It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about. It’s that time of year where everyone’s supposed to be happy and revel in the holiday spirit, but no one ever really seems to have the time to do that, what with all the scrambling to get work done before the holiday vacation, shopping for and wrapping the perfect Christmas gifts for friends and family, putting up the tree and decorating the house with lights, tinsel, and garland, and making arrangements for pet-sitters and transportation to the airport (not to mention dealing with crowds of shoppers at the mall and thousands of holiday travelers on the roads and at the airports). Yours truly is caught up in some of that, herself. I’ve managed to get most of my holiday shopping done, but I’ll still have to brave a trip to the mall this weekend for one or two more items. And I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful coworker who has agreed to feed the cats for me while I’m gone. But there’s still so much to do before I go home next week. As usual, I’m already starting to get antsy about traveling next week (I leave bright and early Wednesday morning to go home for nearly two weeks). There’re a million things to finish up at work before I leave, which makes for potentially long days for the next week, and on the home-front, I need to do some serious cleaning, mail out my Christmas cards, finish my Christmas shopping, start planning a packing list (these things are important), and make sure I have enough clean clothes when I get ready to pack.And because I have a doctor’s appointment Tuesday evening, I need to make sure I’m mostly packed on Monday. Fun, fun.

On the plus side, I found out tonight that my printer’s not dead after all! A few months ago, we had a bad electrical storm, after which my printer no longer seemed to work. There was obviously power going to it, because the lights came on. But all they did was flash incessantly. Nothing I did seemed to work, and it rejected all documents sent to it. So I unplugged it and called it a wash, figuring I’d eventually just get a new one. I’d had that printer for quite a few years, and it wasn’t exactly a high-end one anyway, so I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of it. The only real bitch of it was that I had just bought and installed new ink cartridges in it. Oh well. I haven’t really had much of a dire need for a printer recently - the few things I needed to print every now and then I could just print at work. But now it’s Christmas, and I want to send out my Christmas newsletter to friends and family. Problem is, I don’t have a printer, and I don’t feel comfortable printing out 40+ color pages on the printer at work. And even with the special price of $0.49/page that Kinko’s is currently running, that’s still not a small chunk of change - I’d almost be better off putting that money back into a new printer, right? Well, tonight, I was upstairs rummaging through some yarn in my stash, and I happened to glance over at the printer, just sitting there, unplugged, sad, dead. And I thought to myself, why not give it another try - what can be the harm? So I plugged it back in, hit the power button, and lo and behold, the green light came on and proceeded to not flash. So I sent it a document. And the little wheels inside started whirring, it grabbed a piece of paper from the tray, and spit out a printed page. Wunderbar! So now I can print my Christmas newsletter, which is one fewer thing to hassle with in this coming week.

Another thing I can finally print is the set of new Scattergories cards I created. You see, my friends and I are all board game junkies. We play all sorts of games when we get together - Scattergories, Taboo, Trivial Pursuit (any one of a number of variations), Loaded Questions, etc. (And that’s not including the card games.) Scattergories seems to be the group favorite, though, and we play it pretty frequently. The game, however, does tend to get old after a while, as there are only 12 different category cards. You can only play the game so many times in any length of time before you get tired of coming up with boys’ names beginning with G or things you study in school that start with an L. I’ve been tossing around the idea of coming up with new cards for quite a while, but never really got around to it until this past week. I spent the week jotting down ideas (aided, in part, by the official expansion pack that was released in 1989, which, I will add, really prettymuch sucks), and then this weekend I created the new cards in InDesign. Fun fun.

If you like Scattergories, you might be interested in adding these to your collection (PDF, 605 kb). There are 6 new cards, each with 12 categories, and there are 4 copies of each card on a page, complete with crop marks to make the cards match the originals. We haven’t played these cards yet, so I can’t attest to how difficult they actually are, but I think they’ll be fun. So, enjoy!

In other news, I went to see The Golden Compass tonight with H & L. I had read a number of reviews and analyses before seeing it, so I knew better than to expect an exact replica of the book, and I was also prepared for how rushed the story-telling was. It definitely was not one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, but it was fun to see the steam-punk world Pullman created put to film, and it was pretty to watch. There were also a lot of knits to see in the movie, though I was a little surprised at how much bulky yarn was used. All that cold weather, I’d want something knit a bit more tightly, myself…

Speaking of cold weather, where did ours go? It was nice and cold last week (a coworker was even telling me that it took him 3 hours to get to work on Friday because there was ice on some of the bridges), but today’s high was 77°. Seventy-seven degrees. That’s nuts. There’s even a tropical storm brewing in the Atlantic. Guess no one told Mother Nature it’s supposed to be winter, and hurricane season ends in November.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll have knitting pictures to share next time I post. I did finish a few projects and was able to hand them out - now I just have to arrange time with the recipients so I can photograph them! :) Ah, the complicated life of a knitter. Anyway, I’m out. Tata!