I awoke this morning early, to the unmistakeable sound that told me that I had better watch where I walked when I got out of bed, unless I really wanted to feel the charming squish of cold slimy hairball between my toes. I awoke again to the same sound, a half an hour later. By the third time, I realized that getting any more sleep was going to be impossible, especially because it occurred to me that there might be more landmines besides just the three I'd had the pleasure of hearing, so I finally got out of bed, and cleaned up the mess, and fed the cats so that if they insisted on continuing to hork great piles of slime loudly onto the floor, they would at least do it downstairs, out of hearing range.

We went out for breakfast because Richard wanted chocolate chip pancakes, and since this was his birthday, chocolate chip pancakes were what he got. And then we figured as long as we were out, we might as well do the massive grocery run we've been needing to for the better part of a week, so we went to CostCo and stocked up on fresh veggies and fish and laundry detergent and then on to the grocery store to get everything else.Somehow it seemed appropriate to be doing such a full scale grocery shopping trip on this, the last day of the calendar year. Stocking up in preparation for a new year of healthy food and healthier living.

This afternoon I put together two small lasagnas and popped them into the freezer, and decided it was time to try out the new apple peeler-corer-slicer contraption we picked up the last time we went up to Apple Hill. So I pulled all the old apples out of the fridge and any that were salvagable were processed quite quickly using that very handy little device, and were dumped into the crockpot with some cinnamon and apple juice and chopped dates, and they have been simmering in there now for several hours, in preparation for being turned into apple date butter, which I will pour into jars and seal for later in the year.

Richard got one of his birthday presents yesterday - the lemur I 'adopted' for him from the San Francisco zoo - and he knew about the main present, which is the purchase and installation of a new stereo system in his car that will let him plug in his MP3 player. So neither of those was much of a surprise. However, I am pretty sure that his third present came as a surprise, because few people would ever guess that for their birthday they would get a felted jellyfish.

We had such a late breakfast that we didn't ever get around to eating lunch, and my parents took us out to dinner as a birthday treat for Richard (he's getting three birthday dinners in a row, which works out quite well, all things considered). We never got around to making any sort of exciting plans for this evening, so we've basically just spent a fairly quiet day and except for the New Year wishes from the clerks at the grocery store, it would be easy to think this was just any other day. I think that the one nod we will make toward the end-of-year festivities will be to turn on the television at a minute before midnight, just to watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, and maybe I will go downstairs and put some apple cider on to mull, just for the heck of it, while I am mashing up the apple butter and working ever closer to putting aside the very last bits of this year to savor in the next.

Tis the season for Holidailies