I have this theory that would probably make all the physicsy people in my life cringe (which, really, just makes it that much better): the midday hours are actually longer than those in the morning or evening. Point in case: I got up this morning at 8:00 am, and worked on various tasks til about 1:00, and the time just flew by. I took a short nap (it is Sunday afterall - I’m entitled) and then went out to run some errands. From about 2:30-6:00 I shopped, and while they weren’t quite excrutiating, they were a long and tiring 3.5 hours, especially compared to the 5 hours I worked this morning. Now that it’s 6:00, 11:00 pm (and thus bedtime) will come before I know it. How can this be? How can my afternoon when I’m out and about seem to drag on forever, but the hours when I’m home and trying to get stuff done be over in the blink of an eye? It’s the same way during the week when I’m at work: I arrive around 8:30 or 9:00, and before I know it, it’s 2:00. Yet 5:30 or 6:00 never seems to come - the minutes just tick by. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing - working at my desk or sitting in a meeting - the afternoon always drags on. I think God’s playing a dirty trick on me.

It’s funny that Mom posted today, because I had been planning on posting today as well. It’s also funny that her friend Helen was the one who prompted her to write, because I was going to write something about Helen as well. See, Helen is on Ravelry (she’s helenkosings on there), and she’s on my friends list. One of the nifty features Ravelry sports is an RSS feed for your friends’ activity, so whenever someone adds a new project, queues a project, or favorites someone else’s project, it shows up complete with photos on your blog reader. Well, Helen went through a spurt a while back where she was favoriting and queueing projects by the boatload. And they were all fair isle mittens or gloves! I about cracked up. Picture after picture was nothing but these multi-color mittens. They make up 47 of her 67 favorited projects. And the vast majority of them were added within a 2-3 day span.

I laughed and laughed every time I saw a new one pop up. So, thank you Helen - you got both me and mom to write, and you gave me a good giggle. :)

At any rate, I know we’ve been fairly slack about posting lately. It’s those damn evening hours - you get home from work, and by the time you’ve eaten dinner, cleaned up, thrown a load of laundry in the washer, and paid your bills, all you want to do is sit and stare at the wall for the next 30 minutes until it’s time for bed. I’ll try to be a little better about it in the future, though. I can’t promise it’ll be exciting or entertaining, but at least I’ll put up something.

Part of the problem is that nothing exciting or note-worthy ever happens around here. I go to work, I come home, I knit (but lately I’ve been knitting on unblogable projects), and I go to bed. I can tell you about my Thanksgiving, though. This was the first year I hadn’t spent Thanksgiving at home with my family. Well, that’s not entirely true - there was one year that I spent actual Thanksgiving day with a boyfriend’s family, but I was at my parents house for the rest of the weekend. This was the first year I didn’t see them at all. Instead, my friends and I all gathered at one of our houses and had a potluck dinner. And it was really great.

I got up early that Thursday morning and did some preliminary cooking at home, and then I packed everything up and headed off to T & E’s house. I arrived around 9:00, just in time to catch the beginning of the Macy’s parade. When we weren’t cooking, we put together a puzzle.

The five of us took turns in the kitchen, which worked out amazingly well considering we hadn’t really planned out a schedule beforehand.

And despite the fact that the turkey was done an hour before everything else was, everything went smoothly and by 2:00, we all sat down to a beautiful, delicious Thanksgiving feast. (I almost think it’s a prerequisite for a traditional Thanksgiving that the turkey ends up taking either far more or far less time to cook than you plan for.)

So, I may not have spent the holiday with my biological family, but I did spend it with my regional family. And my regional family is wonderful - something to be truly thankful for.

So back to today. As I said earlier, I spent my afternoon shopping. I don’t have all that much Christmas shopping to do this year, since my circle of friends is doing a secret santa exchange, but that still leaves me with several gifts I needed to get. And unfortunately, I had zero ideas for any of them. I didn’t particularly want to go to the mall and deal with all the huge crowds of people, but I needed to be in an environment where I could browse for ideas. I tried doing the online shopping thing, but the problem there was that there was just so much stuff, I couldn’t wade through it all. Luckily I was able to find and purchase about 80% of my gifts today. When I was pulling all the bags out of the car on my way back up to the apartment, I thought “holy crap, I just bought a billion dollars worth of crap!”

I even splurged a little on myself and allowed myself to enter Sephora today. And then walked out with $100 of new makeup. In my defense, I was almost completely out of everything - I’ve been using the last dredges of foundation and eyeshadow for the last week, the one lipstick I can find is way too orange for my skintone, and my mascara is all clumpy and nasty. I needed to replace it all… and normally I get el-cheapo stuff at Target, but I thought I’d pamper myself a little bit this time around. The big part of the purchase was the Bare Essentials starter kit. I keep hearing about how wonderful this foundation is, so I decided to give it a try. My skin’s not all that bad, but I’ve got very ruddy cheeks, and I really hate liquid foundation. So, hopefully this will have been a worthwhile purchase. Still, I’ve been quite frugal lately and haven’t splurged on anything fun for myself in quite a while, so I figured I could justify a Christmas present to myself. Merry Christmas, Liz!