Jolly Holidays!

I hope everyone had a merry Christmahaunnakwaanzakaa!

Cory and I had a nice, relaxing, stress-free Christmas with Zoe... we went to a movie (The Day the Earth Stood Still. Don't bother.), ate Chinese food (an O'Dizzle tradition), opened presents (Thanks for all the good stuff!), talked to family on the phone, and that pretty much covers it. Nice and uneventful. We both worked the next day, so we went to bed early.

On Friday after work, we headed to Orlando. Cory had a pair of Universal Studios passes that had to be used by the end of the year, so we spent my birthday at Universal and Islands of Adventure.

I had a very child-like birthday, really. We went to IKEA in the morning, and had breakfast while we were there. I had a gigantic slice of "Chocolate Overload" cake for breakfast. After I got all hopped-up on sugar and chocolate, we spent the day at the amusement park.

We've been to Universal a few other times, but never during peak season. Once was on a weekday in January, the other time was a weekend in July when it was about 95 degrees out. This time, the park was packed. Lines for most of the rides (or the good ones, at least) were in the 90-minute range.

So we found other ways to have fun...

We'd been in the park for about fifteen minutes and were trying to figure out when the next showing of the "Terminator" attraction was going to be. All of a sudden, the Simpsons rolled up in a big, yellow, cartoony RV. It took some arm-twisting to get Cory to get in a picture with them, but I think he secretly wanted to do it. It doesn't look like anyone's forcing him to smile. Plus, Homer gave him the thumbs-up.

I could not, however, get Cory to pose with the Cat in the Hat.
I tried.
When I walked up to the Cat in the Hat, he gently grabbed my face and planted a smooch on me. The person in the cat suit even made a little kissing sound when he did it. I got another kiss when Cory took the picture.

We took plenty of other photos with our cell phone cameras, but those are my two favorites.

All in all, it was a pretty fun day. The weather was beatiful, we managed to get onto a few rides, and best of all, we didn't have to pay park admission, so that made it even better (Thanks, Fox-4!).

The stockings were ripped open by the kitty with care

Merry Christmas from Zoe!

Jolly Holidays!

O, Tannenbaum

You might think that lighting a palm tree would be easy. After all, you don't need to contend with stiff, cold fingers, freezing rain, or leaning on an icy ladder.

You do, however, have to dodge the spikes. See, before a leaf on a palm frond becomes a leaf, it's a razor-sharp spike... much sharper and pointier than any pine needle. And they hurt like a bitch when they stab you.

Was it worth it? I don't know. The tree looks cute, sure. And it's nice to finally decorate for the holidays for the first time since we moved to Florida. But we finished with the tree an hour ago and my hand is still sore from getting stabbed repeatedly by an angry tree.

Speaking of Christmas, our little Zoe is now an internet celebrity. Sure, she's made plenty of appearances on our blogs. And she's had her own MySpace page for nearly three years now. But now, she's visible to all of Southwest Florida on the "Fox-4 Rising" website. When your daddy is the web coordinator at a TV station, he can make things like this happen.

By the way, the little Santa hat is photoshopped in. She'd never be patient enough to let us put a real hat on her!

A Very Skinny Christmas...

A confession-- We have a Charlie Brown-ish Christmas tree. I bought it for $30 at Target six years ago. It's about 6 1/2 feet tall, and maybe three feet across. But when you've lived in apartments most of your life, and have WAY too much stuff already crammed into it, an anorexic tree is the way to go.

The other nice thing: You don't need to buy many ornaments when your tree has an eating disorder. I bought a few packs of ornaments when we got the tree and re-painted a little tin tree-topper.

This year, I bought some fake poinsettia flowers, some little gold pears, a couple packs of gold jingle bells, and some weird gold foliage. voila! The tree is done.

It's pretty pathetic compared to some of the trees we had at the Festival of Trees. On the other hand, I wasn't working with a $500 minimum budget like those tree designers were!

We also bought some lights to put on our palm tree outside. Depending on how that turns out, I may post some pictures of that, too. Stay tuned.

Take a deep breath

Sigh.

The last few weeks have been insanely busy. Between preparing for the Festival of Trees, trying to find a dress and shoes to wear to our Gala (Failed miserably with the shoes. I have a blister on the top of one of my toes. How does that even happen?), catching up on a week's worth of work, attempting to figure out what kind of insane accounting system our folks used at checkout, and delivering expensive, fully-decorated trees, I'm pooped.

And guess what? Christmas is in less than two weeks and I have to start wrapping presents.

Fortunately, I always have a helper when it comes to wrapping:

Seriously. Could she be any cuter?

I've finished most of my shopping for my parents. I've barely started shopping for Cory.

I keep trying to fall back onto the fact that I paid for half of the suit that he bought to wear to our Gala... But I still have to get him something, and I'm kind of at a loss.

Maybe Zoe can think of something good. She seems to be more ready for Christmas than I am.