On the sixth day of Sockmas, my true love gave to me... one impromptu date night, reams of wrapping paper, tango shoes and shoe bags, four sock santas dancing, two moosies skiing, two cobalt bands and a loris in a pear tree!
Oh yes, a fabulous date night with dinner and dancing and dvds of 30 Rock! Mr. (W)right had a job interview in town Thursday morning, so I suggested he might feel more refreshed for the big event if he drove up last night and crashed at my place. He arrived midway through my private lesson with Nate, thus rescuing me from further torments of proper foxtrot form (e.g., bend your back in ways that god never intended human beings to contemplate moving! Now smile as you stare up at the ceiling and spin around leaning backwards!!) I dragged him into our first lesson together with Nate. We're doing West Coast for our wedding dance and Nate was ready to whip (ha ha - dance pun) us both into photogenic shape. Apparently, we should look at each other and smile.
After dancing, there was dinner and snuggling on the couch. Since my fella and I rarely see each other in the middle of the week given that ninety miles of freeway between us, it was a particularly tasty cherry on top of my Wednesday. And since he'll be thoroughly embroiled in finals by the time I go to visit this weekend, a nice calm before the storm to say our sweet nothings.
As an epilogue, the interview was three hours long, and was reportedly "bizarre, but promising." I don't know why Andrew thinks that men dressed in tutus chanting "All hail might ZUUL" while whipping him with limp spaghetti is bizarre, but we all have our quirks. Actually it was long and turns out that the interviewer for the biggest part of the screening is actually my old roommate's engineer friend! Small world.
On the seventh day of Sockmas, my true love gave to me... cat-nipped advent chocolate, one impromptu date night, reams of wrapping paper, tango shoes and shoe bags, four sock santas dancing, two moosies skiing, two cobalt bands, and a loris in a pear tree.
I've always loved Advent Calendars. They mix many of my favorite elements of life: teeny tiny surprises, little nibbles of sweets, and staggered simmering anticipation building to a roil after 24 days. When I was young, we had a full Advent ritual, with candles and reading and - eventually - chocolate from the calendar. Of course the chocolate was my favorite. I may have once snuck downstairs after bed time and ravaged my Advent calendar in a single evening... taking care to doggedly close all the little doors after me as if nobody would evernotice the dearth of chocolate or my potential hand in this.
Of course, I prefer dark chocolate to that milked down stuff they put in commercial calendars, so my mother brilliantly bought me both an Advent calendar and a bar of dark chocolate so I could substitute the little chocolates with my own. Of course, the cat rather liked the dark chocolate too, apparently. He managed scale some wrapping paper tubs and reach a bar on top of the book shelf. Fortunately he didn't have too long with the pretty foil, so ... only nipped. If I learned anything from his ongoing war on pistachios, no chances shall subsequently be taken. Like everything else in the home, the chocolate will have to go on top of the grandfather clock or in the fridge (the only two places he cannot reach yet)!
On the eighth day of Sockmas, my true love gave to me... eight blue bulbs, cat-nipped Advent chocolate, one impromptu date night, reams of wrapping paper, tango shoes and shoe bags, four sock santas dancing, two moosies skiing, two cobalt bands, and a loris in a pear tree.
In all the holiday hubbub it ought be noted that Mr. (W)right is Jewish, so he doesn't really celebrate Christmas... By which I mean "his mom's side of the family is Jewish, and he celebrates the holiday season with his family by exchanging a pre-requested - usually unwrapped - gift sometime in December, buying and decorating a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve before eating at a Chinese restaurant, and having an gargantuan Christmas-themed gustatory Bacchanalia at the Wright's home (they do celebrate Christmas, largely in pure Americana fashion of seeing which guests can be made to explode from over consumption first and bringing all the colorful personalities together in a single pressure cooker of holiday jubileeeeee).
