Happy Christmas Eve!

Winter has come at last, and with it came the cold and the snow! It started snowing yesterday afternoon, but most of it just blew around without really landing, like we were in a giant snowglobe that kept getting shaken up. It started getting serious about it last night so now there is a layer of fresh snow on the ground, just in time for Christmas!

More snow is in the forecast for tomorrow, and of course I’ll be on the road through it. But as long as it’s not the thunderstorm, tornado(!), and gale force winds from last year, I think I’ll be fine. Driving through snow is a fact of life around here. As long as there’s some visibility, you can make it somewhere.

I’m celebrating the arrival of Christmas for more than the normal reasons of family, friends, and gifts- it means I’m done with the crazy season at work, and my schedule will be back to normal! We’ll probably be busy until the second week of January, when the cold deepens and everything slows down. But now that I’m back to having two days off each week instead of one, I’ll have a real chance to relax and recharge.

I have taken a little bit of time for myself this week, thanks to canceled dinner plans. A bunch of us usually get together for dinner on Wednesday night, but the married couple had to pick up family from the airport, so I had the night to myself. I used it well, I think. I tried out a new restaurant that recently opened in my neighborhood. There has always been a diner in that spot since I moved here, but it had changed hands several times. This incarnation features burgers with a twist inspired by the owner’s various travels. It’s an interesting idea, but the food left a lot to be desired in amount, flavor, and presentation. Perhaps it will get better with time, but with so many other fabulous burger places already established in easier-to-access areas, this new diner is really going to have to step up its game to compete.

After dinner, I walked home and played with my cat until he got annoyed and wandered off, leaving me to plop down on the couch and finish a couple of books: Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick, and Early Color, a collection of photographs by Saul Leiter. Because I did my Christmas shopping early, and because the bookseller wrapped several of the gifts for me, I only had one gift left to wrap in the evening. So everything’s ready to go. I just need to get it into the car and head west!

Thanks to an absolutely crazy day at work on Friday, I got home and just wanted to flop on the couch and do nothing. So that’s pretty much what I did, after queuing up the new Netflix film, Bright. I’ve been looking forward to this since I heard about it, thanks to its similarities to an RPG I used to play called Shadowrun. While Shadowrun is set in the future and Bright is contemporary, they share fantasy elements, where humans, orcs, elves, and dwarves co-exist and magic is real. Critics have given Bright quite a drubbing, but I enjoyed it and would definitely watch it again.

This week’s posts:

Goodreads Monday – Deathless

Review- The Bookshop on the Corner

Fangirl

Review- Early Color

I am definitely not going to finish the five books I chose for December, but that’s okay. I’ve finished enough books for the month to more than double my 2017 Goodreads Challenge. Plus, I got an unexpected delivery from the public library in the form of the eBook of Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. I’d been on the waitlist for the past few months, and the last time I checked, there were still four people ahead of me. So I don’t know how I got it so soon, but I’m glad it showed up. I started it last night and was hooked right away. Mbue’s voice is lovely, and her depiction of her immigrant characters feels so real. This is not a happy story, but I am looking forward to reading the rest of it.

So that’s been my week! Super busy, super crazy, but with enough me-time that I didn’t go crazy. It helped that the grocery store had my favorite wine on sale..

Anyway. Happy holidays, everyone! Have a very Merry Christmas, and a brilliant New Year!