this mess

Welcome to the disaster area.

The countdown is on until moving day, one week from tomorrow!

I have one entire suitcase filled with tank tops.

Every Song You Hear

This is my favorite Christmas music of all time. It's the Carpenters (Peter and Karen! They're siblings!) and it's from, I think, the 70s. It's the music my mom would always have on during Christmas when I was growing up, and my first Christmas season in college I had to buy my own copy because I realized it just wouldn't be Christmas without it.

It's this amazing nostalgic blend of cheeserific cheerfulness (although Karen Carpenter on Ave Maria is really quite lovely) combined with some serious religious numbers. Plus even when I was little the whole thing was tinged with some tragic drama since my mom sat me down and explained how Karen Carpenter later died from anorexia. Heavy stuff for an eight year old.

If you want to listen to one song from this, please make it "The First Snowfall."

marathon

If my wallet could take it, I would totally just take one day over Christmas vacation to go see

Brothers
Up in the Air
The Lovely Bones
An Education
The Young Victoria

(Okay, and maybe also The Princess and the Frog.)

Who's with me?

Ramona the Pest

This is Ramona.

If you didn't know, she is rather high-spirited. And sometimes plumb crazy.

She does this thing where she sleeps all evening, then wakes up and does the crazy at 5 a.m. She bites the bottom of the closet door, the ethernet wire, the wicker storage basket under my bed, and just does not stop. Meanwhile I wake up every five minutes, speak to her in a stern voice, plead with her to stop so I can sleep, and spritz her with the spray water bottle. Then around 5:30 she gives up and curls up on my bed with me.

I told my mom that I feel like a bad cat mommy because sometimes I want to throttle her. And my mom said, "Kids are like that, too."

D.C. Holidays

Whilst on Oprah.com to find out when her Obama White House Christmas special is airing (Sunday at 10 p.m. on ABC, if you are so inclined) I found this nifty slideshow of White House Christmas cards from the past. The one above is from the Clinton Administration for Christmas 1998. Fun to check out if you love Christmas cards like me.

'Tis the season...

. . . to use up all those vacation days that are soon to expire. Yay! I made a last-minute decision to use up one of my personal days today. Fun to have a nice bonus free day in the middle of the week, right?

Apartment-hunting combined with freelance (gotta be able to pay the rent on the new place!) has made for a crazed past few weeks, so I tried to get a bunch of stuff done that had been on the back burner.

Made some crazy delicious white lace for tomorrow's office party (white chocolate snack mix), recipe courtesy of Kathryn via Mrs. Stasz, got the laundry done, did a loop in the mostly deserted park, and put together this little Christmas package for a certain friend and her baby. Is this not the cutest tiny T-shirt you've ever seen? The hot pink felt wreath is inspired by this Flickr find.

I just need to say that right now Glee is totally ripping off the storyline from Sister Act 2 wherein the ragtag gang of acapella singing kids makes it to the climactic regional competition only to find that another school is singing the same song they have planned! Can they top Lauryn Hill? Can they??

Let's make a deal

What I would really like to be doing tonight is reading the new issue of Real Simple that's patiently waiting on my desk, watching Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (my all-time favorite Christmas movie), and maybe even putting up a few holiday decorations in my apartment.

However, I have this mother of a freelance project that I gotta keep soldiering through, so I can finish up and start the next project. So I made a deal with myself wherein I could take a fifteen-minute break to download The Nutcracker Suite off iTunes and write this blog post.

Weekend, are you here yet?