Xmas Holiday Celebrations Begin

We slept later than usual, me until 8:05am. I felt pretty good, though and was eager to get up and get moving. The coffee maker kicked on just like it’s supposed to. Trouble was, I forgot to add coffee. But generally, I don’t make coffee ahead of time on weekends. Truthfully, I forgot to disable the auto brew feature Friday evening.

I fixed the faux pas and whizzed through my exercise routine still bummed about my hard drive. It wasn’t long before Ykraps and I were outdoors taking in the neighborhood. He’s such a good dog!

I enjoyed some coffee and sat down at my Laptop tuning into work. Things were going fairly smoothly – thankfully. It wasn’t long before Mindy was awake and downstairs too. I can’t recall the exact time. I left for a run in what were dramatically windy conditions. We were experiencing gusts up to 50 mph. If nothing else, it made running interesting.

I was a little more relaxed after my run having come somewhat to terms with my broken hard drive. I feel a little ashamed at how reliant I’ve become of my PC and then why I didn’t take more precaution with a back-up system of sorts. You can bet that I’ll be looking into something like that moving forward.

Work kept me hopping for the next couple hours. Mindy formulated a grocery list to carry us through a rash of holiday events/parties as well as our usual food supply. What I knew for certain was that we had an incredibly busy agenda ahead of us. Mindy wanted to visit a sick church friend, grocery shop, make buffalo chicken dip, ready for Bob’s party. All of this had to happen in three hours. All of this, and I still had some Xmas stuff to do too. Yikes!

We left the house together headed towards Oakhurst Country Club. Annoyed with our ever expanding agenda, I suggested to Mindy that she just go alone. She agreed somewhat begrudgingly. No matter how I tried to disguise it, I was still raw over my crashed hard drive. Mindy left to see her sick friend, and I stayed at home working on a few last minute Xmas things. Mindy called close to 2:30-#:00pm asking if I wanted to meet her at the grocery store. We met at the Alton Darby Kroger. We got the Xmas party fixins and a bottle of Jack D. for Rene.

We didn’t get home until just after 4pm. We had a boat load to do before we were ready for Bob’s. After carrying groceries I got crackin’ on the buffalo chicken dip. I’ve got that recipe down to a science. It became apparent that we weren’t going to make the 5pm slated start but that’s OK. It was more likely that we’d make it closer to 6pm.

Somehow we got everything done that needed to be done. The house would need a good sprucing up first thing tomorrow am in readiness for our little get-together. We arrived at Bob’s around 6:30pm – maybe later. I had to get my laptop hooked up in the basement since I was on-call. Meanwhile, the place was jumping – a little crazy in fact. Lot’s of wee ones around.
We interacted with everyone eventually starting the gift exchange for kids. By far the best idea in years was to have the adult White Elephant exchange. That made shopping easy & fun - $20 limit. It was much more fun than the chaotic gift exchange, too. We ended up with $20 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets. I think that we won $2. :(

Most of the kids left around 9pm (Ash, Linz, Adam, Hilliary, Christie). Dad left soon after. But even before dad left the girls were getting’ a little wild. Mindy somewhere intimated that she wanted to party and asked if I’d be the designated driver. I began drinking soda only. On the other hand, she, Dodie, and April got fairly tanked!

Let’s just say that Mindy was feelin’ no pain by the time we departed. The kids were beyond cranky. Jacob cried all the way home. He was pissed that he didn’t get a turn with the Wii. Geesh! While Mindy tried helplessly to get the kids ready for bed, I got my laptop fired up at home. I guess I didn’t realize just how shit faced she was. Trust me! She was loopy! It wasn’t until I heard Jacob ask her why she was crawling and then Bella said she was throwing up because she ate so much food. When I went upstairs she was naked and the kids were crying. :) I was finally able to get them to bed. Bella, however, was pissed! I got Mindy of to bed after forcing her to take some Advil and Tagament.

I stayed up long enough to watch a little Mad TV and a Saturday Night rerun. I felt fine!