Geoff Bought Me A Beautiful Painting Of A Cow For Christmas. I Love Cows. Sometimes I Wonder If They Are My Spirit Animal. Is That Weird?

I have returned.  Almost.  I'm sort of using this post as a warm up lap.  I had a hard time deciding when to make my blogging return - do I start on New Year's Day?  What about on Monday - everything starts on a Monday, right?  Or maybe I should start when the kids go back to school since vacation time isn't real time.  Obviously I established my start date today.  It's the first day of a New Year in a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule that isn't an actual holiday.  So there's that.

I hope you've all had wonderful holiday seasons.  We had a great time here.  Lots of activity and noise. I'm so grateful to be able to spend holidays like that with our families and friends, but I'm also incredibly appreciative of the quiet that follows.  Relative quiet, of course.  And this year, I also appreciated my restraint when it came holiday decorating.  Once the tree came down, the rest of the house was successfully cleared of all things Christmas related with just two small trips to our basement storage.  We are now officially a home of 2014.

I learned a few things during this holiday season:

Ski boots are terrible to walk in, but they do make it easier to perform a hover maneuver in public restrooms.

When you first start using a Neti pot, it feels like you are waterboarding yourself.  I'm still not convinced about its effectiveness and I'm really tired of blowing my nose.

The Pioneer Woman's spinach artichoke dip recipe is delicious, but if you reheat it too long, it becomes hotter than the sun.

If you put something really hot in your mouth, spit it out.  Don't hold in in there just because you remember how delicious it was the night before and you're all alone in the kitchen and no one can see the huge amount you scooped up on the pita crisp.   I had an incident like this thanks to the aforementioned dip and I am still recovering from what may have been third degree burns on the roof of my mouth.  I'm talking a two inch long blister because I wanted to eat a dip.  Not my proudest moment.

I'm wearing these.

They are my new Christmas slippers.  I love them so.  Ever since the kids were babies I bought us all new jammies to wear on Christmas Eve, but this year the family informed me that they just couldn't stomach another pair of Christmas jammies - clearly not all traditions are meant to continue forever.  So I bought everyone slippers instead and now we have warm feet and maybe in 2014 we can find some sleepwear that doesn't have reindeers on them.

gratitude:  washing machines, family movie nights, Tocca perfumes, rest

thanks and love.