Holiday season

I like the fact that my birthday falls when it does. I guess our "holiday season" actually starts on our wedding anniversary at the end of October, then November is my "birthday month," then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year's. Not that it's like a whole round of merriment and parties or anything, but it's a special time.

With my birthday generally falling right around (and sometimes on) Thanksgiving, I generally get a nice, long four day weekend, and I traditionally use it to regroup and recharge for the rest of the holiday season.

I didn't really do anything in particular this weekend -- I cleaned the house and did some knitting and read a couple of books and did a little Christmas shopping -- but that's sort of the point -- a long weekend to do basically nothing.

We had intended to go out to dinner for my birthday on Wednesday night, but after having gotten so sick last weekend, I was a little hesitant to go out and eat a big meal. And then we got the first snowstorm of the season on Tuesday night, and it was a doozy. So it was just as well that we didn't have any plans. I stopped at the store on the way home from work and bought French bread and cheese and a chocolate pie, and we made fondue, but even that (and even the chocolate pie!) didn't taste very good to me, so I was even more glad that we hadn't bothered to go out.

We had a nice day at my parents' on Thursday, and my mom's cooking was wonderful, as always, but I still didn't have much of an appetite, so it was easy not to overeat.

Thursday afternoon I finished the poncho that I'd been knitting, and was able to try it on and show my parents and my sister; I sat down and started fringing it (wrapping the yarn around a Prevention magazine from my parents' coffee table), but I ran out of yarn and had to order another skein when we got home, so I wasn't able to completely finish it. When we got home, after I ordered the yarn to finish the first one, I started another one. The first one was kind of a practice one, using yarn that I had already knitted once (a shawl) and ripped out. I wasn't to be sure I liked the pattern (which I kind of made up, using several sources) before I committed new yarn to it.

And hey, who couldn't use another poncho?

At our weekly meeting this morning, when we went around the circle and told what we did over the weekend, I said, "I finished knitting a poncho," and the general reaction was "You knitted a poncho??"

I finally made it to 50 books on my list, and while I think I started the year with the goal of reading 100, I think that's probably an unrealistic goal. 50 books is about one a week. There are weeks when I read more than that -- it looks like I read twelve books in February, or three a week -- but one a week is probably about right. This summer I didn't read much at all--just a couple of books a month--but I was involved in setting up the new computer, among other things.

Anyway, not that it matters, I just do like to keep track.

I went to the library on Saturday and just wandered through the Mystery aisles, something I haven't done for a long time. I was specifically looking for mysteries with a Christmas theme, and I picked up several. I'm not really a "cozy" reader, but once in awhile, I get in that mood, and I seem to be there at the moment.

Yesterday I read Murder Among Us by Jonnie Jacobs, an author that I hadn't heard of before, and I really enjoyed it. It's a "suburban" mystery, and very well written. I've requested the three other books in the series from the library, and am looking forward to reading them.

So anyway, a very low key, quiet weekend, just exactly what I needed, I think. We did go out to dinner on Saturday night with some friends, and that was nice, too.