Sweetpea’s Garden

The blog’s been having a nap for a few days, but it’s Monday again, and time therefore to look back at the beauty found in the past week. Because it was Christmas and my whole family was together, it was a great week overall, but here are a three especially beautiful things:

1. My younger nephew (15 months) has the absolutely delightful habit of greeting guests he knows by running to the front door and applauding their arrival. This brought smiles every time he did it, regardless of who was on the receiving end of his good cheer.

2. On Thursday, we got together with my cousin and her family, which includes the two oldest members of the next generation — her seven- and nine-year-old daughters. They’re such great kids, and are so good with their cousins, even though they are much littler. It’s such an amazing thing to watch them play together, just like we did when we were children.

3. Is it wrong (or arrogant) to count the Christmas cookies I made as a beautiful thing? I really love Christmas cookies, and having four varieties to choose from over the course of the week made me very happy indeed.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I worked on the day after Christmas. It’s probably been since I last worked retail; if ever there was an experience that makes taking the day off after Christmas for the rest of forever seem like the right idea, it is several consecutive years of spending the holiday season working in the mall. Most years, I take the week between Christmas and New Year’s off completely.

So, it is quite a break from tradition that I am at the office today. We’re doing a soft launch of the new website a month from yesterday, so things are a bit hectic, and as a result, Bossman asked me not to take the whole week off this year. I’m working today and Friday, as tomorrow is filled with more family fun with the cousins from Pennsylvania. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t a little bitter about having to come in, but it’s understandable given the circumstances — and I do have projects I need to get done.

It seems, however, that the office computers wanted today off, too, as we’ve had no access to any of the network drives all day. And of course, I always save my work to the network and not my hard drive, having seen too many people get bitten in the ass by hard drive crashes. So the style guide that I was going finish compiling and start editing today? Can’t get to it. I’ve organized the few documents I had saved in my email (which isn’t down), but otherwise, I haven’t made much progress. It’s kind of a bummer — it’s one of those projects that practically demands quiet and solitude, which I have around here in spades at the moment, and I can’t do it. Sigh.

Back in the olden days, before cable and 24-hour “A Christmas Story” marathons, there was the WPIX yule log. It replaced the regular programming, and it will perform the same function here today, thanks to YouTube. Merry Christmas to all, from me and Snapdragon, and the rest of the Family H!