Happy New Year!

May the year to come be better than the one now passing (hey, I believe in setting the bar low).

Merry Christmas!

Unless you celebrate Channukah, in which case, Happy Channukah! Or you could be like my family, celebrate both, and host a Channukah-celebrating dinner on Christmas Eve. We are, it's safe to say, very festive here today. Well, whatever you celebrate, have a good one!

Thanksgiving

I have to admit, I'm not exactly a bottomless pit of thankfulness these days. It's been a rough year and an even rougher fall. And I'm certainly not alone there because I know things are tough all over and there are a lot of people a hell of a lot worse off than me right now. So I thought I would try to make a list of things (and people) that I'm thankful for this season.

• My wonderful family, without whom I would be even more of a wreck than I am right now. I've been spending a good amount of time wishing my parents lived a few hundred miles closer, but they're still there for me and my grandparents are close by. I'm a very lucky girl.
  
• My job, complete with a totally understanding boss and coworkers I like. Also, the fact that I hadn't used up my days off before this shit began.
  
• Having the money saved to hire an exterminator (or two, if my next/fifth visit doesn't solve the problem).
• My roommate's mother, who is yet another person on the list of people who have done all they can to help me deal with this bed bug nightmare.
• The fact that the people I love are, if not all in great health, all still around and kicking.
• The fact that Thanksgiving means I'm getting out of my not-presently-much-loved apartment for nearly three days and will instead be spending time with people I adore somewhere where I can actually sit on the couch.

I hope you all have a fantastic, refreshing holiday filled with all kinds of good things.

Happy New Year!

Definitely not my favorite holdiay, and my plans aren't exciting of anything, but I hope you all have a good one.

Merry Christmas!

These foxy folks...

...and these rather elderly elves...
...would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas filled with only the best sorts of things.

Even if you do spend Christmas eating Chinese food...

And remember, this should not be a metaphor for your holiday season...

...so be sure to enjoy yourself. :)

Decorations Everywhere

So while my Christmas shopping has rather stalled--I like giving people gifts but hate the actually shopping which I'm no good at--but I have been wandering about trying. Today, after leaving work, I walked up 5th Avenue wandering among the tourists. Now I realize that tourists are supposed to drive New Yorkers up the wall at this time of year, and I admit that I avoid Times Square like the plague--although I pretty much do that the rest of the year as well--but I totally get where the tourists are coming from in December. New York City is pretty much the best place in the world at Christmas time. Yes, it's super-commercialized, but it's also beautiful and there's music and dancing and magic everywhere. It was like a wonderland when I was a kid.

So anyway, I walked up past Saks, and while I wasn't interested in waiting in line to see their fabulous windows, I did get few photos.

And one of my favorite decorations, the star hanging over the center of 5th Avenue.

Needless to say, the decorations in my house are a little less flashy. Several of the ornaments on the tree were gifts from my mother, and I love them because they remind me of my family's tree. Also, my roommate and I have somewhat different taste in ornaments--hers being flashier than mine--so I'm glad to have a few homier ornaments.

Made with volcanic ash from Mt. St. Helen's--gift from my sister

One of a couple yarn cat ornaments--they have to go up high because Bonnie thinks they're toys.
Snowmen are a big Christmas theme in my parents' house.

And just to end with something totally unrelated, here is Pyramus happily hanging out in a rather too small shoe box that happened to be close to the radiator.

The Nutcracker

Wendy and I went to see the Nutcracker yesterday evening. Six o'clock start times are so not my favorite thing in the world, particularly since they mean I can't eat first. I mean, I understand that a lot of children go to see Nutcracker so they don't want it running too late, but honestly, if it's hard for me to get from work to Lincoln Center by six, I can only imagine that it's even harder for the many working parents who want to bring their kids to the ballet. I just don't get it. On the bright side, it does mean we got to watch Project Runway yesterday.

