Ack, falling behind already! And the first week of December is already over! Ack!

Friday I made a list of Things to Do and whomped through most of them. Edited two journal articles, showered, hard boiled some eggs, cleaned the living room, etc. I had lots of energy. I wish I’d felt that way all week! Then Ken came home, and we had a lovely picnic on the living room floor. As we were chatting, he mentioned that the boots he’d commissioned from a friend in Britain more than a year ago had arrived at Trikon (but of course, he’d been in Portland all week). “So let’s go get them so you can wear them tomorrow!” I said. Apparently he hadn’t even though of that. So we went out and picked them up, and then went to Walmart to get insert soles. I managed to buy a very cool pair of leather boots with almost no back heel—not quite the 80s pixie boots of my dreams, but very close! And they were only $17! For leather! I want to go to another Walmart and buy a second pair to use strictly for fencing. And they also had faux suede granny boots, but the 9s were a little too small, and they didn’t have 9 1/2s, so I want to check elsewhere.

Yesterday morning, Lasairfhiona and Maren and I went up to Long Beach and a Women’s Spirit Faire. It turned out to be mostly merchants, although there were always musicians and dancers and singers performing. I bought some rose-scented spray and a stained glass heart in clear and purple to hang in the living room window. There was some cool clothing made out of fabric printed with labyrinths and spirals, but I couldn’t justify the expense. What I want to do is find the fabric! The merchant, whose catalogue I took, also sells the fabric as sarongs, but they’re still a little pricy.

We drove around forever looking for a Mediterranean place for lunch because we were obsessing about falafel, but we couldn’t find one. We ended up at Baja Fresh, where L had never eaten, and she loved it. We picked up some soup and canned veg for the canned food drive at the event, and then made our way to Gyldenholt/Lyondemere Yule.

The event was a lot of fun. Feasting, dancing, Father Christmas, a snowball fight (with balled-up white socks), and good friends. Afterwards, we came home and collapsed into bed.

This morning I made breakfast burritos and would have brought them to Ken in bed, but he snuck out before I was finished. Then I threw a load of laundry in and dove into proofreading the Dragon’s Tale. That felt like it took forever, largely because I tend to cock the papers at an angle to mark them, and then leave them that way, so a sore neck was imminent. And because I had to then scan each page and convert it to a .pdf.

After that, I immersed myself in copy editing. Uff da. I was happy because I discovered that two of the articles were short book reviews. Then I logged onto the website to check some information and realised there were still three articles I didn’t know about, that had to be done with this set. So instead of one final article tomorrow, I was facing a total of four. So I did one after the book reviews.

Meanwhile, Ken’s been working on our UK taxes. Our horrible, terrible, incompetent accountants in the UK have screwed things up every year, and this year they’ve done a doozy. I don’t feel like going into it right now. Suffice to say that they think we owe something like twice as much as last year, despite all the time Ken spent travelling out of the UK _and_ the fact that we moved back three months before the tax year ended. They seem to think we made gobs more money than we did. So he’s been fighting with that all day, pretty much. Bless his heart, he did throw in more loads of laundry and put some of them away. I surfaced only to make tuna fish and avocado pittas for a late lunch.

Now it’s nearly 10:30, and I haven’t got enough sauce for the planned pasta for dinner. I’m feeling the need to be bad and reward ourselves for all our hard work by ordering pizza…

Ah. We were good and cooked lowfat chicken breasts stuffed with cheese and broccoli and ham. I’ve already eated a mound of fresh broccoli with dip, so this will suffice.