It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... Home (and Christmas)
We juggle decorating for Christmas with settling in and getting our apartment situated... to surprisingly decent results.
Settling In
We've spent the majority of these first three weeks of December getting settled in... Rearranging furniture (and bringing in a few new pieces), figuring out where to put stuff, and adjusting to all of us living together full-time.
Lucky and Penny still have their moments of antipathy toward each other; but, they're doing quite well overall...
...And we're doing okay as well :)
Here's a shot from when I won Last Man Standing by the end of one of Jim Gaffigan's comedy specials a couple weeks back...
Riley Lied!
Way back during the first weekend of the month, Riley and my cousin Ava were begging us and Ava's parents Laura and Matt to coordinate a way for them to hang out despite the decent amount of physical distance between our houses.
Fortunately, Matt was able to bring Ava to us so that she and Riley could spend a few hours together at the Oxford Valley Mall. I hear that they both had a lot of fun together—and then Riley spent the following weekend at Funzilla with her friend Kassie—but, since she never blogged about it like she said she would, I suppose the world will never get to hear the tales of her exploits.
Tree-Huggers
Riley and I surprised Athennia by assembling the Christmas tree while she was at work one day last week: I lugged the box out of the closet and snapped all the branches into place, and then Riley went around and fluffed the Charlie Brown-level presentation into something actually worth having in our living room.
The code inspectors rolled through to double-check our work and give us the all-clear...
A few days later, Athennia had a screw in one of her tires that couldn't be repaired with a patch (so, necessitating a new tire altogether). So, she decided to say "screw it" and called out of work the next day... but woke up early anyway to bake two loaves of pumpkin bread for us to enjoy while we all lit and decorated the tree together...
One-Year... First-Dateiversary?
Mid-month, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our first date!
I treated Athennia and Riley to pizza, chicken tenders, French fries, and zeppoli from a local place called Bambino's, and then we watched The Jungle Book.
Ah, but that's ambigious; isn't it?
Was it the animated Disney version from the '60s? ...Or the 1994 live-action version with Jason Scott Lee, Cary Elwes, and a pre-Cersei Lannister Lena Headey?
Luckily, my little sister came up with a way around this back when we were kids: If you meant to refer to the live-action version, you denoted this by calling it "the real one." And, if you instead meant the animated Disney version, you said "the fake one."
Observe:
Hey Kel, you wanna watch Jungle Book?
The real one or the fake one?
Uh, hello? The real one, obviously.
Such a time-saver, and a very handy way to avoid misunderstandings.
My sister's answer to this was that, since the 1954 musical version of Peter Pan was complete trash compared to the Disney version in our five- and seven-year-old minds, the "real" and "fake" qualifiers got reversed for this one case: Despite being animated, Disney's Peter Pan was forever known as "the real one" due to its perceived superiority.
So, confuse the two at your peril! Or just avoid the confusion entirely by calling them the good one and the dumb one like we usually did :)
And anyway, all that is to say that Athennia, Riley, and I watched the real one.
Merry Qhristmas, Qdoba
We wanted to get our Qdoba friends Larry and Nai'mah something for Christmas since they always take such good care of us when we dine there.
We settled on a personalized cake and dropped it off (with a card) to Larry a few days ago...
...And, much to our surprise, he comped our entire meal in response! :D
Taylor and Lou
Taylor mentioned recently that she wasn't sure whether she would be spending Christmas in Connecticut with her girlfriend's family; so, we stopped to see her and Lou on the way home from Qdoba so that Athennia could drop off their presents.
Then we popped over to Julio's and grabbed some milkshakes for dessert...
One of Athennia's gifts to Taylor was a geneaology DNA kit from Ancestry.com—which she also got for Riley. And, since Taylor opened hers immediately upon receipt, it was only fair for Riley to get to do the same.
So, we sat there and watched her spit into the little tube, while imagining some distant relative of hers who's about to be outed after getting away with murder back in '68 and living comfortably ever since.
...All because Riley wants to confirm that she's 97.3% molerat ;)
Then we wound down with a couple episodes of Impractical Jokers... although we've also been going through the rotation of Christmas movies: Home Alone, Die Hard, and Muppets' Christmas Carol.
Athennia also wants to watch White Christmas sometime before "Christmas proper" arrives; so, we've penciled that in for tomorrow night.
A Merry Early Christmas
In the meantime, it feels like Christmas is already here...
Lou and Taylor have received and opened their presents...
Athennia's boss "reprimanded" her a couple days ago for being the only one at the company whose name he didn't see with any scheduled days off... Talk about a stress-free workplace! He actually insisted that she take some time off to be with her family for the holidays...
And, we even got a lovely gift from Amazon when the ~$100 corner shelf Athennia had ordered for our bedroom got delivered to the wrong address in her mom's neighborhood: The customer-service rep who answered Athennia's call acknowledged that this was no fault of ours, immediately sent out a replacement, and told us to "go ahead and keep the first one if it should turn up."
Well, don't mind if we do!
Taylor's girlfriend Ahlina walked two streets over and dragged the box back to Lou's for us; and, now that we'll have two matching shelves, I suggested that we put them in the corners of the kitchen and find something else entirely for Athennia's side of the bedroom.
Pictures will be forthcoming in due time once everything arrives and we have it all built :)