Today was Richard's birthday. Since I had to go to work and he had all this week off, I left this morning before he ever woke up. But I did have time to bake his birthday cake, and wrap, or otherwise set up, his birthday presents so he would find them when he came downstairs later. Since we are, after all, nerds, I gave him another domain (a nerd can never have too many domains, right?), a very goofy spirally stuffed dragon (who we have decided must live in the library on the new library chairs which arrived Tuesday and they are gorgeous and perfect!), and the extended edition of Return of the King, which apparently he promptly sat down and watched in its four-hour entirety. I expect that at some point in the near future we'll be doing a marathon session to watch all 13 hours of the extended editions of all three of the movies. Mmm. Legolas. And also the movies were pretty good, too.

The office was quiet today, since pretty much everyone else had the day off (we get our holiday on Monday instead). So instead of fielding calls from clients, we all focused on getting work done. I had files to scan for disk storage (all those boxes we brought back with us from San Francisco) and some minor updates to do on the databases for each of the offices (hooray for some end-of-year coding). We all did our best to stick it out as long as we could but by 3am there were only two of us left, and I gave up and decided that anything else I could do could just as well wait until next year and left work early. Although that last coworker pretended to be hard at work as I walked out the door I have no doubt that he was only minutes behind me for leaving.

Richard and I had our own New Year's Eve celebration a night early, since the special holiday menus offered at the restaurants we'd considered did not in the slightest sound inspiring. So instead we decided to do dinner last night instead of tonight, thereby avoiding crowds and lack of parking and traffic and all the other joy that comes with holiday dining. We went to a fondue restaurant in Sacramento, where we ate far too much of the swiss pesto walnut cheese fondue starting course, finished almost all of the main course (which included cuts of filet mignon, salmon, tiger shrimp, among others) and finally had to leave a small amount of the turtle chocolate fondue behind when we were done. Oh, so very good.

This has been a Holidailies entry.