christmas time is here!

alan and i just got finished decorating our christmas tree and listening to christmas songs in our new apartment, and i'm feeling awfully christmas-y at the moment...

christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.

~norman vincent peale

he who has not christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.

~roy l. smith

i have always thought of christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time i know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

~charles dickens

the best of all gifts around any christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.

~burton hillis

christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

~washington irving

for centuries men have kept an appointment with christmas. christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.

~w.j. ronald tucker

the love fern

when alan and i moved in together for the first time, we bought a lucky bamboo plant that we have since always referred to as the "love fern." (if you're confused, please see how to lose a guy in ten days. you won't regret it.)

it moved with us from apartment number one, where we lived for about 6 months, to apartment number two. at apartment number two, the love fern started turning brown and some of the leaves started falling off. we were pretty sure it was dead, actually, but being lazy college students (and hopeless romantics?) we postponed any sort of proper burial. after a while, the love fern turned green once again and regrew all of its leaves! it grew and grew and hasn't stopped growing since. we've now had the love fern for five-plus years and three apartments... it may seem silly but that love fern is a part of us, a part of our story, and we love it.

the old apartment

alan and i went over to our old apartment today, because we still needed to pack up a few things and bring them back with us to the new apartment. we've been looking forward to this move for such a long time that i guess i wasn't really expecting the flood of emotions that swept over me when i walked in the door and saw our place, looking so empty and naked despite the handful of boxes and trinkets in various rooms.
this was our first real apartment together, with both of our names on the lease. this was where we lived when we got scoop, when we graduated college; this was where alan proposed to me, with a pathway of little notes that led from the front door to the back balcony; this was where we were living when we got our first real jobs, when we got married, when we celebrated our first year of marriage and our fifth year of couple-dom. this was where we lived for four out of five-and-a-half years of our relationship.
there are so many beautiful memories that it's hard not to get a little teary-eyed to see it looking so sad and lonely. but i know that memories live inside of us, not in places or things. we will always have those memories, and we will create more memories in our new apartment. and i'm so very thankful for that.

thanksgiving

today, i am thankful for...

my family, which is ginormous and comprised of many many people, connected to me by blood or marriage or friendship or otherwise;

a random phone call from a cousin whom i have not seen in at least ten years;

a yummy recipe for vegan green bean casserole;

two loving kitties and one amazing husband;

football all day long on a non-sunday;

sitting around the table telling crazy stories and laughing till we cry;

mashed potatoes and tofurky and delicious casseroles and pumpkin pie and lots and lots of leftovers!

happy thanksgiving!

all moved in

it's been a long crazy day, but we're officially all moved in to our new apartment! we haven't unpacked every single box, and there are still a few little things left at the old apartment, but we're here, we're exhausted, and we're about to go to sleep in our brand new bedroom with our cuddly (and super confused) kitties!

happy thanksgiving eve!
and,
welcome to your new home, baby barnsley!

fraggle rock

i don't know very many cool people who didn't watch fraggle rock when they were little. because fraggle rock was awesome. they went on crazy adventures like every day and they taught me all kinds of important life lessons along the way.

i like to move it move it

finally went to see madagascar 2 yesterday... yes i loved it and yes i am a sucker for kids' movies and yes i love the lemurs and yes i love the stupid lemur song!

and speaking of moving it, we get the keys to our new place today! the official move is happening on wednesday and we're in a packing and painting frenzy so wish us luck!

the angel tree

when i was little, my mommy and i used to adopt an angel from the salvation army angel tree at northpark every year. we would have so much fun shopping for our angel - it was quality time spent with each other doing something good for someone less fortunate. it's one of my favorite memories.

this year, we're carrying on the tradition. instead of buying normal christmas gifts, we're spending quality time with the people we love and shopping for angels from the angel tree. we all agree that none of us needs anything, and if there is anything that we truly need or want, we all have the means to buy it for ourselves. but there are plenty of people who don't, and they are the ones we should be buying gifts for. that's the real meaning of christmas - doing good deeds, spending time with loved ones, and being thankful for all of life's gifts.

today we went angel shopping with my parents for a family of four brothers and sisters, all under the age of ten. it was so much fun looking at toys and clothes and picking out the very best ones for our children. when we went to drop off our goodies, alan and i picked up two more angels - an elderly woman and another little girl - who we can shop for with his parents.

i know i can't fix everything that's wrong with the world, but it's nice to know that i can help make a few peoples' christmas a little bit brighter.

i'm going to be an aunt

that's right folks. my husband's brother's girlfriend is going to be a mommy, which means that i'm going to be an auntie. crazy! exciting, but crazy!

