what I did on my holidays
12/21 - Solstice lunch with Wim's family. Five million gifts as always. Aw. Maybe they still like me despite my strange relationship status? Best one came from Wim: The question block lamp is effing hilarious and I must find a way to hang it by my front door despite my weird ceiling and frustrating lack of screwdrivers.
Was EXTREMELY SKEPTICAL. Not sure what about.
12/22 - Christmas decorating time! Cherry-picked my favorite ornaments for the little grand fir tree while baking gingerbread house pieces with Mom, and got to hang out with Dad and give him a hard time, which he enjoys greatly.
12/24 - Christmas Eve. Worked the whole day and got to do a cool experiment injecting bacteria into plant leaves. Then, yikes, Mom asked everyone to bring candy for the gingerbread house, so I had to (HAD TO) track down where to buy gummi grapefruit slices, which are the best candy ever. For some reason you can only get them in bulk candy bins, and busing to grocery-store bulk candy would only work in one case -- got there before closing time, got candies including some other fun ones, go me.
Set up lights in kitchen! Orange-green-purple is totally fine as winter lights IMO.
Listened to Slicing Up Eyeballs Christmas Mix while cleaning, cooking, and gift-wrapping. Excellent relaxing evening.
Found that mushrooms in fridge were entirely dried; had brainwave; used microplane rasp on them to produce MAGICAL FLAVOR SHAVINGS.
Moved lights into bedroom! Slept some with them on because LIGHTS, then unplugged them because lights.
12/25 - Christmas Day. Woke up much too early with Crosby and Bowie in my head, so, not all bad!
Made a lovely lemon meringue pie in the crust I baked the previous night. Do not know what happened to my usual recipe; used the Cookwise one and adjusted based on my memory of it.
Watched cartoons. MLP "Daring Don't" is so great.
Wim arrived and I got dressed, yielding a surprise pentagonal neckline!
Srs MLP discussions with Wim in the car.
Got to my parents' place and hung out for quite a while before people arrived, including gingerbread house decoration time! This led to the usual fun and also the nefarious use by me of a mutant Mike & Ike to, as Wim said, "Hang a candy dong upon the highest bough."
Note the creche-like presentation of the traditional Nerd Rope.
Wim's side, with grapefruit slices in pride of place.
My side, with detail.
Then there was a bunch of Iron Chef on TV, so Wim and I watched it. It is inferior to the Japanese version, but still fun. When there were too many humans, we took a walk. There were reindeer wearing antlers on their antlers!
Gave people stuff I wanted them to have: mokusei plants to my mom and (at her sort of grudging assent based on sweet reason and puppy-dog eyes) her sister, Archer's Goon to weird little reading cousin, MLP to princess-obsessed cousin, silly robot pen and the lemon pie to Dad, good wool socks to uncle who always authentically wants and raves about warm socks.
Aaand then I went to the lab. :) I'd run off the night before instead of finishing my stuff, and luckily it was a thing that can be done the second day, so I went in then. My bus pass for next quarter had already started working! Xmas miracle!
This was followed by dozy laundry and Yuletide time, which was excellent.
12/31 - New Year's Eve.
1/1/2014 - New Year's Day. Went shopping with Mom for fabric for the next baby quilt! Now if the cousins would just stop naming their offspring things that all sound the same. All my quilt suggestions were eventually shot down, but I had a good time designing and admiring anyway. And we got her a new Mac laptop, which she'd been meaning to get with some gift money from a while ago.
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