Anyway, the Nutcracker is lovely and all. Our tickets, as they were last year, were way up in the 5th ring, which is an odd almost vertigo inducing perspective (there's a picture below that might give you an idea). You have to lean forward against the railing in order to see the whole stage, and my hands kept falling asleep. Teach me to try and get cheap--aka within my budget--tickets long after they've gone on sale.

I tend to find myself a bit bored during the first bits. I mean, it's a lovely Christmas party with the dancing and the children and the toys, etc. but once you've seen it once, it kind of feels like a prelude to the real magic which is to come. For me, the delight of the ballet comes when the tree starts growing upward--although the 5th ring does ruin that particular magic a bit since you can see the hole from which the tree grows.

For the most part the ballet was delightful, and I actually felt, watching it, like I was seeing it differently than I had in the past. I felt like I actually have been learning something about watching in the past year. So that was nice too. Anyway, I particularly liked Alina Dronova as Marzipan and Megan Fairchild as Dewdrop. Dronova was full of vivacity and delight while Fairchild seemed to have the kind of clarity that a dewdrop would have. I also always particularly the candy canes with their hoops. Although I imagine most do. The only performance I was disappointed by, and unfortunately it was a big one, was that of the Sugarplum Fairy.

I'm sure that Teresa Reichlen, who danced the role, is usually a lovely dancer--I've never seen her before--but she wasn't good yesterday. While I was at a weird angle so it's sometimes hard to say, she appeared to be very unsteady at times. On at least one occasion it seemed like her cavalier, Stephen Hanna, had to catch her to prevent her from doing a face plant, and there were wobbly arms all over the place when she had to balance (I think I'm describing this correctly). Setting aside such obvious things though, I felt like her dancing lacked the authority, sureness, and grandeur that the role and music seem to call for. Well, I confident that she's been much better in the past and will be much better in the future. I sure don't do my job brilliantly every day. I mean, my boss walked up yesterday and I was totally watching the Gary Robert-Ben Eager fight on YouTube. So I can't point fingers.

Still, it was a nice night and we left the New York State Theater very satisfied. It was quite a bit colder when we left than it had been earlier that day and we rushed home feeling decidedly chillier than we would have hoped. It probably would have helped if either of us would have remembered to wear our hats that morning. Live and learn? Pay for your mistakes? Some other cliche? Oh well, unsurprisingly we survived.

Playing Santa

(More cellphone pictures today. I suck. I really must just keep my camera in my purse during the holidays.)

So my office does that thing where we get together in groups and buy gifts for a child who otherwise wouldn't get much of anything and my group is wrapping tomorrow so I made a run to FAO Schwarz today.
I'm not a big shopper, Christmas or otherwise, but I love going to FAO Schwarz. Even though they have a lot of the typical toys and a lot of things that are overpriced, I think they also appreciate the wonder of toys in a way that Toys 'R Us with their bargain bins doesn't. Their collections of classic toys show that, as do the too expensive for most to buy displays, which are often works of great imagination and craftsmanship.

And then there's the piano that you play by walking on it. If I'd had a child with me I'd so have waited on line for that.
Anyway, the child had asked for cars and, more generally, toys, and the other people in my group had taken care of the cars. So I wandered aimlessly, not quite sure what I would get. I found one toy that I was happy with, but wanted to get another as well and was having trouble finding just the right thing. And then I stumbled on a corner of the store devoted to Playmobil.

Now, in case you're not familiar with Playmobil, let me just say that their toys are totally awesome. They're well made, they encourage imagination, and they're just plain fun. One of my very favorite toys when I was little was my Playmobil Eskimo set, since discontinued and apparently rather difficult to find.
Our kayak wound up being rather interesting looking after I left it up against the radiator, melting a series of thin holes into its side. But we had the set for years and my sister and I certainly played with it a great deal. Of course we lost all the pieces eventually but it's still the toy I remember most fondly.

