn how to tie some fancy bows with ribbon and then with a couple of stitches I could hold the bows in place so I would be able to use them year after year. I think this will be a fun project and it will make me feel better about being less wasteful at Christmas! :)

I love that the phones are slow enough this afternoon that I can put a CD of Christmas music in my CD Rom and listen to it through my speakers. :D