Christmas Party...

Well, last night was The Cat Hospital's Christmas Party and we filled up a huge table (our staff, husbands, fiancès, girlfriends and significant others is quite a crowd when all assembled) at Maggiano's in Tyson's Corner. It certainly was family style, like one big Italian family and we had to manuver our way past strollers and presents and tables way too close together, to get to our seats. But once seated, the wonderful meal that just kept coming, made us forget about the obstacles. We had spinach salad, caesar salad; we had veal piccata and 4 cheese ravioli, scampi and pasta; and the most creamy, fluffy cheesecake on earth, I think. We will be eating off the leftovers for at least a couple of days at the hospital!

Today, I slept in again, or more precisely woke up and got up, did a couple of things and then sauntered back to bed. That is luxurious to me and gives me some more snuggling time with the cats, which they are quite happy about, too. I had three things on my list to get done this weekend and am almost done with them. They might sound like small stuff, but sometimes I procrastinate or stay on the computer too long, or just don't complete anything, so 1) emptying and filling the dishwasher--you should not even imagine what my kitchen sink looked like--Mike used to do the dishes and there's another thing I miss about him. 2) Ironing--yes, I still have things that need ironing and Mike used to do the ironing, too (do you see a pattern here?) and 3) Putting up some curtain tiebacks for the new curtains I bought about two months ago. So anything above and beyond that which I accomplish, will be less that I have to tackle next weekend.

I have a friend coming to visit the second weekend in January (and she is adopting Billy Idol, one of my two Sphynx cats) so I have to get in gear and stop avoiding getting my house back together, and get out of the guest room and back into the master bedroom, so she can have a place to sleep! I keep thinking how much free time I would have if I didn't have the cat family to take care of and didn't work full time too...but we make our bed, right. Sometimes the things that give one pleasure can also give one cause to grouse.

Maybe I'll get some decorations up, since I pulled some boxes of stuff out of the attic, as I've decorated the Cat Hospital every year since I've worked there and well, if I didn't I would feel really scrooge-like. I did get a fragrant rosemary tree, but it's still sitting out on my deck til I get the dining room table cleared off so I can put the rosemary tree in the center of the and put a few unbreakable ornaments on it. I do have an artificial tree that looks nice in the bay window, so that's on the list of to-do's for the week.

In keeping with the holiday spirit (yes, I do have some, it's just getting to it that's slow), here's a couple of photos to show that...