I’m gonna make it through the holidays, I can feel it.  That might be overly optimistic, but things are looking good.  We don’t have any plans for NYE (a.k.a. our anniversary…) so we should be in for a quiet week.

Christmas was a bit busier than anticipated, thanks to some friends.  They invited us over for Christmas Eve, and I guess we didn’t embarrass ourselves too badly because they invited us back for dinner on Christmas Day too.  We had a good time watching the little ‘uns tear it up.  I think there were about eleventeen of them;  The buggers were moving so quickly it was hard to count them all.

As for the weekend?  Quiet and boring, just the way we like it.  Saturday we went shopping, which was much less stressful than the last time I tried such a foolish venture.  I nailed some pretty good after-Christmas bargains at the local nerd store, then we headed to one of our favorite wineries to wind down and enjoy the wonderful weather with a little picnic on their patio.  (Which has since faded considerably…  Saturday nicked 60 degrees, today will be lucky to hit 50.)  When we got back home I hit the biggest bargain of all, a new doggie door for Teagan.  (And Kane I guess, although so far he’s refused to use it.  And why should he, when he can just meow loudly until somebody comes and holds the flap open for him?)  Anyway, I’ve been seriously shopping for this one particular doggie door since we moved to CA.  For reasons I cannot fathom, they don’t stock the “extra-tall” patio door kind in the stores, only the shorter version.  This strikes me as a bit odd, since absolutely no patio doors around here fit the shorter ones.  I worked around this problem in the rental house by duct-taping a beer carton to the top of the one I brought from KC, but Donette labeled that some kind of decorating faux-pas at the new house, not to mention it wasn’t a particularly energy-efficient solution.  So, I’d had the correct size in my Amazon shopping basket for a year plus, patiently waiting for them to knock a few bucks off.  (The specific model I had picked out was exorbitantly expensive, at least in my book.)  Well, if it hadn’t dropped after a year, I was starting to get the feeling it never would, so I braced the checkbook and got ready to pull the trigger.  At the last minute, on a whim, I decided I should at least try good ol’ Craigslist, so I pasted in the model number.  What do you know, I actually got one match, and it was even in my city.  I went ahead and shot the guy an email, despite my “too good to be true” feeling.  A few quick emails later I was at his house, which was like a mile up the road from mine, picking up his nearly-new door for well under 1/2 the price I was just about to pay.  Ding Ding!  Heck I might go ahead and get that new lawn mower I need with all the money I saved!