Last night at The Raven (which I just can’t love – every time I go there, I am disappointed with the food and the regulars are dicks; we need a new place to hang out), I got bored and started to doodle. By the time we left, I had drawn our whole group:

the resemblance is uncanny

Starting from the top:

• Shan, wearing big earrings and reading a book
• Reilly and his chin scruff, playing the guitar
• Ed chewing on a straw
• Sharon, cheering for some reason
• The server who delivered my pizza (plus a hat, and steam)
• Me in my awesome Hello Kitty hat
• Josh and his mighty beard playing on his iPad-sized iPhone
• Miranda knitting
• Darren doing the helicopter with a piece of bacon in lieu of his penis

Oh yeah. I’m totally channeling Da Vinci up in here.

I RULE at Sunday!

Up at 9:30, mom called, 7 loaves of banana bread in the oven (two banana chocolate, three banana walnut, two plain), dishwasher going, kitchen cleaned – and it’s not even 11am. WHO’S AWESOME? I’M AWESOME!

Did you know that it’s very difficult to bake when you’ve got a near-obsessive compulsion to have clean hands? It’s true! I absolutely HATE having anything on my hands, and baking is not a tidy job. It’s why I can’t make anything that involves ingredient manipulation, like shaped cookies or pies – I’d have to touch the dough and I just can’t do that. Having sticky or dirty hands is so uncomfortable to me that it makes me panic a little, especially if there’s no easy way to get them clean. Ever see me fish ice out of my drink and rub it all over my hands? Yeah, that’s me with a desperate need to clean myself off. I’ve always had an aversion to being sticky, but I think I can pinpoint the moment it turned into a phobia: we were at Circle in Calgary, celebrating Yule. The candy was flowing fast and furious, and people had brought their children to the party. At one point in the night, we had to form a large circle and hold hands – and to my left was a small sticky child with a cold, who had, mere moments before, sneezed into his hands and wiped them off onto his pants. He was covered in crumbs and germs, and I had to hold his hand for what seemed like forever – it makes me shudder to this day; remembering the horrible sensation of icky sticky snotty child hand tightly clutching mine. It may have been a festive Yule, but a compulsion was born: clean hands, all the time, or a little piece of me dies inside.

My other phobia – and this is an actual phobia; if it happened for longer than 3 seconds every two months I would scream out loud – involves hair dryers.

I am off to shower! It’s time to finish my Giftmas shopping!

ninjamas!

We didn’t have a tree up Lastmas, because we had just moved in (one year ago today!) – but this year, it is crazy festive all up in here:

treeeeeee!

We decorated with ninjas, Olympic mascots, my Mighty Ugly hockey, and secret Domos:

slurpees are festive

It’s been a busy couple of days around here. Last night was my office party, which was a blast – I wore the Kermit Dress, it was so green. Today was the kid’s party in Stanley Park, riding the Bright Lights train in the rain. It was my first time on the train, so I had fun even though it was friggin’ cold and wet. Trains are awesome, and there was a bear on stilts:

let him love you

Tomorrow I will bake a multitude of banana breads, finish my Christmas shopping, and possibly take a nap or two. I’ve got a busy week ahead (but less crazy than this past week), but I’m looking forward to getting some work done (the raise and booze I got on Friday likely has something to do with my sudden work ethic). Then .. Friendmas! And Foodmas! And a mini vacation – I’ve got a 5-day weekend over New Years that I plan to put to good use. I don’t know what that is yet, but I have grand aspirations and nothing on my plate – the very best kind of time off!

Yeah, it’s been a little scandal-free around these parts lately – I’ve actually been too busy to get into any trouble. Also, there’s nothing really hilarious going on. Things are just super, which doesn’t make for exciting times – I’m happy, conflict-free, enjoying my life, and have 14 litres of Diet Coke in the house. I may never need to put pants on again! Except I will, because I kind of miss my friends – feels like I haven’t seen them in seventeen years. We’re having Brunchmas at Sparta on the 25th and dinner in Railtown, but I hope there will be Hanging Out before then.

she can see into your soul >:E

In the end, every single wish from the tree was fulfilled. It took six people to load up all the gifts, and multiple extremely laden trips to deliver them all to the mom, who was beside herself with tears and gratitude. I may have choked up a little. For all the stressing and worrying I did, everything came together beautifully in the end. My coworkers are awesome at giving!

