11 posts tagged “christmas”
I'm pretty sure I'm getting an iPhone tomorrow. Like, I will get one, barring any unexpected meteors that might hit me on the way to get it.
We usually celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve (i.e., tonight) but this year, due to various things, we're celebrating it (gasp!) on Christmas itself. We're going to have a big Christmas meal around noon and then do presents and all that jazz. Should be fun!
A week from tomorrow I will be hopping on a plane (yay for free flights!) and spending about 45 minutes in the air between Gunnison and Denver. Pretty excited to be home without any homework or essays or exams looming over my head!
The holidays have officially begun! I started listening to Christmas music already (though I'm going to ration it and not overdo it, I don't want to be totally sick of it by Christmas) and my mind is way out in left field, far away from this Spanish paper I need to write and an Ethics paper I need to start.
I'm driving home to Denver on Tuesday after class, and on Thursday we're having the usual Thanksgiving festivities at our house. Mmmmm. Thanksgiving and Christmas are my two absolute favorite holidays of the year, so I'm wicked excited (Thanksgiving is centered around food and family. Christmas is the same, but with awesome decorations and cheesy music. So amazing.)
I just love this time of year though. When there's snow on the ground, Gunnison looks like a Christmas card and is ridiculously adorable. Denver isn't so shabby either. I live by a pretty fancy business park area that always does really cool lights, and driving through the rich neighborhoods is always entertaining. While it's insane and often annoying, I actually really enjoy going shopping during the holidays and everything is all crazy and insane-o. I love curling up in 3 layers of pajamas with a mug of tea when there's 5 feet of snow outside. I love waking up on the 24th and spending all day cleaning and cooking and getting ready for the evening's celebrations. We do everything on the 24th, with a big Christmas Eve dinner and presents. The 25th is usually spent doing absolutely nothing, though sometimes we go skiing or something.
Then after Christmas, it's....New Years. Ugh. I hate New Years, heh. I haven't had an enjoyable New Years since I was like 10. I always spend New Years either alone or as a third wheel along with a happy couple. Looks like it's gonna be the same this year, as I'll probably just hang out with my sister and her fiance.
UGHHHH back to this damn Spanish paper. I guess at least it's the last one I'll have to do for that friggin class. Thank god.
Yay Merry Christmas and all that jazz, even though it's a day late....been really busy the past several days, today was literally my first "day off" since I got home to Denver on Friday. I had a great Christmas though, hope everyone else did too! We had the family over for dinner and presents on Christmas Eve, as usual, then went skiing/snowboarding on Christmas day up at Winter Park. It was fun! I posted some other shit and pictures up at my LJ, and I'll probably have pics up on my Facebook sometime in the next few days/weeks/whenever I feel like it.
No real big "omg!" gifts this year, though I am finding it exceedingly painful to be IN POSSESSION OF Super Mario Galaxy and to have my Wii completely inaccessible until the 13th (or some date like that) when I go back to Gunnison. But, I guess I've waited this long for the virtual Wii sex that is Mario Galaxy, so I can wait a smidge longer, eh?
Speaking of Gunnison, it was brought to my attention that the new Alien vs Predator movie (or something, I don't have time to pay attention to shitty movies) "takes place" in Gunnison. After an alien spaceship "crash-lands in the forest outside Gunnison, Colorado," shit goes down and the townspeople get killed left and right and, I believe, a nuke gets dropped on the town. However, what amuses me the most is the "forest" that has moss all over the trees and is all foggy (hi, Colorado is dry. Moss? What's that?) Also in the trailer they show a shot of them dropping a bomb on the town, complete with dramatic aerial view from the plane. Only problem is the town looks to be several times larger than it actually is. Also, heavy rain in Colorado, especially the mountains, isn't all that common. It's not totally uncommon though, so I can let that slide, but still, AVP people, you fail. That is all.
Anyway, for some completely crazy reason, I don't yet have the 5th Harry Potter DVD, so I need to remedy that and get it at Target tomorrow. Along with Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Because, hi, it's Battlestar Galactica. With lesbians? Total win. What the FUCK with season 4 being pushed back to April though. That, and South of Nowhere, are really the only casualties of the WGA strike that affect me. Fuck you, giant TV networks.
