This is gonna be quite the miscellaneous journal entry.

It's Monkey Day.

For the moment I am temporarily in the good books at work, for the most part. On Friday I got things rolling on setting up some interoffice demos, which both I and my boss are thrilled about. It’s something I’ve actually put on the list of goals at my evaluation for years, but hey, finally I got someone convinced and down to arrange things. Woot! My boss is also getting me more things to do in my area of expertise and mentioned ahem, possibly getting my public service time cut down in order to work on those things.

Though on the bad news side, somebody came up pregnant, so getting public service cut is...probably quite the opposite in practice. Plus I’m going to have to do extra shifts in January for someone else being out, and that’s not EVEN factoring in the inevitable “I’m siiiiiick!”, so.... yeah. I do not like the falling dominoes aspect of this job one bit. I really wish I could be out of public service officially before these things happen, but...yeah right.

I have my resume and cover letter for the job application done, I'm just waiting to see if I can talk to my boss to give her a heads up before submission or not. She called in sick today, so odds are about 50/50 our meeting scheduled for tomorrow won't go on, so we'll see if that happens nor not.

I spent all of Sunday indoors. I’ve basically needed to clean up my craft room for probably most of the year. I started a weeding out books project in there and then my office started making giant ahem noises that I should start taking things home for the office move ASAP while I was doing that, so then I had boxes waiting around to go back into my new office… and then guess what, I wasn’t allowed to bring any of it back. (I have been Heavily Discouraged from decorating in the new space, in a “take the hint” sort of way.) Anyway, one way or another the room has been nigh unusable for months on end, and I never wanted to clean it when I could be OUTSIDE shopping or whatever. But if it’s raining, I have no excuse, so I finally started purging crap and putting my office toys in permastorage.

The good news is, the table’s half usable (I made some giant ceramic bowls that I have no idea what I’ll do with them that need to reside on it) and there’s now floor space and I put away the yarn and got rid of most of the books recently, so there’s that. And I emptied all of the boxes out today after I got home from work, so there's a lot more space around here than usual now.

I still need to clean up the living room, which is covered in Projects again, but that at least is easier to physically do. I also finished fixing up the advent calendar vest from Saturday by sewing new replacement decorations on and then doing some felting onto the vest (which, thank goodness, was wool) to fill in the holes. Ta-da, it’s generally presentable now!

I’m debating whether or not to make another sampler for someone else-mostly because ugh, post office isn’t fun right now and I think we're at "presents optional and not too likely" status still anyway-but other than that, I can probably reasonably get back to working on the Christmas tree apron idea. I found this lovely picture of Betty Boop that’s the general idea of what I want to do…

I have been spending time pre-blogging for a couple of holidays, such as Ugly Sweater Day (this Friday, guys! bling up now! hit your Goodwill!), Star Wars Day, and Festivus. I finally found enough decent looking and decently priced Festivus merchandise online to finally splurge.

I've wanted a Festivus pole for years (I'd make it myself, but I have no damn idea to work with a big ol' pole by myself with the CC not open) and usually I've seen them for like, $35 at Urban Outfitters, for fuck's sake. But I found one online for $13 and I'm quite happy with that price, especially given how hard it'd be to make my own. (Unless I did one out of Pabst beer cans, but I don't drink beer.)

I've wanted to make a Festivus sweater, but (a) I haven't really gotten on the stick about it, and (b) that's kind of a lot of work for a one day a year item to wear. So I found a lot of Festivus shirt selections online and decided to go witth this one.

And finally, I have been eyeing this Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer sweater (THIS EXISTS!!!!!!!), but when I first saw it it cost $80 and I was all nope, not paying that much for something I can only wear 1/12 of the year. Then they dropped it to $50 and I was all, well, I'm considering...and then today they had a big sale and they dropped it to $38 and SOLD!

I should be getting all of this stuff around December 22, which will be quite appropriate for 2/3 of those items.

I watched The Great Christmas Light Fight again tonight. I was not quite as thrilled this time since none of my favorites won, darn it. They had a group competition with neighborhoods in Celebration, Florida (for that Disney advantage) and Hawaii (for that Hawaii advantage) and neither won, darn it! Likewise, when it came to the nearest local house (Widmer World, they didn't win either. Which is a shame because it looks amazing. I haven't really gone out to Pleasanton to look at houses, but I should because their backyard looks AMAZING.

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