Ho Ho Ho

And all that kind of stuff.

We have had a very nice Christmas so far, though. We watched a traditional holiday movie on Sunday night, Die Hard. Yippee Ki Yay. Then yesterday we drove down to Ventura for the traditional family Christmas Eve festivities, complete with the traditional turkey dinner and exchanging of gag/white elephant type gifts. Both James and Katie were able to come and it was really nice being able to see both of them. I think everyone had a good time even if Linda's house was pretty well trashed by the time we were all done!

We didn't have much planned for today, no cooking of holiday meals for me, thank you very much. We had talked about going to IHOP for breakfast, something we did the last couple of years, but thought maybe we'd try someplace else and drove to Milt's thinking they never close, but whaddya know, they were closed. Denny's didn't sound all that appetizing but we seemed to remember having a Christmas breakfast at Coco's once, so headed over there to see if they were open. Which they were. We feel kind of bad because we were once weekly regulars at our local Coco's and since our finances have taken such a beating the past few years haven't been going out to eat very often. The waitress remembered us as did the manager, though, and we had a nice but overly filling breakfast. Our waitress was saying that most of her customers had been extra cranky this morning and extra cheap on the tip giving. Which waitresses are taxed on whether they get a tip or not.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you can afford to go out to eat YOU CAN AFFORD TO LEAVE A DECENT TIP! And if you can't afford to leave a decent tip, go to McDonalds where you don't have to tip, you cheap bastards!

We left a $10.00 tip. It's Christmas people! And nobody has ever gotten rich being a waitress.

We decided we are going to start a new holiday tradition of driving around town and looking at empty store parking lots. I always feel like it's the end of days and zombies are going to start chasing our car when I see empty parking lots and not much traffic on the roads.Very eerie out there, but tomorrow will be business as usual with full parking lots and people out spending money again.

Funny Kitty

This basket with a bunch of recipes torn out of magazines in it (not that I'll ever cook any of those recipes, just look at the pictures) has been sitting on the filing cabinet for weeks now because I *was* going to clean it out, but you know how that goes. Anyway, Mimi discovered it yesterday. She was trying to climb into some other plastic baskets filled with my new paper boxes and mini notepads and I kept shooing her away so she found this basket to climb into instead. The paper crinkling noises were almost as satisfying as the merchandise crinkling noises were.


She sat in there for a little while and got bored and went off somewhere else.

Then today back into the basket she goes. Keith said that we should go buy her a basket of her own and put some paper in it but you know if we did that she's just totally ignore it and then we'd have another basket of paper sitting around.



Kind of a tight squeeze there, kiddo.


But even with her rear end sticking out the back it was a good place for a little nap.

Keith did get home late last night, about 11:30 and then we talked for a while and finally went to bed around 1:30. He took a shower and then started to take one again this morning because he was forgot he had already taken one last night. More on his trip and how his mom is doing later.

We went to get some breakfast this morning at Coco's because we have no food in the house at all, not even a salmonella filled egg, and we had coupons that expire tomorrow for a buy one get one free entree over there, so one of us got a free breakfast. We haven't been out for breakfast in a long long time (no money) so it was a nice change of pace and pretty darn tasty. Very crowded though, so somebody still has money for breakfast out either that or everybody else was using up their coupons.

And now Keith is napping and I'm editing pictures on the computer, I'm redoing the shop pictures yet again because I'm bored with how boring they look.