Hehehehhehehehe. I'm in an extremely giddy/excited/good/motivated mood right now. It's probably the two cups of black coffee (I usually have it black with sugar, but I'm out of Splenda and have no other reason to go to the store since I'll be leaving in a few days, so all-black it is) I had this morning plus the GINORMOUS mocha I'm sipping right now. Also adding to the joy is the fact that my Spanish final this morning DID NOT EXIST. Because the prof "no cree en los examenes." Fine by me! Especially considering that I'll have her for pretty much all of my Spanish classes until I graduate. Which doesn't mean that all my Spanish classes are going to be easy, just that I won't have the end-of-semester freakout that comes with most classes. :D
I actually kind of like the ends of semesters. Even though they're totally wacky and zany, they're kind of...fun.
A week from today is Christmas! Well Christmas eve, but that's when we celebrate, so....:D I'm 94.27% sure that my parents got me Super Mario Galaxy, so now I have to decide if I want to take my Wii home with me...I suppose I'll see how my packing situation is and then decide. If not then I'll just play FF3 on my computer. Mwahaha!
K time to use this energy to study for philosophy and geology.
Yay for stress!! The past week has been delightfully full of unexpected bumps in the road, and it's getting everybody down, so the Lind Household isn't quite the place of joy that it should be.
My Grandpa had minor surgery a couple weeks ago and was in the hospital and my dad and uncle (his sons) want to put him in an assisted living facility permanently because he's starting to lose his mind and he just can't take care of himself. His "girlfriend" doesn't like this idea and wants him to move in with her so she can take care of him, even though she is obviously not qualified to do so. So she's basically making everybody's life hell and is getting out of control about it and it's a bad situation all around. The latest development is that my grandpa is moving back into his house, which is like 5 minutes from his lady friend's house, so he'll basically spend all his time there and she'll have gotten her way. :\
Some other stuff has happened but it's mostly just little things that, by themselves, wouldn't be all that horrible, but one after the other it just starts to add up and gets to be too much. I also freaked out about The Gay Thing yesterday and am still trying to recover from it, with not much success. Christmas went well though, it was a more Christmassy Christmas than I was expecting, though it still wasn't quite on par with Christmases past.
When will my relaxing winter break begin? I can't even focus on FFXII long enough for it to cheer me up.
I have, however, discovered this song, which is currently on Repeat.
This is a very un-Christmassy Christmas. We usually celebrate on Christmas Eve, everyone would come over late afternoon and then we'd have dinner, then presents and then have dessert and everyone would leave. Christmas morning my dad would make delicious pancakes and we'd all just hang out and fiddle around with our newly received goodies. Then my Grandma and Aunt Clara died and now Christmas has lost almost everything it meant to me as a child. :( My Grandpa just got out of the hospital today and is now at a "rehab center" (a nice way of saying "assisted living," which is a nicer way of saying "old folks' home"), so that combined with a lot of other crap going on, no one's heart is really in it this year. It doesn't even feel like Christmas at all.
In other news, I have way too many pictures and am just starting to sift through them all and decide what's worth uploading for all to see. I realistically won't get any up for several more days, so bear with me. Not that anyone really cares anyway, but I can tell myself they do.
But my moodiness aside, Merry Christmas to everyone, hope it is/was an enjoyable time. I'm excited to eat turkey and honeybaked ham tomorrow, and to get my new camera. And to start FFXII, because I haven't done so yet.
Thursday night I had the brilliant idea of actually -looking- at my plane ticket, and saw that it was for January 12, not December 22 (though that wouldn't have mattered much since the Dec 22nd flight was canceled anyway). The woman at the airline said I could try to get on standby for a flight every day until the 26th, when I could guarantee a spot on a flight. Um, no? So I did some freaking out and then calmed down enough to contemplate my options, of which there was only one: bus. So I packed up my goods, bought a bus ticket online and cabbed it over to the Greyhound station in a lovely part of Philadelphia. 40-some hours later I find myself completely sleep-deprived, disgustingly dirty and bored out of my skull, finally getting off the bus in Denver. On the plus side I got to drive through something like 8 states, most of which I'd never been to (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, West Virginia, Indiana, and probably some other state...oh and Colorado). I also got to see that eastern Colorado is exactly like Kansas: incredibly boring and flat. I got a laugh though when I saw a billboard advertising tours of Dorothy's house in Kansas. But anyway, if you ever have a choice to bus it or do ANY other form of transportation, don't bus it. Maybe I'm just an impatient snob, or maybe it was because I had already been traveling for two days and was already aching to be home, but it was not fun. Evil snow! Always raining on my parade.
