Enough about people Christmas, what everyone really wants to see is cute cat Christmas pictures.

Caligula started the day with a nap on my lap.

In the late morning both Caligula and Michael were finally awake, so it was present time! As to be expected, Caligula got lots of toys. This is the best time of year to get him toys because there are so many Christmas ones, and his favorite color is red.[lj-cut]

3 bags of red and green mice!

He played fetch with one of the red mice for a bit

Green catnip mouse from and

The most popular toy was a goofy-looking, round, red mouse with a party hat on a string. I was unsure of how he’d react, since it had a muffled bell inside and he generally doesn’t like bells, but we were pleasantly surprised! He went nuts over it!

You can see what the toy looks like here

Attacking the red mouse toy, you can also see his new catnip-filled chili in this picture

And finally, we shot a little movie: Caligula playing with red mouse toy! (3.9M)[/lj-cut]

A couple weeks ago, Michael and I decided to take the week between Christmas and New Years off. This doesn’t leave much time for planning a trip, but we were optimistic.

Michael looked at Bed & Breakfasts from West Virginia to Nova Scotia, the nice ones he found were all booked. This morning we did more searching for places, checking out New York State and some places in Maine.

There was a really nice place I called first, called the Captain Lord Mansion in Kennebunkport, Maine. They were completely booked, but I’ll have to keep them in mind for the future, they had heated bathroom floors! I then called and left messages at Bear Mountain Inn and Lakehouse Bed & Breakfast. Both places were nice and close to each other, whoever called back first would win our business.

A woman from Lakehouse Bed & Breakfast called back first, they had the suite we wanted free for the 27th and 28th, so we reserved the room with the Celebration Package. Yay!

So here’s the plan:

Tuesday & Wednesday night: Lakehouse Bed & Breakfast
Thursday – Saturday night: With Morgana and Bob at their house in Oxford, Maine

So we’ll be celebrating the New Year with Morgana and Bob!

I’m so excited, it should be a great week. We don’t have actual plans for what we’re doing any day, figure we can just relax, drink, shop and eat. I might meet up with an old friend from high school, and I let my sister Heather know I’d be in the area. But we’ll see how things go, we want to to be a vacation trip, not a family trip with business and obligations.

On Wednesday we had Kathleen and Barbara over from the Shaman class. They’re both really great people, and since they said they’d be in the area doing some shopping at Dreamcatcher we thought we’d all get together. Michael cooked dinner, and after some initial panic (“oh no! we didn’t ask if they ate meat!”) the evening went very well. It was nice to get to talk to them in a different environment.

Thursday was the last day of work before this 11 day vacation I’m now enjoying. On my way to work I swung by the bank to pay the mortgage. At work I was really busy all day, my boss was somewhat amused by how many calls and emails I was getting, and offered to help me out since she didn’t have a whole lot to do. It was all good though. I was able to schedule a long lunch so I could hop over to the nail place and get my nails done, which offered a nice break from the work day. After work I got the car washed, stopped at the grocery store for a couple things, stopped at the gas station to fill up the car with gas and headed home to wrap a few presents. Around 7:30 and showed up, and soon after arrived. Movie night! Movie night was fun, we watched The Princess Bride, which we had all seen, but enjoyed enough to watch again. We had pizza and Michael’s homebrew, some eggnog. I managed to stay up past 1am, which surprised me after the day I had.

Yesterday morning I spent some time talking with our buddy Grifter about mplayer codecs, it turns out the “essential codecs package” from the mplayer site these days includes quicktime and realplayer stuff, so my Debian mplayer how-to could be vastly simplified. Now it just installs the essentials package and the live.com stuff for streaming. Then I pretty much reviewed and updated the entire thing, tested it, and launched the new version of the how-to. Yay![lj-cut]

In the afternoon I finally got showered and headed over the ‘s place. She recently had a surgery and isn’t very mobile, poor thing %( The traffic getting there was horrendous, but it was worth it, we had a nice time. We got to talk a lot, play with her cats, order some food from a local pizza place (which was good, I’ll have to poke her for the name so maybe next time we have movie night in that area we can order from them instead of Papa Johns). She introduced me to HBO’s The Wire, which was pretty good, I’d like to see more. I went home around 6, shortly after came home from shopping.