:}

After tomorrow at 5pm, I can stop worrying about other people and begin to worry about MY people. The Ninja Tree will go up this weekend!

I’m a festive ho ho ho!

When I got to work this morning, there were four snowmen on my desk.

The fact that there are snowmen on my desk is not the issue. The real problem is that when I left the office last night, there were only two snowmen on my desk. They are multiplying. Hide your carrots.

Truthfully, I am not that alarmed – the snowmen were accompanied by a penguin and a bear. I still have not caught up on my sleep and am barely functioning, so it might be that all of this didn’t really happen – but I’m pretty sure it did, and I’m amused as all hell that this kind of thing is relatively normal over here.

It’s Fancy Times in the office today – there are photographers about taking pictures of the office and some of the staff. They want to update our website to show that we have a fun, vibrant, diverse place to work so certain people were asked to dress a little better than we normally do (we work in IT – all hail jeans and t-shirts [concert tees for the sysadmins; software swag tees for support]). I’m a little cranky about it, though – neither me nor my desk were asked to be a part of our new image. I am offended, because I have the most awesome desk in the company:

I suppose I can somewhat understand my personal exclusion in the pictures (even though I am the walking definition of “diverse, vibrant and fun”) – when someone tells me to “dress up a little”, I inevitably show up looking like a French prostitute circa 1882. Since we sell the internet and are not a brothel, I guess I can forgive the slight. I hate my face and the universe a little less today, so I will tell myself that I am just too awesome (and busty) to be featured on the website (instead of the usual “you can’t market Mama Cass” song and dance).

Know what I miss? I miss parties.

these were some good times

I woke up so far on the wrong side of the bed this morning I can see the Atlantic Ocean outside my window. I feel as though I should post a warning sign on my cubicle: “Stupid questions will be met with bodily harm and foul language”. I hate feeling like this – there’s nothing wrong; I just hate the universe right now. And my face. The universe, and my face.

I need sleep and a hefty shot of holiday cheer.

I’m about to take a bath with one of these:

I am afraid for my urethra.

This is about as coherent as I feel right now:

i can't tell if this doesn't make sense, or if i am too tired to get it

I am exhausted and chicken-like, but things are great. I’ve spent most of the day organizing the presents people have brought in for our adopted family, which is for happy times – and the kitchen has been stocked with holiday treats all day. I need the sugar to keep myself awake for the next two hours, at which point I will go home and collapse and possibly not move until Wednesday arrives.

Shit, who’s the idiot who scheduled me for a 2-hour training session at 3pm? Fucker. (It was me. I HATE me.)

This has been my favourite song for the past year, and the video kind of makes me weak in the knees and fluttery in the loins:

Incidentally, it’s @astronautalis‘ birthday today and you should say hello to him on the Twitters.

That is all.

It was a busy weekend around these parts, ham-packed with activity.

On Friday night, we wandered down Robson street:

the top of the ice rink at Robson Square

OH GOD WHY

I got a haircut:

this isn't where i got my hair cut, but it's a cool sign

Went to the One of a Kind Show with Miranda, where I bought the MOST AWESOME BAG EVER:

this lamp was not one of a kind; there were several and they should have given me one

Birthday hanging out at Darren’s, a beer at the Black Frog, then a late night dinner at Wild Rice before our Groupons expired completed our Saturday. On Sunday, I woke up with a terrible pseudo-hangover that could only be cured by breakfast at Deacon’s Corner. Afterward, we attempted to BLOW CHRIS’S MIND:

chris has olympic fever

getting cozy with the locals

caught the sunset on the way down Cypress Mountain

i live here!

After impressing Chris with our ability to drive north for 10 minutes and be in the mountains, we showed off by driving south another ten minutes to be at the beach:

sunset at ambleside park

pier pressure (get it)

A jerk chicken salad for dinner, hockey on the TV and cats all over the place wrapped up our excellent Sunday – Optimus Prime approves:

transform and be awesome