Flippin' Bored

I'm bored.  Every year I wonder why I come in this week, and every year I remember that its because my boss takes this week off so I can't.  Sigh.

None of our approving partners are here, a lot of staff is out of the office, and it is tediously boring. I originally asked to leave at noon tomorrow, but emailed my supervisor on Monday to ask about working from home that morning instead.  She has not replied, which is a bit frustrating because at any other time (including on vacation) she still checks her email at least once a day.  I'm not sure if I will just suck it up and come in tomorrow for my 3.5 hours or if I'll go to the CFO and ask.  I *really* did not want to be here tomorrow!

Brought lunch today (sandwich and goldfish crackers because I'm 12), but right now I'm feeling like I will need to escape the office for a bit.  I can't believe it's not even noon.  :o

Christmas was great!  My celebration with BF and J was lovely and my trip home was great.  I got a legitimate white Christmas there as 7-8 inches of snow fell on Christmas Eve.  It was gorgeous!  My travels only included a couple of delays on the way out that landed me in Omaha about 2 hours late, which was better than a lot of people had to deal with.

Now the focus has shifted to NY's Eve, which we will be celebrating in a very low key way.  We plan to pick a super casual dinner spot (seriously, like Buffalo Wild Wings or something, LOL) and then come home for drinks, football, Kathy Griffin & Anderson Cooper and a midnight kiss.  :-)  Sunday is our 2 year anniversary so we're also planning to go out to dinner that night, though we've not finalized our destination.

I do love this time of year and a little bit of me dreads it ending after this weekend.  I love how our home looks with all of the Christmas lights and decorations and I love the general spirit of everything.  I'm looking forward to the arrival of 2016 and excited about what it may bring!

I hope everyone had a great holiday and I wish everyone a very happy New Year!

Christmas is coming!

So it's Monday of Christmas week and I'm here at work.  Traffic was lighter, my bus was emptier, and the office is definitely quieter.  I'm an hour and a half into my work day and already looking forward to wrapping it up.  I've got some things to take care of before I go, but unfortunately our database is broken in a way that significantly impedes my ability to do my job.  Hoping it gets resolved this morning because I always like to get everything off my desk before I go out of the office.  I do finally have a back-up, but I like to minimize what she has to deal with in my absence!

I had a nice weekend.  It was productive!  We finished up BF's Christmas shopping, which included a trip to Victoria's Secret for perfume for his 15 year old daughter.  I got to pick out the scent, which also meant avoiding any of them that had racy names.  :-p  We settled on one called Fabulous, which was acceptable.  I got the rest of my presents wrapped Saturday afternoon to the sound of some fun Christmas music, and our tree is now resplendent with lots of presents for everyone.

We decided on a Christmas cookie to bake Tuesday (Chocolate peppermint pinwheels) and I made a formal request that we do a viewing of "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" that same evening. We got some more nice Christmas cards in the mail, which I love.  :-)  I'm excited that I can finally say that my holiday starts tomorrow!  I will be going to breakfast with my friend, A, wherein I will get to present her with her gift, which I'm excited about.  It's so true that as you get older, the real gift is in giving as opposed to receiving.  I'm so happy about the gifts I found for people this year.  :-)

BF picked J up this morning and they are now headed to go see the Star Wars movie.  I'm glad they have something fun to do today.  :-)  Tonight we are just doing crockpot buffalo chicken sandwiches for dinner.  I'm hoping to get to the gym or at least do a home workout this evening since we don't have anything planned.  I also intend to get my packing list for my trip put together today.  Hopefully I can get most of my stuff together tonight so that I don't have to worry about much tomorrow evening.

I finished the first season of "Master of None" this weekend.  Wow, did I love that show. First of all, it's full of great music. Beyond that, it really touches on so many things that feel so real, including how modern technology has changed dating, and the reality of how much pressure is added to dating in your thirties.  The finale was on point and really honed in on a lot of things I think singletons in their 30s can identify with.  I'm also just really proud of myself for finishing a season of something for once.  Takes me ages and happens rarely!  I'm still only 6 episodes into the third season of House of Cards.  ;-)  I'm so behind!

Got my holiday nails done this weekend (red and silver alternating), am wearing a red sweater with red Christmas bulb earrings and am generally just ready to get this holiday started!  I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday with your friends and families!

The Week Before Christmas

So Christmas is next week.  Craziness!  I am pretty proud of myself because I finished my shopping this weekend.  I will be getting a few more packages this week as the result of online shopping, but I hope to get those wrapped this weekend.  Cheers for adulting and getting this all done in a timely fashion.  :-)

I'm really excited for the looming holiday.  Admittedly, it's been a bit more challenging to get in the Christmas spirit since it's been 70 degrees outside!  This weather made me realize that I'm definitely a person who needs to live where there are seasons, in particular for the holidays.  Maybe one day that will change, but for now, I'm torn between loving that I can go outside without a coat in mid-December and feeling jealous of the snow my Colorado relatives got this weekend!  Conundrum.

My holiday party was last week.  It was a success!  We ate, we had drinks, I danced with my friends and co-workers.  :-)  I had a fabulous time and I think BF enjoyed it, too.  I really do love getting dressed up occasionally and feeling sparkly and fun.  My Etsy purchased holiday party earrings were gorgeous, too!  The second, smaller pair were a freebie thrown in by the seller, which was a lovely surprise.

We stayed at a hotel in Alexandria post-party, so it was a much shorter trip back than it would have been otherwise.  Friday at work was a bit painful, not because I was hungover (because I wasn't, cheers!), but because I was exhausted and holiday parties on Thursdays are mean.  ;-)  I made it through, though, and was so glad for the weekend.

