December is starting off with promise: it was only about 45 here today (which is "Chicago" mild, but "Texas" cold...), and there are rumors of a SNOW possibility tomorrow! But I'll believe THAT if and/or when I see it. (Of course, snow flurries in Austin are really hard to see... you have to squint, and tilt your head just so, and hope your porch light is casting enough of a reflective glow that the tiny little flakes are visible to human eyes. But hey, I'll take anything that even remotely reminds me of Christmas.)
Speaking of Christmas, I have finally begun my foray into cyberworld to search for Christmas gifts. I have ideas for about five people, which is a decent start, I guess. One of the problems with shopping online is that occasionally I'll stumble across the "perfect" gift, only to see a little note about how it's "backordered until the Mayan-predicted end of the world in 2012," and I realize I can never get it in time for Christmas. But generally, I find online shopping to be much less stressful than fighting the crowds at the mall. AND you can shop in your pajamas. They frown upon that at the mall...
So I have managed to drag myself out of bed before 5 a.m. twice this week, to get in a morning workout. And you know, except for the "waking up at a ridiculous hour" thing, I actually rather enjoy working out first thing in the morning. And it's definitely easier (at least the "exercising" part... I'm not sure about the "getting out of bed" part) to get in a decent workout in the morning, BEFORE I've spent all day at work and fought traffic to get home. Usually by the end of the day I'm so anxious to just GET HOME and throw on some comfy clothes and relax for a while, that the thought of changing into exercise-appropriate attire and hitting the treadmill is not at all appealing. But in the morning (or the "middle of the night" as I prefer to call it), the one thing that wakes me right up is a nice 45-minute walk/jog. And the best part is, I CAN throw on comfy clothes the minute I get home, and I don't have to feel guilty about it. :) I'm gonna try for another early morning tomorrow... we'll see what happens...
I watched the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree on television last night. It rather made me miss the northeast... I especially love New York at Christmastime. (Although we ARE heading up to Chicago for Christmas this year, so at least I'll get my "holiday in the city" fix... :))
Okay, how crazy is this -- I was just informed that it is 65 degrees in New York today! It's 65 in New York, and Austin is expecting snow... (maybe we really WILL get snow??) When I was in high school, a forecast for snow was cause for major excitment. And lucky for me, our area of New Jersey was hilly and full of small towns and crisscrossed with narrow, twisty, treacherous roads that could be dangerous in the middle of SUMMER -- much less the middle of winter when ice and snow made them slippery. So it didn't take a whole lot of snow to close the school down -- a few inches could suffice. (This was unlike my childhood in Buffalo -- which is a perfectly flat city with straight, right-angled roads -- where it would have to be near blizzard conditions before they'd free us from the confines of the classroom.) So as soon as I heard the words "possibility of snow" on the evening news, I'd start looking out the window every fifteen minutes to see if it had started yet... and then I'd wake up in the middle of the night and look outside to see if there was anything white on the ground. In the morning, as I was lying in bed, I could always tell if there was a chance of school closing by listening to the cars going by on our street -- our house was right on a very sharp curve, and when it was slippery, cars had to slow to a crawl to prevent sliding right off into the woods (something that happened many, many times :)). So if I heard slow-moving cars crunching over the snow, I knew I could switch on my radio (conveniently tuned to a station that announced school closings), and listen with bated breath as the morning host read the list of cancellations and two-hour delays...
But I can't get my hopes up about snow in Austin -- chances are whatever we get (IF we get anything) will stick around for about ten minutes before melting away into cold pools of icy water. And then the temperatures will climb back up into the 60s and 70s and we'll put this whole little wintery episode behind us...
Sigh... it was nice while it lasted... :)
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