Now he also "doesn't really celebrate Christmas" by spending most of December tolerating his fanciful girlfri- er, fiance's (despite some months of this engagement thing, I have enough trouble remembering to call him the culturally approved nomenclature, and he is officially going to be my boyfrianceband from now until we die in each other's arms... but I digress into parenthetical hinterlands here) gleeful holiday participation. Since Christmas has always been an important holiday of ritual and childhood tradition, I celebrate it quite thoroughly, sucking the very marrow from each candy cane. I've encouraged him to share his own traditions (Andrew, Andrew... can we do like a Passover thing this year?? PLEEEEEEASE), but at the end of the day, he's mostly just not much into those sorts of things unless somebody else is doing it and his major role is eating all the cranberry sauce. I have insisted that we go out for Chinese food on Christmas Eve when he celebrates with my family. This year, my mom got excited about the need for new lights, so in his honor, we bought... sort of a menorah! The top light broke. We're a culturally sensitive family here. A family that likes Chinese food and pretty lights anyways.
On the ninth day of Sockmas, my true love gave to me... client file kindling, eight blue bulbs, cat-nipped Advent chocolate, one impromptu date night, reams of wrapping paper, tango shoes and shoe bags, four sock santas dancing, two moosies skiing, two cobalt bands, and a loris in a pear tree.
This impromptu work day to complement Wednesday's is brought to you by the letter A. A for Andrew, who had one final exam on Saturday morning, a project due Monday morning, and another take home due ... Monday morning. After the Monday dueness blitz, a job interview and several man-cave hours of mountain biking and zombie killing he'll be free!! I'll remain in my same relatively fettered state, but the job's got perks. For instance, instead of spending a weekend driving to and fro to Seattle to be ignored, and then waiting for him to drive up here and be abandoned while I go to work, I can say "Hey, I've got work I can do on the weekend and then I can block off a regular work day and increase our time together!"
A, also, for Attorneys... namely other attorneys. Namely, our clients' ex-attorneys. Sometimes clients lawyer-swap or are swapped due to a series of events that range from routine (take on a pro bono case thinking it'll be simple, then realize it'll take four years... ahem, Ms. Englett that is in fact an excellent reason to let clients swap us out... just fyi!) to obscene (parenthetical redacted!) to something to do with maximizing their Pokemon power grid or... something. So, you know how when you date somebody they're said to bring all the baggage along from their past relationship along? Yeah, it's true of clients too. Except their baggage is more literal and comes in the forms of extensive court records and a small forest's worth of historical documents. I'm the designated case historian on staff (read, I really wanted to master in history but wussed out at the horror of spending my life in the ivory towers of academia), so I'll be wading through a few bazillion pleadings, emails, interrogatories and so on today so that the office may have some idea of what's going on as we blindly stumble forward in a case quite far in progress. Then I'll be converting my findings into iambic pentameter and doing some wood etchings of the case for our files. A short interpretive dance section, perhaps... we'll just see what the day brings.
On the tenth day of Sockmas, my true love gave to me... tiny tamarins aleaping, client file kindling, eight blue bulbs, cat-nipped advent chocolate, one impromptu date night, reams of wrapping paper, tango shoes and shoe bags, four sock santas dancing, two moosies skiing, two cobalt bands, and a loris in a pear tree
I first saw tamarins in person with Andrew and his family, at the San Francisco Zoo. We had heard they had a real live loris(!!) and Andrew and I had just become fascinated with lorises at that point. Visiting this little loris was something of a must. The loris was apparently on long holiday or else otherwise indisposed, but we saw plenty of lemurs, big kitties (lions, incidentally, I'm pretty sure are animatronic because they far too uncannily scaled to be real)... and these little guys and gals called tamarins. Leaping from tree to tree with eyes apopping like me after a morning coffee... well, it was a natural fit that if Andrew is my loris, then I am his tamarin... even if I have yet to perfect my leap from Andrew's book shelf to his dresser in my morning excitement. I blame the book shelf for being quite rickety.
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