happy holidays!

Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

This will be our first Christmas on our own and while I had initial reservations about it, I'm getting excited. For the last three years we've spent Christmas at Tim's parents' house in Delta, which I love because the holidays were always a time for family when I was growing up so I have this need to have people around me. This year, though, his parents are taking a long overdue vacation to see their kids that don't live in our valley so we're on our own. We will be having one of Tim's sisters and her husband over for Christmas Eve, though, which should be a lot of fun! We always went to my cousin's house for Christmas Eve dinner in New York. The idea of staying snuggled up indoors on a lazy Christmas day has grown on me lately but I'm glad we'll have some company tomorrow

We finally got our tree up and decorated over Friday and Saturday [I know, so behind] after I spent a day and a half removing the pre-wired lights. Let me tell you, whoever puts those suckers on is not getting paid enough, not nearly. I also understand why pre-lit trees cost so much more. Honestly, though, I'm willing to put up with having to re-wrap the tree in lights every year to avoid potentially needing to replace the entire tree every other year because some of the lights go out and you can't fix them [the reason I removed the lights on ours this year]. Tim thought I was a bit crazy but I didn't really mind taking them off and as for putting them on, we always had a real tree, growing up, so I'm used to it and our tree has never looked this good, if I do say so myself.

Winter has been making periodic attempts to set its claws in over the last week. We've finally dropped out of the mid- to upper-50s and we're starting to get some precipitation, mostly in the form of rain. It did start out pretty snowy yesterday but by the time I left work it had all melted and today it's sunny, if frigid. The weatherman predicts at least 3 inches of snow on Christmas which would be appropriately seasonal and pretty but we'll see what happens. Only a fool trusts the weather forecast implicitly.

I only have to come in to work on Monday and Tuesday next week and I'm looking forward to a lazy vacation. I've set a goal for myself to break 20,000 words [continuing my word count from nanowrimo] before the new year. I know that's only a goal of 5,000 words for the whole month but it feels attainable and considering the holiday season as well as the other events that broke up my writing schedule this month, I'll be happy with attainable. Right now I'm trying to find pictures of people that remind me of my characters which is fairly simple for some but others, like Percy [who is undergoing a change of ethnicity by her own volition], are a bit more challenging. My search terms are often too specific or too many to bring up any good results so I might end up Frankenstein-ing pieces of different pictures together. Man, I really need to get that cork board!

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday wherever you are! And if you don't celebrate any of the current holidays, create your own! We should never really need an official excuse to celebrate life  : )