I decided I was going to be on vacation for a few days for Christmas. I did such a good job staying out of the office, I'm starting to get emails from people asking if I'm dead. Fret not, good people. I'm still here!

Mr Moo and I kept ourselves very busy over the holiday. And when we weren't busy, we worked very hard at doing lots of nothing. We finished up our baking on Christmas Eve. When we stay home for Christmas, like we did this year, we bake cookies for the neighbors. This time, instead of just our five immediate neighbors, we decided to leave cookies and a card for everyone on our street. That's 23 boxes of cookies total when you add in one for the mail lady and one for the garbage dudes. That translates into about 63 million cookies. My oven was begging for mercy by the end. We finally delivered them all at 0100 in the freezing rain and snow. Mr Moo was thrilled about that. Not. We had a few neighbors we've never met before stop by to thank us in the morning, which was nice. Being neighborly is what it's all about. We did have one bizarre incident. Someone (we're not sure who) opened the card, rummaged through the cookies and returned everything to our doorstep with no explanation. My first guess was they were confused and thought they were for us instead of from us since we wrote our address along with our names in the card. After I noticed they rummaged through the cookies, however, I now wonder if they just didn't want them. If that was the case, why return them and not just toss them? Weird.

Christmas Day was very quiet. Since the weather was still kind of bad, my in-laws decided to postpone the family get together until Saturday. Mr Moo and I had already bought a small turkey to cook sometime this weekend so we cooked it on Christmas Day instead. We had dinner just the two of us and spent the rest of the day/evening camped out on the couch watching the brain rot.

Since we had been trapped in the house for days because of the snow and my broken car before that, we never got a chance to do any Christmas shopping. Friday was the day. We were pleasantly surprised to find the stores weren't nearly as bad as we thought they were going to be. The sales weren't very good either, but what can you do? We managed to get all of our shopping done in one grand trip and were home before the afternoon was out. I spent the rest of the evening making a pie and wrapping all the gifts for Saturday.

Saturday was Mr Moo's family's gathering. We went to his parents' house for prime rib dinner, which was most excellent. I received many nice gifts, but it was Mr Moo's dad (aren't dads usually the hardest ones to shop for?) who made out most like a bandit. He was sitting on one end of the couch and all of his presents filled the rest of it. We brought Josie with us and she sat in his lap for most of it, but eventually got tired of not getting enough attention from him and went to take a nap in a giant pile of wrapping paper. It was too cute for words and, of course, I didn't have my camera with me. Figures.

Yesterday was clean the house and get back to work day. I did several loads of laundry, washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen, picked up all over the house and, generally, did all I could to avoid doing any real work. I eventually ran out of excuses and finally sat down here in the office to work on some stuff, which I did much too late into the night. Still got loads to do today, too. Better grab a shower and get to it. Later, fishies.