It's Boxing Day, dear friends, and Lloyd and I are home, tired but happy. After three days of mewling and puking over whether we would be able to get out of town, a day of High Intensity Christmas Eve Dinner Preparation and 2 1/2 days of lounging about on my parents' comfy sofas, reading, knitting (or trying to) and watching Do Not Adjust Your Set for hours at a time, I am now so relaxed that I almost -- almost -- don't mind the prospect of heading back to LuthorCorp in the morning.
While relaxing holidays are the stuff of which dreams are made, they do not exactly make for scintillating reading, so I will refrain from the minute-by-minute replay, which can only induce tryptophan levels of doziness. Rather, I will keep it concise and snappy, PowerPoint-style, as I recap The High Points of the Weekend:
- Anticipating a two-hour trip to Penn Station on the first day after the strike, only to make the whole trip in 20 minutes.
- Spending two hours on a pair of speedy, silent, sun-drenched trains.
- Seeing the look on Lloyd's face as he opened his Christmas present.
- Seeing the look on Lloyd's face as I opened mine.
- Being my mother's sous-chef for our Christmas Eve dinner, and turning out what might be the closest thing to perfect pecan pie I have ever made, and probably ever will.
- Catching my parents' cat trying to steal pate off the cheese platter, scaring him away after he had only licked the pate, and thus being able to coin the phrase "cat-lick pate," which we all said as many times as we could over the course of the weekend.
- Baking cookies with my mom on Christmas Day.
- Eating cookies into a state of oblivion on Christmas Night.
- Slowly driving Lloyd mad by asking him if I had gained any weight every time I ate a cookie.
- Slowly driving Lloyd madder by announcing that I was legally changing my name to Enormous McVastbottom every time I ate a cookie. (He didn't think much of this, so I suggested changing it to Large McCookieconsumption instead. I am *this* close to reducing him to a gibbering paste.)
- Opening what my stepdad called "the interactive Christmas gift": Lloyd and I were given a small wrapped package and a pair of tote bags, and told to open everything together. The small wrapped package was an Eyewitness Travel Guide to Boston. Lloyd's tote bag contained a photo of a jet. My tote bag contained a Monopoly hotel. Thus did we learn that my parents gave us a weekend at the Parker House, with tickets from New York to Boston on the Jet Blue shuttle. I'm still trying to find the words to describe how excited I am about this, but I keep getting stuck on "wow."
- Returning home on a fast train and an even faster cab ride, courtesy of the fastest, smoothest, most professional cabbie in New York City.
- Firing up my email and learning from a dear friend that the topic of the 2006 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery practically demands that I attend.
- Firing up PTMYB and knowing, once again, that I have the best friends in the world.