rachel@home

Christmas 2003

This year was a very exciting Christmas, as I had to work only one day the whole Christmas week!

I started the week off with a wild frenzy of cookie making. By 9pm, I had many many bowls of cookie dough sitting in the fridge, and I knew I had to get them all baked by morning. Why by morning? Just because. So by 2am I had all the cookies baked and each variety was stacked on its own plate, wrapped with a towel, and ready for cookie platters to be arranged.

Tuesday I had to work, but it was very quiet, and there was almost no-one there. Tuesday night I began (yes, began) wrapping presents. For some reason, I was feeling quite creative, so I didn't go as fast as I might have, but I sure did catch up on a whole lot of tivo-ed tv.

Wednesday was our one-day-early Christmas morning with the girls. The plan was to do their stuff with my parents and brother, then they would go with their dad and my brother and I would drive down to my aunt's together. I hadn't managed to shower before my parents arrived, partly because they got there before 9am, and I'd been up late, and partly because I really needed to do laundry before I showered, so that I'd have something to wear afterwards.

So parents come and the girls open stuff and parents go, and my brother falls asleep on the floor, and I do some laundry and take a shower, and get dressed, and the girls go and Matthew and I leave and go get coffee and stand around inside Starbucks, and then hit the road for the beginning of our 4-plus hour drive. We averaged 35 miles an hour for the trip. Traffic wasn't our friend.

On the way, we stop for gas, where I get out of the car and stand around and pump gas, and then later we stop at Walmart where we walk around and find the bathroom and I get a coke.

Eventually, we arrive in Longview, and we're saying hello and everything, and it's at that point, a good 6 hours after I put my clean jeans on, that my mother asks me, very delicately, if I knew there's a 'structural problem' with my pants. I rush off to the bathroom to have a look, and discover that there's a huge jagged tear all the way down the left back pocket, it's about an inch wide -- all the horizontal threads seem completely gone, and the vertical threads are sort of there, but there's plenty of see-through room!

I change into the one other pair of pants I brought -- sweats, which I figured I really wouldn't even need, as I was only going to be there two days and planned on just wearing the jeans both days. I was really really glad I'd thrown the sweats in!

Then I interrogate my brother as to why he hadn't told me. (In case you're thinking this was his revenge for making his historic tale, it's not! He liked it!) He said that he thought it might be on purpose, and he didn't want to say anything if it was. He didn't have a really good answer as to why he thought I was the kind of person who purposely walked around with big holes in the backside of their jeans. But hopefully, if anyone did see me as I was lounging about Starbucks, pumping gas in Tacoma, or wandering through Walmart in Chehalis, they'll think it was on purpose too.

Christmas in Longview was nice, and I slept until after nine on Christmas morning! My mom and I walked around by the lake and wandered through some nearby neighborhoods and looked at all the houses, which was fun. Matthew and I left after dinner and made it back to my place in two hours and ten minutes -- about half of what it took us to get there. So that made us very happy indeed.

Today, the girls and I went to see Return of the King, the 11:30 show. (I checked my jeans carefully before I put them on and left the house!) I was surprised at how full it was, and when we got out at 3:00, they had sold out all of the shows until the 7:00 one! So it was good we went early. I liked this one the best of all of the LotR movies, and cried though about the last 45 minutes of it. Even though they didn't do the cleansing of The Shire, it was still all very well done.

Posted by Rachel at December 26, 2003 05:12 PM