Merry Christmas everyone!

Just in case the lovely person who wrote my [Unknown LJ tag] fic is reading this; I can't get into the archive. But I want to read it desperately, especially because of the wonderful title and description (Impropriety - Love Actually (2003)) It's taking Natalie a while to adjust to being in the spotlight)

So, yeah. It might take a bit today before I can read and leave a comment :)

24 hour Wal-Marts and late hours at Sears are da bomb.

Shopping two days before Christmas will almost certainly guarantee I'll panic and go overboard, especially with the boy.

There are no decent clothes for boys at the places that are open at 10:45pm on the 23rd.

Adam has to fend for himself when it comes to his socking stuffers; I tried and was full of fail.

I'm pretty sure I don't have enough wrapping paper.

This is awesome

Out of 300 pinch hits for Yuletide, I could have maybe written 4. Maybe. My obscure fandom knowledge is sadly lacking.

2 days 'till Sherlock Holmes!!! (and Christmas :) )

yuletide fic is done and uploaded. From what I can tell, even though everything is due on the 21st, once it's in the archive I can edit until the reveal on the 25th. Which is cool because I need a day or so away from it.

And since I was cleaning up related email I looked at what I requested and it wasn't what I thought it was...which is good because I'm excited to see what was written :)

Am back from Mexico, but sadly suitcases are not. I am okay with it all, Adam is not and is sort of driving me crazy, but I'm putting that down to the long day of travel.

yuletide fic is a spell check, thesaurus and tag lookup away from being finished. Thank god. Turned out to be over 4000 words, 3000 of them written on the balcony of the hotel throughout the week.

The netbook did really well, but I love my full screen, full sized keyboard laptop. I'm thisclose to hugging it and taking it to bed tonight.

Work. Is. Done.

Turned out work was done yesterday, since both meetings that I had today were postponed due to festivities. So I've been working on my Yultide fic (which I love to death), unfortunately it's 7 sections long and I've only mostly finished 2, with an outline on the others. Good news though is if I hit a wall or time crunch removing one or two shouldn't totally kill the story.

Laundry, packing and a bit of cleaning to round out the day. Vacation is getting soooooo close!

Happy Birthday to ljs who has fed my fic addiction for a while now :)

I offer this little Giles/Anya fic.

and now I can continue on with my yuletide fic, which looks like I will write while sitting in a beach chair sipping an umbrella drink. Not a bad thought at all.

Thanks kashmir1 for the snowflake :)

I'm so glad that I only have to make the drive home two more times this year. With the packed snow and ice traffic has been horrible. So I just think about the very few hours left in my work year and I'm happy again. Serenity now.

The weekend's winter storm has been a bit nasty. Today it's sunshiny out, but -30 degrees; which means my car was a bit sluggish when I started it.

After warming it up for half an hour and crossing my fingers that I could make it out of the snowdrift, I noticed an odd little light on the dash. Because we're in Canada and supposedly bi-lingual there can't be words on any of the icons that they use (well, there could but they'd have to be in both English and French), so where Low Tire Pressure would have been immediately recognized the funky (!) with a wavy line under it was not so much help.

Would have been super helpful if my car could tell me which tire it was, so I didn't have to check all 4. Even that wasn't so bad but my glasses kept fogging up and I couldn't read the pressure gauge :)

Let's not even get into the many gas stations I stopped at trying to find one that a) had a hose, b) had a hose that worked and c) didn't charge me for the privilege of doing it.

I found it at Superstore. I will never say a bad thing again about them.

(Four and a half more sleeps until the beach! )

Christmas tree is up. The actual putting up isn't real fun, but I like the way it looks when it's all finished. Makes the room look warmer and gives it a little more light.

Bought new lights for the tree, there's eight different twinkle settings and I love them all. Having twinkly lights makes me happy.

Made spicy shredded pork for dinner and it was fantastic. Not spicy at all, but really moist. Only downside is I don't really like tortillas and that's what we used for it. Might make some biscuits for the leftovers.

I'm doing my traditional pre-vacation cleanse. It's going about as well as can be expected when you cut out sugar, caffeine, booze, processed foods and anything else artificial. I like doing this one because I don't really have cravings for all the junk. And it clears your mind and helps you sleep better. One downfall is the complete lack of things you can eat when shopping.

