Today was spent taking care of the little things that need to be done this week, getting them out of the way so that I can spend the next three days feeding a color copier and waiting for it to poop out immense stacks of paper for me to sort and punch and tab and bind. Yayz!

(I should have gotten started on the above today, but I forgot to bring my mp3 player, and the thought of making copies all day without podcasts to keep me company made my soul wither in despair. So I got a week’s worth of other stuff done instead.)

Here is a downside of living in the big city: I live close to work, and have a downward (from my house) sloping driveway, and therefore have no excuse to call in and stay home with blankets and cocoa when Old Man Winter dumps ice all over our roads. Actually, in this case that’s an upside, because when I lived in BFE-country I had to use my vacation to cover snow days, and that would have royally messed up my official Christmas Vacation next week. Still, I miss snow days. On snow days, you can feel free to be lazy, because if the roads weren’t icy you wouldn’t be home anyway, and so you’re under no obligation to get things done around the house that don’t involve making cocoa or are no more strenuous than shoving a cat off your lap so you can change to a more comfortable position on the sofa. I don’t get those anymore, apparently. Sadness.

I got most of the stuff on my list taken care of this weekend, except for trimming the tree. We finally procured a tree, but since we’re broke, we could only afford a cheap one from the pile of cheap trees in front of the grocery store, and they were all very, very dry. So in the hopes of not burning our house down, we let it sit in water for 24 hours before doing anything to it. In hindsight, I wish I had also cut the string that was binding it at the beginning of those 24 hours, because when I did it last night, after dragging out all of my decorations in pure childlike anticipation, it…stayed that way. So we decided to give it another 24 hours to unfold itself, because we were afraid that if we force it, we’ll end up with a Charlie Brown tree. And that 24 hours will have to turn into 48 whether the tree’s ready to go or not, because my shows are on tonight, and it’s the mid-season finales, people, and not even the Joy of Christmas will come between me and my Cameron and my Sylar. And there’s nothing new on tomorrow night, so we’ll need something to do then, anyway.

This is probably all you’ll hear from me for a while, until I’m done feeding the copier my will to live.