Traffic coming home wasn’t so bad. Once home, I spent the evening drinking eggnog+vodka – yum! And puttering around on my computer. A friend of ours sent us The 40 Year Old Virgin, which I expected to be horrible, the previews I saw for it led me to believe it would be full of tasteless virgin jokes and insulting the type of people who remain virgins. But I was pleasantly surprised, it did knock on nerds (“women don’t want to see your mint condition in box action figures!” ..hey I’m a woman who HAS mint condition in box action figures! *mutter*), but it did so in a gentle way and Steve Carell is a funny guy.

Today the plan is to stay in our pajamas until we need to get cleaned up and head over to Michael’s Uncle’s house for the Christmas Eve. They always have a 7 fish dinner, yum![/lj-cut]

A woman here at work often wishes people “Merry Christmas” when she gets off the phone. Since we’re a big corporation, I’ve wondered about this. She’s an older woman who is quite set in her ways, and when I recently joked about the Holiday vs. Christmas thing it was clear that she didn’t appreciate my jest.

There has been much political talk about this issue this year (and every year?). Bush sent out a “Happy Holidays” card, Target doesn’t put “Merry Christmas” on their bags anymore. I’ve been thinking about my feelings on this a great deal, and I don’t know how I feel. Mostly I just wish people wouldn’t fight over everything, but I do understand how much it sucks to not be a Christian in the US.

I don’t even know what I celebrate. The origins of the Christmas celebrations are not Christian, but the reason I put up the Christmas tree wasn’t because I was celebrating anything pagan or Christian. I’m an atheist, I put up a Christmas tree because it’s fun to have a tree in the house and my cat loves it.

So what is it that I celebrate? Time off of work? Good food and good company? Excuses to buy expensive gifts for each other?

What do you celebrate? And how do you feel about celebrating this holiday without it’s religious undertones?

I haven’t been sleeping so well this week. Getting to sleep in the first place is no problem, but I’ve been waking up a lot. Two nights ago I woke up around 3AM and just wandered around the house, crashed on the couch for a bit, and then went to bed again about an hour later. Last night wasn’t much better.

I guess I’ve just had a lot on my mind. Not really stress or worries, just a lot of reflection that seems to come with the changing of years. 2005 has been a pretty remarkable year.

Our boss took us out for Mexican yesterday afternoon as a holiday gift to our department. It was a place called Tex Mex Connection in North Wales, not a bad place. I chuckled at the 3 Margarita limit on the way in and my boss said, “yeah, I’ve done it, I wouldn’t recommend it.” Hah! Apparently they make them strong.

After work yesterday I drove up to Petsmart and Target in Montgomeryville to grab some presents for Caligula and a few things I needed at Target. Neither place was very busy like I expected, quite a relief.

I ended up getting home around 7:30. Did some cleaning and then cuddled on the couch with Caligula to watch Nova. Michael spent a lot of time checking out Bed & Breakfast websites from West Virginia to Nova Scotia. We’re still not sure where we want to go next week, but I’m sure he’ll find something wonderful.

Tonight we’re having a couple guests over, Kathleen and Barbara from the Shaman class. Barbara is moving to the area in the next couple weeks, and Kathleen is doing some shopping in Skippack, so we thought it would be neat to get together. Michael will be cooking some rosemary chicken yay!

Sunday was nice. Spent the entire day in my pajamas, got some laundry done, did some reading.

I finally got ahold of Henry Umansky, who has been super busy with work, to get info about montcolug.org. Because of all his current obligations we decided it would be best if he just handled DNS and I do the hosting. So I spent some time getting that all set up in apache and then put together a simple website. I might go back and make it pretty sometime, but for now it just has the basics.

In the evening we enjoyed a pot roast that Michael made in the crock pot. Then I wanted to turn off my brain and watch some TV. Unfortuantely nothing was on (big surprise) so I watched a couple Disney movies. Went to bed around 10.

