Hey, how are you guys doing? Can you please answer a few questions for me? 1) What are your New Year’s Eve plans? and 2) How many Christmases do you celebrate? (For example, do you travel to Grandma’s, have a celebration with your own family, and then travel to your significant other’s family? That would be three Christmases.)
As for us, we’re going out to dinner tonight and then relaxing at home by finishing up our 2007 cribbage, foosball and dart tournaments. (I am totally losing in cribbage and darts, but thank god for foosball.) For the Christmases, we have five, FIVE Christmases to celebrate every year via various family and family-offshoot gatherings (actually 6, before we decided to rotate families every other year) and it is getting to be a bit much, what with all the traveling and the whole “driving instead of relaxing” that happens. So we’re going to figure out a way to fix that while still retaining holiday cheer and familial harmony. Yeah, right.
Anyway, I’m finishing up a cold, so I’ve got to go before my nasal passages pledge their entire contents to the Kleenex Foundation Telethon. Have a safe and fun-filled New Year’s Eve and we’ll see you in 2008, where I’ve vowed to eat more bacon and yet eat healthier at the same time.
Per Tessie’s request, and following in the hallowed footsteps of Ree from The Pioneer Woman Cooks and Caroline and Brett from Partners in Dine, here’s a step-by-step photo essay on how to make chicken saltimbocca. (Special thanks to Jason, who took the awesome photos and didn’t crowd me in the kitchen until I got so nervous I botched the results.)
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I am so tired today.
SO. TIRED.
I’ve been like this all week: coming home from work, sitting on the couch, wrapping my down comforter around me and watching TV, where “watching TV” equals “closing my eyes and dreaming of Batista.”
Is it a little sad that the main reason I’m excited to have a few days off for Christmas is that I can sleep in?
Also, that I can nap?
(And, is it possible for your eyelids to gain weight and feel like they weigh 5 lbs.? If so, that is happening to me. ALERT THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY!)
Jason and I have the weekend to ourselves before we have to do any traveling for the holiday. We plan on taking pictures of ourselves with the cats in front of the tree, using the self-timer, which is always a crapshoot depending on the cats’ level of cooperation, which ranges from, “Sure, I’ll sit in your lap” to “OPERATION: CLAW REMOVAL.”
We plan on driving around the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights, listening to Christmas music, and then coming home to cups of hot chocolate accompanied by way too many marshmallows. Also, I am making chicken saltimbocca, which makes me happy because I’ve been talking about making it again for about 3298758 months, and it makes Jason happy because now he won’t have to listen to me talk about making it. Plus, it’s delicious.
I hope you all have a pleasant holiday/Christmas/whatever you celebrate, and even if your family’s squabbling or you’re forced to dress up and sit through a 7-hour Mass, or Santa didn’t bring you want you asked for, I hope you find a moment or two of peace and happiness.
Happy holidays.
1. Get in the Christmas spirit when work is totally insane and sales people can’t remember that 70% of the staff will be missing next week when they make ridiculous deadline promises to clients.
2. [redacted]
3. Get her bangs to cooperate so that she looks more “cute and sassy” and less “slacker marijuana user.”
4. Get up early to exercise, even after watching “The Biggest Loser” finale last night and seeing how some contestants got up at 4 a.m. to exercise.
5. Figure out how to move the driver’s seat forward in her 2008 Mercury Mariner rental car; a rental car that only needed to be procured after she went to pick up Jason’s car from the mechanic and was told that after finding nothing wrong with the vehicle, they accidentally punctured the oil pan.
6. Remember the name of that delicious white chocolate-filled-with-white-pudding-concoction that someone left in the kitchen last week.
7. Schedule any kind of fun lunch and/or after-work appointment due to the client from hell; a client she will actually avoid doing business with FOREVER because of their asinine-ness. (Other clients banned forever: DHL, Wells Fargo.)
8. Stop having dreams about giving birth to baby girls.
9. Figure out why her new black shoes are making a weird, and extremely loud, clicking noise.
10. Refrain from going longer than 3 minutes without applying not one, but two types of chapstick. Chapstick which is not working AT ALL.