My goal for the remainder of the evening is to write something on one or both of the fics I'm working on, finish cleaning up the kitchen and then have a bath. It might be do-able.

trying to brainstorm stuff for yuletide and I find my male character channeling Pacey. It really sucks that he had such great lines. And that all these years later I can't get them out of my head :)

I just invested way too much time reading a fanfic that I knew couldn't possibly hold up over sixty some odd chapters.

I hate it when that happens.

So, what seems like a million years ago now I got called into a meeting where the guy said; the group planning isn't working, we want you to be the representatve product person for a complete re-do of our software and oh yeah...the developers started working on it three days ago. We need to get caught up so they're not sitting around playing foosball.

That kind of happened again today. Except I have seven days (because vacation, yay!) to get the start of something together for a complete re-do of another product so that come January 1 the devs aren't sitting around playing foosball. Again because the group planning isn't working.

I sort of don't mind being the go to person. It makes me feel good about myself :)

...wouldn't mind a little more lead time though.

Last week I offered to take the soccer equipment because our coaches are not exactly punctual. So of course today it snows a bunch and the drive was slow and I totally didn't want to take Jet to soccer. I really think there is a cosmic test every time you resolve to do something; wanna learn to run, you pull a muscle, wanna save money, you need a new washing machine, wanna lose weight, someone brings you a cake. That sort of thing.

We went, and had a nice practice with 3 other kids. And Jet has been introduced to The Value of Dedication.

(anyone else read The Value of Books when they were younger? I think my mom still has all of ours)

Made a pear crisp with whiskey cream sauce for dessert. Probably would have been excellent if I had let it cook a bit longer...and with ice cream.

Watching the end of the Grey Cup, Saskatchewan is winning which is good because if someone not Calgary is going to win it might as well be another western province.

...Adams switched it to live Black Eyed Peas concert. And they're just so bad live. But can't. look. away.

Now just to finish up the last load of laundry, pack my lunch for tomorrow and possibly have a bubble bath. Nice wind up to a weekend.

Had to make a quick trip to the store, found what I needed right away but stuck around for a bit because a song that I hadn't heard for a while came on :)

I'm going to try a recipe that calls for a package of ranch salad dressing mix. I don't usually do dressing in packets and was a little shocked to see what little selection there was. Not even Hidden Valley Ranch was there.

Gotta start this roast at 9 in the morning. Hopefully it goes well.

Just got back from a school fundraiser dance. The DJ was awesome but I don't think the under 9 year old crowd appreciated him like the parents did. Won a popcorn night basket at the silent auction, but it's not at my house yet because I spaced and didn't bring any money with me. Tomorrow I will see what all was in that basket/bucket.

Nine more work days until vacation. I would be more happy if I didn't have so much to do :) But if I can get it all in a good place I won't have to be back until January 4th and that's a fantastic thought.

I think I want to buy a netbook for travel, rather than lugging around a full size laptop. Guess it all depends on if we'd need to use the laptop as a TV type device for small children and equally restless dads.

I will ask my sister, who said she's "going offline" to work on her NaNo project. Silly girl; I'll just call the house and bug her the old fashion way :)

Happy Thanksgiving to those across the border. And Happy shopping tomorrow too.

Sunrise - 8:00

Sunset - 4:30

That's just wrong.

I'm going to skip over the horrible training session I had to give today because I don't want to dwell on it.

In case anyone from Canada wants to know the cost of an Cat scan, ambulance ride and 4 stitches at the Childrens Hospital in Denver...$6000. I just got the cheque from my insurance company today.

In January we went to Florida for a Disney Cruise. Jet was running around in the airport and tripped into a planter, cut his cheek and got a black eye. The Calgary airport, just for reference, doesn't have a first aid centre, or ice packs. Anyway, we got on our flight to Denver and the flight attendant didn't like the look of it and called the EMTs to meet us. Trip to the hospital, CT scan, stitches and one missed flight to Florida occurred.

We did the Amazing Race thing to get another flight to Orlando before the boat left; flew to Chicago first then Orlando, took a cab to the port and got on the ship with plenty of time to spare. But it was a little touch and go for a bit.

Fun cruise though, even if Jet watched Bolt in 3D with one eye swollen shut.

This is mostly just a post to say that I did one.

....yeah, that's about all I've got.

Have a good night!