Christmas, Part One

Which I have detailed on our other blog: here.

And today, more puppies! Photos here:

Puppies

Christmas Baking

Another day off, so I set to work doing some Christmas baking. I always make the same three cookies.

Oatmeal coconut crisps :

Molasses sugar cookies:

Russian tea cakes:

This year I also tried a new one, peanut butter filled chocolcate cookies:

I ended up with 10 dozen cookies, now all packaged up to give as gifts.

I can't believe it is only a week until Christmas. The house is all festive, the gifts are all wrapped. It's really my favorite time of year. Here's a picture of our tree, with me trying to be artsy:

And completely random and unrelated, I saw this bird outside our house today. Anyone know what kind it is?

Progress

Work is keeping me busy these days... as are preparations for the holidays. We have family coming for various lengths of stay from the 24th through the 15th of January. And with the rest of the family spread across the US and Europe, we've been busy packing up gifts for shipping. But I'm still managing to make progress with my various projects.

Knitting--the sock is done. Unfortunately, the sock is destined for Austria and in order to ensure the rest of the gifts arrived in time, the package had to go off without the sock. But I sent pictures, and in a few weeks, I'll send of the completed pair. I love knitting socks. I think I may knit socks exclusively for awhile. They are the perfect project for me--take only a week, can have some fabulously intricate designs and are probably the most practical thing I could knit. You may all be getting socks for Christmas next year. Just fair warning. Here are some photos of the sock in progress, I haven't gotten around to taking pictures of the final project yet.

Running--I ran 5 miles today. Now those of you who run marathons, etc. may scoff at my 5 miles (of course I know you would never scoff to my face, you are all too nice) keep in mind, I am someone who could barely run 3 miles when I was in the best shape of my life. And since I haven't been a collegiate athlete for about 10 years now, the fact that I've finally gotten back into shape is a great accomplishment for me. I've even lost weight... despite complete failure in my attempts to eat less. It does seem I have lost a disproportionate amount of weight from the bust area while my hips have only gotten a bit smaller (so unfair!) I feel better, and even have muscle definition again. Sorry no pictures here.

And cooking, cooking makes me happy. I love how my cooking skills have progressed from the pasta and frozen Costco chicken breasts of my post-college years. In the last week I have discovered how easy it is to cook (American versions of) Chinese food at home. I found a great recipe for sweet and sour chicken, and another for General Tso's chicken. Although as my cooking skills continue to improve, Adam points out that I'm less likely to get him to take me out to dinner, because he likes my cooking. Isn't he sweet? If I could figure out how to take pictures of food and have them look like something people would like to eat, I'd put them here.

Tonight I'm making mac and cheese. I use a different recipe every time. Right now it smells fabulous. I hope it tastes as good as it smells...

Making the Most of the Weekend

When you only get one full day off a week, you have to find ways to make the most of all the other time you get off. Like weekends. On weekends when we aren't on-call, the interns get the day off. So I go in in the morning, see all the patients, write all the daily notes, and then sign out to the overnight intern and head home. For most of this month, I haven't been getting out until 2 or 3 pm because we have had a ridiculous number of patients on our service. We still have quite a few, but they have all been here so long that nothing is going on with any of them. Thus today I was out of there by 11:30 am. Which left me the rest of the day to try to make a dent in my never-ending "to do" list.


I wrapped presents. Yes, we are already done with our Christmas shopping. It always an amazon.com Christmas here in the Tylee-Silberfein household. I hate malls. So now we (and by we, I mean me since I love wrapping gifts and Adam doesn't) are wrapping everything in preparation in shipping all the gifts off to their various locations.



Knitting! I had this brilliant idea to make socks for one of my gift recipients. However, I made this decision last week, I have never made socks before, and I chose some impossibly difficult Austrian cable-knit pattern. Needless to say, this gift recipient will be getting an "IOU" for the socks. Because that inch pictured there? Took me the majority of the Dallas-Pittsburgh football game to finish.


The other thing I did today is a secret if you are Kat, Tom or Bear (in the off chance that he has learned to use the internet before 6 months of age). If you are not one of those people, you can click here. If you are one of those people, you can click there too, but you'll ruin the surprise.


And I made dinner. Yes Mom, those are brussel sprouts. They actually taste kind of ok. The whole dinner was something of a disappointment (goat cheese and sun-dried tomato quiche, which just ended up kind of mushy and not terribly satisfying). The brussel sprouts were ok though. I'm willing to add them to my vegetable rotation.


Tomorrow it's back to work. Only 3 days left of this rotation. Next month won't be any better, but it's my last in-patient ward month (I have one ICU month left, but I actually enjoy the ICU) which is a glorious thought that will carry me through the next 4 weeks. I'm trying to convince Adam to go get our Christmas tree this Wednesday, but I'm not sure I've convinced him yet. I love Christmas.