...ooh, now i'll have someone else to buy tiny socks for!!!

it's a wonderful life

"remember, george, no man is a failure who has friends."

- clarence

playing dress up

tomorrow night i'm going to a friend's birthday party, and she specifically requested on the evite that we all dress "sparkly." i decided that rather than go and buy a brand new outfit i would work with what i have in my closet already. so when i got home from work i raided my own closet for anything and everything with sparkles, channelled my inner five-year-old, and played dress-up until i found the perfect sparkly outfit. can't wait to sparkle it up tomorrow night!

fuzzy brown socks

one year (last year maybe?) for christmas alan's parents gave me three pairs of soft and fuzzy and super warm socks that i wear to bed almost every night when it's cold outside. i think i may have lost the other two pairs - one was pink and one was stripey - but for whatever reason i always know exactly where the brown ones are. i'm wearing them right now, as a matter of fact, because i'm about to go to bed. early.

...i've been blogging about socks a lot lately, eh?

this guy

he's a pygmy tarsier from indonesia, and he might be the cutest most terrifying creature on the planet. i like him.

laziness

after a long crazy productive weekend, alan and i felt that we had earned an evening of couch potato-ness. we sat on the couch, ate dinner, and watched five episodes of weeds one after the other. bliss.

garage sale-ness

garage sales are the best! thanks to the lovely miss andrea, who invited us to participate in her garage sale yesterday, alan and i were able to sell a whole bunch of crap (not that it was crap...but...well yeah it was mostly crap) that had been hiding in our small apartment for who knows how long. it was a bitterly cold morning, but the company was good and we ended up making over a hundred dollars for stuff that we were going to just drop off at the dumpster! we donated what we didn't sell, and we both feel like a giant weight has been lifted. the purging-and-packing process continues, and we just keep getting more and more excited as we get closer to the moving date!

thanks, andrea (and family)!

mini socks

okay so i know i already posted about baby shoes, and just thinking about them makes me swoon, but it turns out that i am so not alone! i went to a baby shower today for a friend that i went to college with and also worked with and when we went shower-gift-shopping last night the baby section at target was enough to make me cry from cuteness... i couldn't resist buying a pair of little giraffe bootie-socks along with the much more practical (but much less adorable) baby monitor. and today at the shower i found out that pretty much every other woman there had done the same thing... present plus ridiculously cute socks equals perfect shower gift! brilliant!

congratulations, tracie!

mini wine

i like the tiny little single-serving bottles of wine they sell at the grocery store. sometimes i just want a glass of wine, not four glasses of wine. they may be cheesy looking, but they involve no crazy cork adventures, no hangovers. just a glass of wine.

moccasins

so i have these moccasin boots with three layers of fringe and whenever i walk in them i can hear and feel the fringe hitting my ankles as it swings back and forth... for whatever silly reason it just makes me happy. :)

the balance

sometimes life gets in the way of the important stuff... deadlines and meetings and bills and the ten million other things that you have to keep track of in a given day have a way of making you forget to take time out for the good stuff - dinner with a good friend, a purring cat in your lap, a quiet daydream, catching up with a loved one. it's things like these that make life worth living, but it's these same things that often get pushed aside when life gets hectic. it's important to find the balance - i'm still working on it, and i probably will be for a long time. but i'm genuinely thankful for all of the aspects of my life that require balancing: i have amazing friends, an extensive and loving family, a fantastic job, the most incredible husband, two crazy cats (one of which is purring on my lap at this very moment)... i could go on and on.

thunderstorms

last night i fell asleep to the soothing lullaby of an endless thunderstorm... the rains rolled overhead in waves, some stronger than others; powerful claps of thunder resonated in the sky, near and far and in between; silent flashes of bright white lightning punctuated the darkness at indiscriminate intervals. the cats and the husband were cuddled up close, and we all slept peacefully.

puppy-vision

next time you are bored at work, take a look at this 24-hour cuteness party:

http://cdn1.ustream.tv/swf/4/viewer.45.swf?cid=317016

non-stop streaming video of some seriously adorable puppies, guaranteed to brighten your day. :)

the filing cabinet

a few months ago, i went on a super-crazy-organization kick. in the midst of this kick, i purchased a filing cabinet from ikea that was on sale for like $25, with the intention of finally sorting through and organizing our mountain of "important documents" - the ones that you know you should keep because they look pretty official but you don't always really know what they say so they just end up stashed away in some random place and when the day comes that you might actually need one of them you can't find them... because they're so important that you stuck them in an old purse with a bunch of empty cd cases and an old discman. or something like that.