So when I saw that corner, I had to get him something from the company. I toyed with getting a few sets of knights, complete with cannons, prisoners, and flame throwers, but eventually decided to go with the transportation theme and bought the medical helicopter.

I'm so incredibly excited about the idea of the kid playing with this toy. I only hope he loves it as much as I loved my Eskimo set.

I then walked past the giant menorah lit up for the last night of Chanukah on my way back home, feeling about as good about the holidays as I've felt in a long time.
I'm not entirely sure what that says about me--I think nothing particularly good or bad--but still, it was a very good day.

Cavorting Santas

I'm not sure what's going on, but I really wish I'd had my real camera as opposed to just my cell on me today because there were Santas all over the place today, including a Jack Sparrow Santa and a Wonder Woman Santa (no pictures of those--sorry). I first saw them walking down 14th Street in Union Square, but on my way home I walked down St. Marks and they were all over the place.

My favorite group, though, was on Second, between 8th and 9th. They were standing in a circle singing, dancing, and hooping.


New York is so the best place in the world in December.

Tree Envy

So, until I had my own apartment I never once had a fake tree. My family always has carefully selected--and usually self-cut--real trees. To me a beautiful tree--and in my family's case a massively fat tree--pretty much is Christmas. But my roommate thought the cats and a real tree would cause problems and neither of us are actually home for Christmas so we figured it would die. Not having a real tree has made me a little sad the last couple years, but since I head up to Buffalo to spend the actual holiday with my family it was tolerable.

But this morning we woke up to fake tree needle filled vomit courtesy of the little genius on the left. So we figured maybe a spiky real tree would be a better eating deterrent than the not-so-spiky fake one. And besides, if she's going to eat the damn thing anyway, we might as well have the pleasure of a real one. Particularly since Wendy is only going to be away for three or so days this year. So off we went this morning and bought ourselves a real tree. It's tall and narrow but quite full and smells absolutely lovely. I am a happy girl.

What I'm Reading...

...or at least what I'm reading when not totally stressed out. Normally I'm totally chill about the holidays, but this year I somehow got behind the ball and can't get back in front of it. Yikes. Anyway, today was my company's "End of Year Celebration" which was a surprisingly pleasant early evening thing. And on a holiday side not, happy Chanukah to those who celebrate. As the atheist daughter of a Catholic and a Jew I grew up celebrating the holidays of both religions and I still take a great deal of pleasure in lighting my menorah, even if it is only because it's pretty.

But anyway, on to my reading material:

• Last week's New Yorker was particularly good, I thought. They had a piece on endogenous retroviruses called Darwin's Surprise that was just fascinating. I also had reason this week to revisit one of my very favorite New Yorker articles, Angels and Ages: Lincoln's language and legacy. I'm very interested in rhetoric and the way that slight changes can significantly alter tone and meaning, so this is very up my alley.

• Apparently Iran isn't feverishly working towards building nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad may be a whacko, but it seems that the country as a whole is behaving in a somewhat less crazy way. If Bush was capable of reconsidering his positions he'd probably have some thinking to do

• There's been discussion (debate even) in the hockey blogosphere lately about just what hockey blogs are for and how they should operate. The most recent round of discussion started with a post on James Mirtle's blog. That post inspired Pookie and Schnookie of Interchangeable Parts to examine their goals as bloggers with a series of very interesting questions and they've invited others to do the same. So far they have responses from Katebits of The Willful Caboose and Amy of Shots off the Crossbar, with more answers expected. It's an interesting topic to me not only because it relates not only to issues of access, methodology, and professionalism, but to the fostering of community and communication, something I consider to be among the most significant internet-related benefits in my life. (Edit: Heather B. has her responses up as well at Top Shelf.)
  

And now, I have some presents to wrap.

Thanksgiving

Spent the holiday in southern Pennsylvania with my father's side of the family as we've been doing for the last few years. It's always nice to get out of the city for a few days. And we spent a lot of time walking around on wooded paths.