You see that?!?! That, my friends, is a photo of my husband Kurt enjoying a dinner of fresh steamed broccoli and tortellini soup.

What is so unusual about this photo?!

He's supposed to be out to sea at the moment!!!!!!

He called me around 6:30pm, right as I finished dinner, to tell me about the local town having a new service of delivery coffee. I was so weirded out by the thought of delivery coffee, but Kurt said the delivery guy would be there soon.

About 30 seconds after he hung up, a knock was heard at the door. I went to go open it, but first peered through the stained glass set into the front door.

And who should be standing there but Kurt himself with a 20oz Starbucks peppermint mocha?!?!

My brain STILL hurts from the confusion it's endured because of this turn of events.

Basically, the ship is broken, and they may or may not be going out to sea.

I'm totally thrown for a loop. I'm so excited he's home (and giving Gracie a bath as we speak), but I was all set in my "Kurt's out to sea" groove!! Now I have to totally reset!! :o)

YAY!!

Kurt hung the icicle lights up outside on Saturday, and then we put up the tree and decorated it that night as well. And I have to say that the lights on my Christmas tree look as good as if I had a pre-lit tree!! I just wish they were flashing Christmas tree lights. The solid color gets boring.

I didn't put any glass balls on the Christmas tree this year. Part of it is because we have Gracie now, and shards of glass getting into her hands seems to be kind of a bad thing. Also, we have two cats that LOVE glass ball ornaments, and they have a tendency of knocking them down and shattering them. Now that I don't have any ball ornaments on the tree, they've left the other ornaments alone.

I need to find an ornament for this year. Every year we try to buy a new ornament for the tree that has some meaning for the year. For 2001, I have a white dove ornament with a heart dangling from its mouth decorated with the American flag to remember September 11th. I'm not sure what I have for 2002, but for 2003 we have one to celebrate the purchase of our first house, and for 2004 we have a Baby's First Christmas for Gracie. I don't know where that ornament is offhand since we didn't decorate last year, but I know we have one.

So what should I get for this year?! What happened this year that I can commemorate in an ornament?! Give me your ideas!!!!

The predicted snowfall was a bust, of course. There are bits of my county that did apparently see snow, but there is no accumulation where I live. I'm kind of bummed about it. I had no plans to go anywhere today anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered if it had snowed. Last year we got a few flakes at 10 o'clock at night in January, and that was all the the snow we got for the winter. I do miss snow. At least in Virginia it snows every year. One year I went to class at noon in the English building, and the snow was drifting down. When I got out of the building at 2, there was no sign it had ever snowed!!!

It's no longer stupidly cold either. I'm not sure why the last two days were so cold because the temperature isn't much higher today than it has been. I don't know if the wind chill was bad or the humidity was high or what. But it definitely was stupidly cold the last couple of days, and now it's just chilly. I'm very thankful for that since my house doesn't heat well.

Being without Kurt is going better than I expected. I think it's really going to hit come the weekend, but maybe by then I'll be back into my solitary groove and it won't be so bad. One can hope, anyway. :o)

My library has this new program called Books 2 Go, where they set out books they think are the most popular right in the front of the library, so you can just grab a few and head straight to the checkout. When I was at the library a couple weeks ago, most of the books on the shelf looked really darn good, and it was hard to limit myself to just a few. See, the kicker of this program is you can only have the books for the normal three-week checkout program -- no renewals. Usually I grab a bunch of books that look good and just renew the ones I haven't finished by the time they're all due. So I have to beat feet and finish this one book by Thursday so I don't incur the wrath of my county library.

I NEED books. Really I do. I don't know what I would do without books.