Better days and getaways, 'cuz every day's a holiday with you.

Greetings from a nice weekend! I can't believe that it's a week until Christmas day! Man, how quickly this time of year goes. Luckily, I am finally finished all of my Christmas shopping. I look forward to not going into a store for awhile. I'm not going to do Boxing Day... I never really do because I'm in Stratford then, and there are not a whole bunch of mega deals to be had in the small town.

But it's been a nice few days. On Thursday, we had our annual student council Christmas dinner. If you want good service in a restaurant, don't go with eight teenagers, I tell you. They took half an hour to take our hour. They'd told the VP of student council that we could only have the table for 2 hours when she made the reservation, so the kids were worried we'd get kicked out. My co-moderators and I said "we'd like to see them try to kick us out of here".

Anyway, despite poor service the dinner was still fun. Dining with teenagers is a blast because they ask questions like "what's an artichoke?" and so forth. They are cute.

On Friday, I had a delightful massage after school (gotta use up those benefits), and then some of my work colleagues and I had our own Christmas party at a pub. It was organized by the Alans (there are two), and only the "reasonable" were invited. We did a Kris Kringle, which turned out to be fun. This is what I gave:

It got stolen quite a few times so it was a hit. The gift I thought was pretty funny was labelled "Emergency Lesson Plans: Teacher's Edition" and contained Jersey Shore videos. It's fun to laugh at your job. I ended up with some cutesy shot glasses. I should have picked a bottle of wine, but I'm always intrigued by the unknown. No one wanted to steal them, so I was stuck with them.

I slept in and had a lazy Saturday. Then I met up with Jason for pho, and we went to see the movie "Young Adult" with Charlize Theron. It's quite good, provided that you can handle a comedy about an effed-up person with some uncomfortable moments. It's well done because although Charlize Theron's character is quite unlikeable, you end up feeling some empathy for her, and wishing her the best in the end. Or at least this bleeding heart did.

Today I went out to finish my Christmas shopping. I'm glad to be done.

The other thing worth mentioning about this weekend is that I decided to pull out my old black Doc Martens boots from my university days. Wearing them around this weekend brought back memories. It's strange how a pair of shoes can do that. I feel like I was connected to my younger self by wearing them. It felt right traipsing about the streets of Toronto in those things. I'm glad I'm wearing them again.

Hope that you all have great weeks. I've got a couple concerts on deck, and lots of work busyness, but I hope to check in!