Countdown to Christmas

Wow I can't quite believe when I looked at the calendar this morning and saw Christmas is but 5 days away. With Thanksgiving so late this year it has literally been a dash to Christmas. Interestingly enough for the third year now my work load hasn't lightened in the least even with the holidays bearing down on us. It seems nothing slows us down anymore. Don't get me wrong - I am thankful each and every day that I have a fairly stable job and one I like to boot but it is sad in a way to me that we don't seem to slow down in the business world even to take a collective breath and remember what is really important.

I am happy to report that my shopping is about 90% complete now. Not bad huh? I kept it simple this year and that helped. I think next year I am going to look to more Internet shopping as well. I truly love hitting the malls but my schedule just isn't exactly conducive to it so it seems.

This week was a fun one. At my work we had our employee Christmas celebration. We played hooky on Wednesday afternoon and headed to Park Tavern in St. Louis Park where we had bar Olympics. We were split into four teams of three people each and played two games of bowling, a round of darts and two rounds of pool. I pretty much stunk at all of it but I did throw one strike in the two rounds of bowling. Having never thrown a dart in my life imagine my surprise when on my second dart I got a bulls eye! Pool - well that was another story. I don't get the fun of that game. The darts and bowling were more my style. Here is a photo of my team "The Young Guns." From left to right: Nik (drawing a blank on his bowling name), Jeremy "Rev" and yours truly "Pinky." I am so proud to say we came in 4th place! :-)

I had to cut out from the fun early as Anna had her holiday dance program that evening and I had mom duty to get her dressed and her hair looking pretty. We have had a pretty rough start to dance this year as Anna suddenly and inexplicably developed a fear of attending dance class. So strange as this is her third year. She missed classes as a result and then illnesses didn't help. But it seems with age comes the ability to better learn dances so she still did pretty well on her three numbers - ballet, jazz and tap. Here are a couple photos I captured as well as a class shot.

The dance studio always has Santa there so Ryan and Anna took a moment to say hi.

Today we are getting a dumping of snow. I am hearing numbers ranging from 4 - 8 inches. Not such a big deal except there are high winds expected to arrive at some point driving the temps down and most likely blowing the snow and making travel, etc. treacherous. Soon we are headed over to Saint Paul to ring bells for the Salvation Army on behalf of the Saint Paul Fire Department. I will try to capture some photos to share with you. I am hearing reports that they are very far behind where they need to be donation-wise. No doubt the economy is having a HUGE impact - more families now in need and less families able to give. I hope we are successful in getting some nice donations.