AROUND HERE

Wow.  This week just flew right by and now it is almost weekend again.

It will be a working weekend for me and I expect to be pretty well worn out by Sunday evening.  In addition to the usual patient work, I have a ton of paperwork and additional testing to do before the end of the year.  This is the downfall of working so rarely.  Instead of having these things spread out over several weeks, I am always trying to cram them into a twelve hour shift or two.  If I can't get everything done during my scheduled hours, I can go in and finish in the evenings after Brian gets home from work.  Since that doesn't sound like a lot of fun, I'm going to put on my game face and see if I can just crank it all out this weekend.  We will see.  

The low moment of this week was Tuesday morning when Brian and I were both convinced we were going to be told that Mabel (our almost 12 year old beagle) was in her final days.  She was acting really strange and we could tell she was in pain.  But all of her lab work came back normal and the vet's suspicion was that she had injured her back.  He put her on a couple of medications and she was back to her usual self by the next morning.  

Following my online holiday shopping spree, my email inbox has been completely out of control this past month.  I decided to do something about it this week and have been happily unsubscribing to things right and left.  This is such an easy thing to do, but for some reason I tend to put it off.  

Someone drove into Brian's car door as we were getting out of his car, a couple weeks ago.  Trying to get insurance companies to pay for the damage and figure out if we wanted to fix the car or buy a new one has felt like a giant headache.  Big props to Brian who has done 98% of the legwork on this not-fun project.  We ended up with no money in our pockets, but decided to just fix the car for now and it is nice to just have that decision made.  Now, we are anxious to get the car back and get back to being a two-car family.  Thank goodness for carpooling and for Brian's carpool partner being so willing to drive while we've been down to one vehicle.

Sam has been anxiously awaiting his turn at being "The Star of the Week" at kindergarten.  He has talked about it almost daily for the past month or so.  On Wednesday, he got in the van after school and said, "Look what happened!" and then pulled the Star of the Week bag out of his backpack.  So, next Monday is his chance and I'm happy for him.

I've been feeling surprisingly unhurried and unstressed about the holidays.  We've been enjoying things as the come and nothing has yet felt overwhelming.  On my to-do list for this next week is planning our Christmas Eve party, which mostly consists of planning and setting up Minute To Win It games for about 15 people, and also figuring out menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  ...oh, and I think there may be a few big gifts for us to assemble when we have some kid-free hours.

And that's what's going on around here.