The Ceramic Crayfish and Other Happy Things

I'm on my way to stable my car in the garage as a preventative measure against the antifreeze freezing in the bitter cold. (Yes, you read that right.) But I can't resist a few happy things . . .

• The annual Fairwood "Christmas Tree" (gift exchange)
  
• Klara, feeling her gift from the Posts and trying to guess what it was: "a ceramic crayfish." (It was a ceramic angel ornament. And Klara explained that the crayfish guess was because this morning in class they had watched a DVD refuting evolution that talked about crayfish.)
• Christmas caroling to various folks in Dublin (and "hitting the jackpot" by getting to sing to the people at the Rotary Club meeting)
• Christine visiting last week--all the way from Australia!
• Learning to make and eat Vietnamese food from Christine
• Watching a movie that fell into my Indianapolis time warp: "The Count of Monte Cristo" (While I was living in Indianapolis, my family watched a number of movies that came out through the years . . . while I watched "Treasures in the Snow" and Basic Seminars. Just kidding about "Treasures" and the Basic! I watched more than that, but I didn't keep up with all the latest good movies. When I was home on vacations, I got in on whichever movies had recently come out and they were watching then, but otherwise, unless my siblings liked a movie enough to re-watch it with me, I missed it and it fell into my Indianapolis time warp.)
• Having three clients to work with now--with such different personalities!
• One of my clients reminding me of Stephanie Kathleen (Katie) Whittington (whose full name I am uncharacteristically putting on my blog because I have lost track of her and would be thrilled if she Googled her name and found me that way
• The magnificent Christmas lights display in Chesterfield
• Christmas lights in general
• My Kathleen Battle Christmas CD (love, love, love her Polish "Infant Lowly" and her rendition of "Mary, Did You Know?")
• A car that runs
• Making sugar cookies with client #1, for his first time ever
• Giving Christmas gifts
• Christmas shopping (I guess the order of those two should be reversed.)
• Clean laundry
• Another Math-U-See project finished and sent off
• Clyde's graduating in fewer than 48 hours!
• The prospect of seeing Shelly N. again--well, for the first time since her white-dress turn from Shelly Y. to Shelly N.

Okay, enough procrastinating on sheltering the car and figuring out my finances and folding that clean laundry so that I can climb into the bed it's currently strewn across.