The Update, Part 2

So in the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I have been working a lot (no surprise there). Other activities however have been attending a two day seminar in San Jose about management, a cookie baking party, having early Christmas dinner with my mom, going to the track to bet on and watch the ponies, and updating my home entertainment system from standard to HD.

The two day seminar was fun and informative. I learned a lot and hopefully it will help me out with time management issues. December for accountants with calendar year closes are crazy. I hope that things will calm down for me by March. Then I can really get out there and do some serious hiking/waterfall chasing and perhaps some other outdoors activities.

I have been a bit of a Scrooge this year. In fact, it has been the first year in my life that I haven't had a Christmas Tree. I guess that is what working all of the time does to you - it totally gets you out of the Christmas spirit. For a girl that really enjoys Christmas normally, it has been completely uncharacteristic of me not to be in the spirit. So it is with many thanks that I give to my good friend Vivian for calling me on my Scroogeiness and getting me to have my traditional cookie making party. I have to say that I had a lot of fun once I got in to it. We had some bad cookie mojo in the beginning of the day but once we started with the spritz cookies we were cooking with gas! The cookies were tasty and the company was good as always. We even tried to help Vivian pick some baby names (yep, she is pregnant). It was a fun time!

This year it was decided to meet in the middle for our gathering for Christmas with my mom. We met at the Outback in Santa Rosa. It was good to see her and she kept up with the parent tradition of passing many small boxes of my old stuff to me :-) It was good to see her and it made me realize that I don't visit her enough.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Louis and I met up with one of his buddies and his girlfriend over at Bay Meadows race track. I have been wanting to go to the track for quite some time now to bet on the ponies. I had a blast. I used to watch it on television when I was a little girl. I am not sure why but something about it was very interesting to me. I guess it is because all little girls want horses when they are little - they just love horses. Needless to say, now that I have been once I will be looking forward to live racing coming back to my local track. They come back in Feb so I have something to look forward to this coming year!

The big present this year for the household was to update our front room TV to HD. We replaced the TV (from a 42' plasma to a 46' HD LCD), the receiver (had to have the hdmi ports), the DVD player (picked up a Toshiba HD DVD player), and the direct tv DVR box (an HD box). We have yet to upgrade the dish but that should be done by the middle of Jan. In addition to that we scored a Playstation 3 (the most elusive of Christmas items) and picked up a REL T series Sub Base Module (so good it can't be called a subwoofer). It is one sweet setup. We can watch blu-ray or HD DVD and the picture quality on both is amazing. It makes you stare in wonder.

That brings me up to last night and tonight. Both nights we had the special holiday menus at the two restaurants we went to. Today we were supposed to go to SF and have brunch at the Palace hotel but plans fell through and we ended up at the Bay 223 restaurant in the Hotel Sofitel. It was a really good meal. Last night we tried the Left Bank for the first time for their special holiday dinner menu. It was okay. Nowhere near as good as tonight's meal though. So we had a French food Christmas this year.

That brings us up to date with my adventures. Next on deck is a trip to the snow next Saturday. I am not sure if I will end up snowboarding, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating, skiing, or tubing yet but I will be in Yosemite at Badger Pass ski resort. I am dragging one of my friends to the snow day. Hopefully a couple more folks I know will go as well but we will see!

For now, Merry Christmas and good night!