Weekend was nice.  Aside from wrapping up my shopping, we also made a couple of batches of Christmas cookies with J with some cheesy Christmas movie on in the background.  J left Saturday evening and we went out to dinner at a new to us Mexican place, which was fun!  Sunday was gym and football, as it should be.  ;-)

I woke up dreading this work week, to be quite honest.  In spite of the weather, I'm definitely getting into holiday mode and everything else feels like a distraction.  I have a couple of small things going on this week (ie tutoring through my work partnership tomorrow, trainer tomorrow night, lunch with a visiting friend Wednesday, a building breakfast at work Thursday), but I fear that it will be a tedious week at work.  We're also supposed to have our reviews this week and maybe/possibly/hopefully get our raise & bonus memos this week.  My supervisor is behind the curve and hadn't done our reviews yet as of Friday, but hopefully she got them done this weekend since they were due last week!  She's out Friday, so I guess our reviews should be before then.

This weekend will be up for grabs.  We don't have J at all, so we're planning on another date night.  I think we'll go to dinner and then go see the new Tina Fey/Amy Poehler movie, Sisters.  Beyond that, BF has a couple small gifts to get for J, so we'll get that taken care of.  After that, it's Christmas week, which means...BF picking up J Monday morning, breakfast with my friend A Tuesday morning, quality time with BF and J Tuesday afternoon and evening and flying out to Omaha Wednesday morning.  I feel like once we get to the weekend everything is going to be a whirlwind.

Crossing fingers for a fast work week....  :-)

Christmastime is Here!

I cannot believe it's a week into December already!  The end of the year always seems to go like this, though.  You make it to Thanksgiving and then time just flies through the holidays.  I'm currently listening to some Christmas music (Nebraska Theater Caravan's "A Christmas Carol"), as it reminds me of seeing this particular production time and time again during my childhood in Omaha.  :-)  Oh, how I loved the man that played Scrooge for years upon years!

Christmas preparation is fully in swing around here.  I've actually wholly impressed myself by having all gifts planned out and a good portion of them bought.  I've got an Amazon cart waiting for my next paycheck, just to spread the love around, ha, and this weekend I'll be going out to wrap up my shopping.  I've managed to do pretty much everything online so far, but for clothes I prefer to buy in person.  I'm getting BF a work shirt and a casual shirt as part of his gifts as well as a shirt each for my mom and stepdad.  Beyond that I just need to pick up a couple of Christmas cards and after that...I think I will be done!  I used to be such a last minute shopper, but I've found that preparing and shopping early just makes the holiday season a lot easier.

I'm still deciding if I want to do Christmas cards.  I used to do them religiously, but then I got off track somewhere.  I'm considering it, but I want to do a more limited list.  However, I think that's where I get thrown off each year because the list grows longer than I'd hoped.  We'll see!

This weekend was nice.  We didn't do very much, but J and I did invest a small patch of  time into building and decorating a gingerbread house kit.  It was fun and is cute enough, but we definitely did not miss our calling with this kind of stuff.  ;-)



We will have J for only a half weekend this coming weekend, which would normally be fine. However, her mom asked yesterday to keep her for the following weekend since she'll be staying with us for the week of Christmas.  Kind of a bummer since we were planning a cookie baking, holiday movie watching event that weekend, but I guess we'll have to re-evaluate our schedule.  I think we'll try to bake some cookies this coming half weekend, as we have her until 6 on Saturday, and maybe watch a Christmas movie on Friday night or Saturday during the cookies.  We'll make it work.  :-)

Currently I have scheduled off December 23 and 24, with December 25 being the holiday.  However, I decided this morning to request Tuesday, December 22nd as well.  It would be nice to have an extra day to hang out with BF & J, and also to have more time to pack and get ready for my trip the next day.  Yes, it seems a bit silly to just work Monday, and I thought about asking for that as well, but I know that it's easier for my supervisor to stomach if I'm there to get everything in order on Monday. Plus, I also asked about leaving at noon on New Year's Eve since my firm doesn't close early on that day, and I didn't want to be asking for too much all at once.  ;-)  Crossing fingers this request goes through!

So this weekend I started watching "Master of None" on Netflix.  I am loving Aziz Ansari and I can't wait to watch more!  I'm four episodes into the ten episode season.  We also watched the first 2 episodes of "Jessica Jones" on Netflix, and I'm really enjoying that one as well!  I've always liked Krysten Ritter, so that was the first draw for me, but she's playing a totally different type of character than I'm used to with her.  It's another one I'm looking forward to getting more into!

Right now I'm definitely in that frame of mind where I'm just excited about the holidays and work seems like an inconvenience.  :-p  This Thursday night is my firm holiday party and I'm really looking forward to making up for last year when I was coming down with the flu, unbeknownst to me.  We have booked a hotel in Alexandria to crash in post-party to avoid having to drive all the way back to the house.  I would have preferred staying at the party location in DC, but they took too long to send out the discounted rates and honestly, they're still pretty pricy for a place to sleep, even if it is right next door to the office.  :-)

Anyway, I feel like the holiday party is the real start of the Christmas whirlwind.  I'm excited to get dressed up, get my hair done and have a good time with my friends, coworkers and BF.  I got some super cute new earrings from Etsy that I will debut that evening as well.  I do have to work on the Friday after, but that day is historically pretty light around the office, so it's not too bad.

I guess I need to try to rein in the distractions and focus for a couple of more weeks!  At least there will be fun things interspersed in there until Christmas to keep me entertained.  Cheers to December and all of it's accompanying chaos!  :-)