Picking up the pace

My eldest said to me today, while we were out frantically doing errands, "Christmas just snuck up on me this year." I stopped mid-stride, and said, "Welcome to adulthood." Cracked me up.

While I had thought I was totally devoid of holiday spirit this year, I managed to do one or two things. We made and decorated cookies, and yesterday I gathered the two youngest and we made our way via public transit (oh, the excitement!) to San Francisco, where at the St. Francis hotel we viewed this year's over the top "Sugar Castle."


And tomorrow, we'll probably get our tree. It's taken a week, but we've gone from our front rooms looking like this, as they have since we moved in (except without the ladder and the plastic sheeting and the furniture all shoved together in the middle,


to different combinations of these four colors:


Now it's clear that the dining room will need repainting. But that can wait until after the holiday.

What can't wait, alas, is a new refrigerator. I thought getting the old one repaired would be a good move, but since Thursday, we've been having odd clicks and shorts in the whole house's electrical system, and unplugging the refrigerator fixed it. Then we discovered that everything in the freezer wasn't frozen. . . So, after my much-looked-forward-to solo grocery shopping trip after church tomorrow, we'll go to the appliance store and get another refrigerator, then get a tree, now that the living room is 95% done, then I'll finish writing the cards that arrived from the printer today so I can mail them on Monday, and then we'll probably go out to dinner. And collapse.

It's a good thing I got a run in this morning. It was sad, as befits the first one after a two-month hiatus, but it was a run. I was just underdressed, but that can be remedied. My still-to-be-graded papers can't, though, so I'll slog through them tonight. The term is almost over, so I'll have about a week off of work. The Kauni cardigan is hovering between the armpits and the beginning of the neckline, and I cast on another top-down raglan for my son, out of a two-ply alpaca, and managed to not mess it up too much during the opening night screening of "The Tale of Desperaux" that the young'uns and I went to last night.

Any minute now, I expect things to calm down. I don't know why I do, except that in contrast to the last few (and upcoming few) days, it can't feel more active.