It’s amazing to me how quickly December zips by each year. I swear, it feels like we just did Thanksgiving, and now New Year’s is already upon us. Craziness.

We’ve packed the month with our usual Christmas shennanigans, including the annual Laity party. And yes, we do celebrate “Christmas” here, not “the holidays” – I’m a total heathen who just happens to love the secular aspects of Christmas and doesn’t mind that it also happens to be named after a religious figure.

Sadly, I have yet to manage any decent pictures of our apartment decorations, but we did come away with a pretty nice picture of the two of us by our tree (that’s a snorkeling Santa on top in place of a star):

My frantic party preparations included a lot of baking; about three times as much baking as the turnout really warranted, I would say. Luckily, my officemates were more than happy to help polish off the leftover cookies at work.

I’ve also created a webpage with all my Christmas Recipes, which currently just includes cookies (with pictures!) and cornstarch ornaments.

We spent four days in Phoenix for Christmas with Jeff’s family, during which time I also finished editing some more underwater videos. So some of you can expect a DVD in the mail early next month. Don’t worry; it’s short!

In other news, Jeff’s bookshelves are still beautiful. Seriously, I have to restrain myself from licking them every time I walk into the room. I hope he hurries up and builds the boring desk soon, so we can get to the fun project: the coffee table with Catalina tile insets. Oooooohhhhh.

I will never use a chat client while in a meeting, EVER AGAIN.

I use Trillian, which just shows text like this:

alaity47: Boo
jlaity88: boo back

Jeff has his set up all fancy, however, with icons and speech bubbles and whatnot.

One particular exchange, made during a meeting after I’d devoured an ungodly amount of cookies, made me chortle aloud when I should have been paying attention to the meeting instead, but we managed to continue on. Then Jeff sent me a picture of what the exchange looked like to him, and I completely lost it. The two people I was meeting with both insisted on seeing what was making me crack up so hard, and my public humiliation was complete.

These bookcases have been “almost done” for over a month now, it seems. That last 10% of the way took more than 50% of the actual time and effort, but Jeff made a real push last weekend and every evening this week to get these puppies done and installed. Right now, there are 3 shelves left to be varnished this weekend, but the bookcases and 9 movable shelves are totally done.

Here’s the point we reached that started to feel like we were almost there, when in reality we were still so far. Two bookcases stained, but lots left to stain and nothing varnished:

Finally, all the bits and pieces had been stained, polyeurethaned, lightly sanded, and polyeurethaned again (with lots of drying time in between those steps). Tuesday night, we glued and nailed the backs onto all three bookcases:

Then we moved them into their future resting places in our bedroom, not yet filling them up with shelves and books in case we decided we didn’t like the placement. Plus, they still had to finish drying.

And there they sat for 48 hours. Tonight, Jeff attached the earthquake straps (aka, “things that will keep our legs from being crushed in case of another Northridge”), and I set about correcting what has been the bane of my existence these last 5 years: books stacked vertically in TWO ROWS so you couldn’t see them all at once. Blasphemy! But look – see how pretty it is now?

So, was it worth $500 in materials and tools, countless hours of Jeff-labor (and a few hours of Anna-labor, but honestly, mostly I just watched), and three months of having bits of wood scattered all over the apartment as we hauled parts inside and outside week after week? Well, they certainly put our remaining Ikea furniture to shame (take a look at the shabby dresser in that picture – doesn’t it just look sad?), and they actually look like Real Bookshelves instead of dorm room furniture. I’ve seen similar, slightly smaller shelves at CostPlus for about $200 a pop, but they’re never quite what we want – this way, we got to totally customize them, and they’re built much more solidly than anything we’d buy in pieces and screw together.

Or so Jeff tells me. I’ll let you know how they look after 10 years and a couple of moves.