I don't usually babble this much

Monday, Dec. 30, 2002
7:01 PM

Christmas was lovely this year - lots of family time and time with my sweetie. Didn't get to see my sister and brother-in-law as they got iced in by the storm. Our plans for getting to my folks' house changed about three times due to work and weather - we ended up leaving Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve but that was definitely for the best. Less stress, less danger of having an accident in the bad weather. We had brunch with my folks and opened presents. (Kev and I exchanged the night before - he gave me three kinds of cheese, beeyootiful green gloves for grouting and a 5-drawer organizer for my sewing room. He's the coolest!)

My folks always like to go overboard with Christmas presents. My mom is especially good with stocking stuffers, which I suck at. Anyway, I got a bunch of good books, including Dressing Renaissance Florence, yay! Mom gave me a gorgeous quilted Christmas wall hanging (I hung it up in the hall, even if it's only for a few days before we pack up the Christmas stuff). One of the best presents I got was a notebook of blown-up photos of mosaics that my dad took when they went to Italy this fall. Very cool stuff - lots of nifty historic stuff, plus a couple shots of modern mosaics from the subway in Rome. Many good details and inspirations.

In the afternoon we went to my aunt and uncle's in Charlottesville to hang out and have dinner. This was slightly weird in that we normally do Thanksgiving with my mom's side of the family and Christmas with my dad's. This year schedules were weird and my uncle was pouting because he was only going to have six people for dinner (normally he has somewhere around ten or twelve). So anyway, we had a lovely time, yummy dinner, and lively conversation.

Spent the night with my folks, had breakfast the next day and spent a while chatting about all kinds of stuff. So long in fact, that we were still hanging around chatting when we should have been hitting the road. We did manage to get back in time for Kevin to get to work, fortunately. It turned out that the package that Kevin had been waiting for for over a week got delivered that day (go figure). It had two more Christmas presents for me - a book called Big Chief Elizabeth, about the first English colonists in the New World, and both seasons of Sports Night on DVD. Fun stuff!

Saturday we did various errands and then went to Kevin's parents' house for Christmas with them. More presents, more yummy dinner, more hanging out - we had a great time. After dinner we played canasta - or rather, Caliente Canasta. It's a specific deck just for that game, apparently with some odd variations and "cracky" rules (to use Kevin's sister's term). I didn't know the difference as I'd never played before but it was a lot of fun. We were all kind of punchy at that point and had some pretty silly moments but it was a hoot. I think we should get a deck and rope some people into playing.

Got home late Saturday night and slept in Sunday. We had a fairly lazy morning but spent part of the afternoon moving furniture in the house. Kevin's late aunt had some furniture that was up for the taking, so we ended up with a beautiful bedroom set for the spare bedroom. There's a queen size bed with headboard and footboard, a tall chest of drawers (a highboy?) and a low, wide set of drawers. It's all mahogany and really lovely. Anyway, we started hauling the stuff out of the trailer and upstairs. I have come to realize that one of the chores I hate most is moving furniture. It's awkward, it's heavy, it's miserable. We broke the bracket on the stair handrail and created a dent in the drywall. But the furniture survived and so did we. Have an unresolved issue with the bedframe not matching the headboard and/or footboard but we'll deal with that later.

After the furniture adventure, we went to see The Two Towers. We're probably the last people on the planet to have seen it, but if you haven't, go see it. Great movie - I hate to say this but I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd read the books first. I still haven't managed to get through The Fellowship of the Ring but oh well. Anyway, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing with this series and I think the fact that all three movies were shot at the same time is the best thing they could have done. There's such a sense of continuity from the first movie to the second and I have no doubt that will carry through to the third. The battle scenes were incredibly intense. I can appreciate the comparison of the Ents to Fraggles, but it didn't bother me that much. I thought it was interesting how Gollum/Smeagle's internal struggle reflected the greater struggle between good and evil.

Wow, this is getting long. I hope nobody's died of boredom yet. If you haven't started skimming by now, well, sorry. I've been working on this entry for almost an hour and a half so I think I'll quit while I'm verbose.

Ciao!