2008-12-07 - 10:01 p.m.

...Christmatizing the House...

OK - I just wrote a rather involved email complaining about work. I was a full-fledged grump. And now I've hidden that entry safely away so that I can now be a shiny happy person.

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

LA LA LA! Let's plant ROSES!!!

Or lettuce. yes, lettuce. I planted lettuce seeds on the back porch about two weeks ago, just on a whim, to see if it will grow. It certainly gets enough rain...and there are little green things popping out of the soil today. By golly, the thought of growing leafy green stuff (that isn't mold) on my back porch in December is kind of mind-blowing. I really love stuff like that.

I worked all day today. (grump grump grump). And I gained two pounds. (frump frump frump). I blame the casserole from yesterday (for the weight gain, not for the need to grade exams). A huge, chicken-mushroom-rotini-cheese casserole (minus the mushrooms because we were out). There's something about the German word for casserole that just FEELS like a thousand pounds when you say it. AUFLAUF. This was definitely a thousand pound AUFLAUF that I made. "Mit Kaese Ueberbacken." oofdah.

Apart from manufacturing food as dense as a black hole yesterday, I also took it upon myself to Christmatize the house - in an all new way, because of El Destructo Baby. Who is basically good, except when she wants to see what a great sound the HAMMER makes on the glass doors in the living room.

And speaking of babies getting into things that they shouldn't get into...whose brilliant idea was it to make the outside of an EXACTO KNIFE a bright cheerful happy ORANGE color that babies cannot resist?? (knife has been safely stowed).

Anyway, back to Christmas. Last week, K chose a Charlie Brown Christmas tree from the local hardware store, and this week I decorated it on the covered front balcony. I made the executive front balcony decision (see previous paragraph about El Destructo Baby). I decided that we could take the little one outside to experience the beauty of Christmas trees and decorations in limited and controlled doses.

And so we decorated outside - during (surprise) a Funcouver rain storm. K was in a foul, foul mood. It had all started earlier in the day when he got REALLY MAD at the shredded red cabbage because it wouldn't fit into the pan. (I had never seen someone get mad at a cabbage before.) I guess you could say that his cabbage-induced rage reached a point of climax when he whacked his head on the porch light five times in a row (which, by the way, is pretty funny to watch - but for some reason he wasn't amused by my bending over in hysterical laughter on the third loud BONK of his noggin against the light. But you see, it's a motion detecting lamp - so each time he WHACKED himself, he would turn it off/on. But boy was he grumpy about it....)

Anyway, the tree is up, the lights are on, the icicles are hanging...the rosemary bush is covered with cute little German traditional wooden thingies. There is Christmas music on the iPod. It's all quite lovely and festive-like. And we get to enjoy it for one week before we leave.