It would be an understatement to say I’m looking forward to my 11 days off coming up. Luckily we’re quite busy at work so I’m sure these last few days before the vacation will fly by %)

I’m looking forward to a snuggly relaxing day today.

People were busy yesterday, so I snagged Michael to come shopping with me in Skippack. It was chilly out, but most of the stores weren’t crowded. We pretty much stuck to buying for a few close friends, I’ll mostly be sending out gift cards and the like to distant family people.

Around 4 we left Skippack and headed up to Peddler’s Village in Lahaska (just outside of New Hope). As we approached the area we were glad we had decided to do our shopping in Skippack rather than New Hope, the traffic was horrible and people were everywhere. Luckily we weren’t there for the shops, we were there for beer! A little brewpub that I mentioned in the last entry called Porterhouse Brew Pub. Again, this was a selection from Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries 3rd Edition (have I mentioned that I love this book? We really should pick up our own copy).

Porterhouse sells River Horse beer, whose headquarters is just across the river in Lambertville, NJ (but we won’t hold it against them). I’d never heard of it, but apparently it’s reasonably popular in the area. The place was really nice, and when we met Bob there at 5 we were able to find a seat at the bar easily.

Bring on the beer!

Michael ordered a Hop Hazard Pale Ale, which he claimed was less hoppy than the name would suggest. But it’s good to keep in mind that Michael loves hops, it was plenty hoppy for me. A clean, good brew.

And now for my choice. I almost went with the Hop Hazard, but when I spied the Belgian Frostbite on the menu I decided to give it a shot.

As the days grow shorter and frost becomes snow, our BELGIAN FROSTBITE WINTER ALE is the perfect remedy to loosen the spirits. This deep amber tonic is brewed with lots of roasted caramel malt for body and warmth to bring in the holidays and see you through the spring.

8% A.B.V; Available from September thru March. Deep Amber Belgian Style Ale Fermented with Authentic Belgian Ale Yeast. Moderately Hopped and Lower Sweetness Than Most Belgian Ales.

Sounds yummie, huh?

WELL IT IS! It was a bit like Guinness, but had a wonderful Belgian style finish. Guinness+Belgian Ale brewed locally? Yay! It’s now up there in my top 5 favorite beers. Too bad the closest distributor is 48 minutes away. Although, the retailer down the street does accept special orders…

It’s so great to have Bob to visit brewpubs with, these past couple months have been a delight for my tastebuds.

My nails look pretty. I might start getting manicures more often.

The company party last night was a disappointment. The location was nice, but there wasn’t enough seating and the food was served buffet style. Arg! I hate buffet style. The food itself was less than impressive too, nearly-stale rolls (wtf?), lousy crabcakes, super-rare steak, and bad stirfry. We didn’t stay long after finishing our dinner, didn’t even stay for dessert.

I’m now left with the craving I cultivated for good food! So we decided it would be good to head over to Porterhouse Pub this evening to satiate that craving.

Other than that, I don’t have plans for the day. It’d be nice to head down to Skippack and do some shopping. I’ve never been one to give meaningless gifts, so I hope that going to Skippack will be inspiring. But I don’t want to go by myself, so I need to snag someone to come with ;)

Right now I must take a shower. When I got my haircut yesterday they put some “root volumizer” in my hair to make it look nicer when they blowdried it – but it’s awful stuff and makes my hair feel yucky.

There are cookies everywhere in this office! Such a terrible temptation after the week I’ve had.

Tonight is the holiday party for work, we’re going to Normandy Farm in Blue Bell. Quite honestly I’m not in the mood, I’m sorta tired and just feeling lousy. But it’s a very nice place, and I’ve never been one to pass up a free meal %)

In preparation, I’m hopping over to the hair salon a block from where I work in a few minutes for a quick haircut and manicure. I had wanted to go with a woman from work to get my nails done on Wednesday, and then remembered we had our shaman class. The haircut had been planned for last night in Schwenksville, but they closed down early because of the freezing rain. At least this way I’ll be able to get them both done at the same place, even if I am paying a bit more and squeezing it into a lunch break.

*heads off to hair salon*

Remember that post yesterday where I said all that lovely stuff?

The truth is, I’m having a shitty week %(