well, however many months later, i finally took the time to deal with the filing cabinet. the top drawer has all of our important papers - insurance stuff, benefits, 401(k), taxes - all of the boring papers. it wasn't fun but at least it's done. and i got to buy fun new office supplies, so i was happy.

and i used the bottom drawer to hold all of our memories. i've been a pack rat most of my life (i consider myself a recovering pack rat now), so over the years of my relationship with alan i've accumulated quite a collection of ticket stubs and love notes and photographs and cards. of course, the intention here was to create a scrapbook (or ten)... but that's for another weekend maybe. i did take all of my alan-and-olivia memorabilia and organize it into file folders, which makes me happy on so many levels. five and a half years' worth of memories had been living in haphazard order (i think that's an oxymoron) amongst two or three different shoe boxes in my craft room for quite some time (close to five and a half years, i would guess). now it's all so pretty and organized into pink file folders that are arranged in chronological order with labels and subfolders. and the very best part of all was sorting through everything - examining all the little pieces of our history and putting them in the correct order so they would all add up to tell the best story there ever was.

why can't i just eat my waffle? -or- good words from a good man

"focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. it asks too little of yourself. because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential."

"if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost."

"if you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress."

"we need to internalize this idea of excellence. not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent."

"why can't i just eat my waffle?"

today

today, i woke up with the exact amount of time needed to drink my coffee, feed the cats, clean their litter, and get showered and dressed to go to work, where we had our second huge-important-meeting in two weeks (which went really well actually), and it was "fancy friday" (which means tall-soy-chai-latte for me), after which we took a long lunch (sushi!) and an afternoon shopping trip (for research of course), followed by dinner and drinks with girlfriends (aka too many margaritas and too many chips), after which i came home to kiss and hug my honey who just got back from a two-night (too long) business trip!

guilty pleasures

i have a confession. i love gossip girl. and 90210. and the hills. and lipstick jungle. and all of those stupid shows made for thirteen-year-old girls that are full of pretty people and even prettier clothes and all kinds of drama and ridiculous plot lines. love them all, each and every one.

...wow. it feels really good to come clean.

obama day

today i am still grinning from ear to ear, amazed and inspired by the results of last night's election.

i have always always felt incredibly blessed to be an american, to live a life of so much freedom and opportunity, but it wasn't until yesterday that i truly felt proud to be an american. i'm proud of the citizens of this country and i'm proud of the man we have elected to be the 44th president of the united states of america. he represents the best of what this nation is about and he inspires me on so many levels that it is difficult to put it into words. this election is not about race, or age, or gender; it's about a new generation of politics and politicians. it's about doing what is right, and just, for americans and for the global community.

i know we have a long and arduous journey ahead of us - an economic crisis, an environmental crisis, a broken political system - but i have faith. i have hope. this is something that we can do. yes we can.

election day

today, i can honestly say that i am proud to be an american...

"the only way to make sure people you agree with can speak

is to support the rights of people you don't agree with."

- eleanor holmes norton

"as long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences."

- eugene mccarthy

"as mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. i hope ever to see america among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."

- george washington

daylight savings

i love it when we fall back... there's the extra hour of sleep, which is always nice - although i missed out on mine due to the early morning attack of the sinus infection... and it gets lighter earlier, which makes it easier for me to get out of bed and maybe even exercise... not to mention that falling back means it is officially fall and shorter days lead to holidays and all the warm fuzzies that come along with!

candy coating

i've been taking a lot of medicine today (thank you very much, mr. sinus infection) and i would just like to say that i am super duper appreciative of the candy coating on my target-brand cold and sinus headache pills. also, my honey-lemon cough drops. and my neti pot.

moving

alan and i signed a lease on a new apartment this morning, and we're getting pretty excited about moving at the end of the month.

no, i don't like the process of moving, but i will admit it has its advantages. it allows you to really take stock of everything you own and get rid of a whole lot of stuff that you don't need/want/even remember buying. and it's exciting to start over in a whole new place - decorating and organizing and figuring out where you'll shop for groceries and where you'll go to eat sushi.

so, yes, when it comes down to it, i suppose i am thankful for moving.