this little life of mine

A bright and brilliant sunset this evening!

I was thrilled to see Meg is doing The Mayfly Project again this year. It's a simple, yet difficult concept: sum up your year in only 24 words. Here are my words, for what they're worth:

Work, work, furlough day, work … Halloween in San Francisco, wine tasting in Napa Valley, Atascadero & Avila Beach, adventures in Seattle, losing grandma.

It has been very , very cold here. That is all.

In my house Christmas Eve is defined by a good bottle of wine, a delicious light dinner and a viewing of It's a Wonderful Life.

I bought this Alpha Omega chardonnay back in October during the Rehab Napa Wine Tour and have been saving it for a special occasion. It's SO good!

This year mom and I went with a Surf and Turf theme with our dinner, and bougfht a couple frozen appetizers - bacon wrapped filet mignon and mini maryland crab cakes. They were yummy!

Merry Christmas!

Today I baked up some cookies for Christmas! Not from scratch, and not even from a box mix. Nope. These cookies came pre-made and pre-sliced, and were super easy!

I ordered these Red and White Cranberry Delight cookie dough from my co-worker's son who was participating in his school's fundraising program. I've ordered cookie dough from him before, a few years ago, but only got the frozen tubs of dough and it took me years to get round to dealing with them, and even then it was kind of a pain digging the dough out of the tub!

This year I really wasn't going to order any because of the pain-in-the -butt factor, but when I saw the pre-cut cookies in the catalouge I immediatly ordered them!  (I also ordered Double Chunk Chocolate cookie dough, but my dyslexia must've gotten in the way when I wrote out that order because I ended up with a tub, but whatever. I'll deal with that over New Year's!)

This pre-cut dought is awesome! Look at how easy and convenient this is; one layer of cookie dough fits perfectly on one parchment-paper-lined baking sheet, and since I have two baking sheets, I was able to get a lot of cookies baked at one time! It literally took me one hour to bake all 36 cookies!

And, yes, these cookies taste delicious, too! So, yeah, I'm a lazy bum and all, but I also have 36 freshly baked cookies to enjoy with a cold glass of milk (or some festive eggnog with nutmeg) and share with family for Christmas!

I got my Green Bay Packers stock certificate in the mail last night. I know some people think it's kinda silly - I'm not going to make any money off this stock purchase or anything, so it's basically just a really expensive souvenir, but I'm still very excited to be part owner of an NFL team!

It may look like this oak leaf is lying on cracked ice or maybe even a bed of diamonds, but it's not. It's lying on a pile of broken glass. Some knucklehead kicked in the side of the bus stop, shattering the safety glass and making a huge, annoying mess! Still, I got an interesting shot out of it, so .... a little good from the bad.

I'm not sure this gift would go over too well here on the Central Coast of California where we don't get snow, but I'm sure someone who lives nearthe mountains would enjoy it. I used to have a sled like this one and had a fantastic time racing down the hills when I lived in Cle Elum, WA. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time!

Well, our annual Toys for Tots campaign didn't do so well this year. I'm not sure if it's the economy or the fact that our usual Toys for Tots party organizer is out, but we ended up with only a handful of toys for the tots.

In past years we've made the charitable toy gathering a big party where we'd draw names of our coworkers who were each assigned a random child's age (for example: Lisa-Marie, age 12), and would buy a toy based on that. We'd wrap them up and having them sitting on the back counter for everyone to see (and wonder what it is!) until our party where we'd each open our "gifts" as well as have festive refreshments and listen to Christmas music.

This year, however, our party organizer is out, so we skipped the party and just bought toys to display on the back counter in the hopes that people coming in would see them and want to bring in toys as well. It's worked pretty well in the past.

I only hope it's enough.

Another sign for the art studio in downtown Paso Robles. I peeked in the window and saw they have everything from oil and watercolour paintings, sculptures, pottery and jewelry. It looks fun and I wish I'd had more time to go explore inside.