But anyway, my parents picked me up and we came home so I could take a shower and put on some clothes that weren't alive with germs and stink. I got to see my doggie, I don't think she quite recognized me at first because she was a bit standoffish, but now she's fine and follows me around and stuff. We went to get Thai food for dinner which was delicious as always. It's weird to be home though, almost feels like I never left. My computer has all sorts of funky updates that it needs (helloooo there iTunes, when did you get so pretty?) and I have a lot of things to catch up on, like South of Nowhere season 2 that I FINALLY get to watch. Joy.
So yeah, that's it. Tomorrow is Christmas eve, which is totally weird because that's when we usually do everything, and this year we're not really doing anything. My grandpa is in the hospital because he has pneumonia and had to get minor surgery, and his lady friend is being a total nutcase about the whole thing and is trying to take over the situation, so that has my parents really stressed out. So he's going to be in the hospital for a couple more days, which means Christmas is just going to be me, Mom, Dad, Sarah and Patrick (Sarah's boyfriend), but I don't know what we're doing or when we're doing it. Christmas has always been about my Grandma Lind and Aunt Clara, and ever since they've died it hasn't been the same. This will be the second Christmas we've had without either of them, and last year we went on a cruise so it was weird and different anyway. This year is going to be way odd.
I feel like I have a lot to write about but I'm not really sure what.
Edit: After looking at how ginormous this post is, evidently I WAS sure what to write about...
Thanksgiving was pretty fun, though there was no stuffing or pumpkin pie (which is probably just as well because I'm überpicky with my stuffing and pumpkin pie and generally only like my mom's). We went out to a bar after that so I didn't get to sleep until late, then I had to wake up at like 4:30 or something to leave for Sevilla at 5:45. Sevilla was really awesome, I liked it a lot. It's in the southwestern part of Spain, about an hour or so flight (or something like that, I was so tired on both the flight there and the flight back that I was already asleep when the captain came on to talk about the weather and the duration of the flight). It was raining a ton on Saturday when we went to the big cathedral, and we were supposed to go somewhere else but it got cancelled. So after the cathedral I went to the bull ring with Rachael and Mikayla (not a bull fight, we just went on a little tour of the ring and there's a little museum type thing there) and that was pretty cool. Then we had lunch and went to...Starbucks! Naoooooooooo! That was the first time had Starbucks since I've been here :( Oh well. Then we went to a flamenco show that I didn't think I was going to be able to go on because I hadn't RSVPed when I should have, but I went anyway with no problemo. It was pretty cool I guess, I dunno, maybe I'm just not a huge flamenco person.
Then a bunch of us (me, Rachael, Mikayla, Jen and Melissa) walked around with Javi, Dani and Geno (the three ISA directors who were on the trip) and they took us to a bunch of tapas bars and we had some good eats and beer. Then we went to some big bar place and there were a lot of other ISA people there, so we met up with some of them and then went to a discoteca and stayed out until they kicked us out at like 6 or something. Somehow we found our way back to the hotel and had breakfast when it opened at 7, which was amusing cuz all the happy old people and families are in there and then there's me, Rachael and Mikayla laughing about eggs and chocolate donuts. Ah, good times. Then yesterday was pretty much a waste, we had to be out of the hotel by 1 and our flight wasn't until 5 so we just wasted time in the airport, then we didn't get off the bus from the Barcelona airport until like 8ish. Bleh.
After we got back I went to the Hard Rock Cafe with Ainslie and Amanda, which was awesome and horrible at the same time. The food was amazing, I had salmon on penne pasta and a margarita, but Amanda and Ainslie were annoying the hell out of me and I was tired and sick so that wasn't fun. They made friends with some creepy Spanish men and were going to go to a discoteca with them, so I just left and got some coffee with Ben and vented a bit and then just talked about nerdy things. I was so exhausted but when I went home I couldn't sleep because my throat was so dry and uncomfortable, so now I'm still tired and nasty feeling. I hate being sick. Though maybe now this will be a good reason for me to be a hermit for a few days and just sleep away the time until I can go HOME. :D
I'm going to be kind of sad though when I go home, just because most of the people in this program are leaving after this semester, and while I'm not a huge fan of a lot of them, it's still going to be sad. It's not like in grade school where most of the people will be back the next year, and while some people leave here and there, by and large it's the same crew of people for a long time. But I'll never see most of these people again, and that's just kind of sad. There's a handful of people that I will definitely miss :'(
In other news (oh yes, there's MORE!) I think I might possibly maybe be getting a Wii for Christmas, which makes me smile. I told my mom I also want a flatscreen TV and a laptop, and I think she's going to kindly tell me to go fuck myself. Oh well.
Oh and don't pay attention to the subject, it's a joke from this weekend that I find way too funny not to mention, so it's for my personal humor.
