10 on Tuesday

1. I had my annual physical recently. I love my doctor, I always come away from seeing her very comfortable with everything we've talked about. This year she said to me "You weigh a bit more than you have the past few years. Are you worried about that?" and the look on her face...well, it was clear that she was hoping I was at least a little worried about it! And so I joined the gym at work. Running on a treadmill is insanely boring when the TVs at the gym are to ESPN and MSNBC. Also, it's definitely a routine/schedule adjustment that I'm still trying to figure out.

2. We recently discovered two new Zipcars near our house - about half the distance as the old ones. Which weren't even that far. It's awesome, I love them. To add to the Zipcar love, today I got an email from them saying that I had won a $25 driving credit for filling out a survey a while back. Yay Zipcar!

3. The weekend before last, we stopped by MassArt to check out their holiday market and ended up buying some artwork from friends of ours. Someday I will own one a painting by Karl Stevens, but in the meantime we have a drawing of his to hang on our wall. I was extra happy to buy it because Karl admitted that it's one of his favorites. ;) We happened to have bought an autographed copy of his most recent book from him the night before, and have one of his comics from over the summer hanging on our fridge (Warning: some may find that comic offensive...but if you look at it, tell me if you recognize anyone in it...). I guess that makes us Karl groupies.

4. This is also about the artwork we bought at the MassArt holiday market, but I think Fish deserves his own number! I really love our friend Fish McGill's work, and have been pondering a plan to commission him to do a larger-scale something for me (in fact, the idea is so young that I still haven't decided exactly what I want it to be or talked to him about it yet), but in the meantime we picked up a drawing of his to join Karl's on our living room wall. Fish is awesome, so we also got a bottle of Robot Wine with our purchase. It was made on the moon! You can see more of his work over at the Rockband podcast site, where he does lots of awesome artwork for them.

5. I've had Christmas music in pretty heavy rotation on my iPod and at home for the last few weeks. When I'm at work I usually just set my iPod to play all of the Christmas music and then end up skipping over songs I don't feel like listening to occasionally. I've had two sticky notes sitting on my desk where I've been jotting down songs to create some Christmas playlists. Tonight I finally sat down and actually created those play lists!

6. I leave for Virginia tomorrow! For eight days! I'm excited to see the kiddos and how much they've grown (especially Adele! She was so teeny tiny when I met her in September!). I'm excited to have Christmas brunch with my family, and to watch the kids joy at finding what Santa brought them. And funny enough, I'm excited at the prospect of a white Christmas, which is currently looking pretty likely for NoVA and not at all likely for Boston...go figure!

7. I managed to pack for my eight day trip in just a duffel bag and a large purse. I did ship presents in advance, but still...you have to admit that packing for eight days in the winter in a duffel bag is pretty good! I even remembered to pack my little laminating machine thingy for my sister.

8. Just in time for us to leave the cats to a (very awesome, very appreciated) cat sitting friend, Champ has a bacterial infection and has to take a pill daily. Awesome! The good news is that if you stuff the pill into a pill pocket and put it on top of her food at night, she gobbles it up and doesn't even realize or care that she's taking a pill. She's also lost half a pound since she was at the vet for her fall in July, which is great news! It must be the hyperactive playing ever since the crazy cat nip toy was welcomed into our home in August. We've had cat nip toys in the past but none have ever been as loved as this one, which the vet gave to Barley when he spent a day there in August to have blood drawn. It's really just a small scrap of blue fleece fabric that has some cat nip tied in the middle of it, but Barley and Champ can't get enough of it!

9. This afternoon I walked over to the North End running an errand and came across some very cute ice sculptures on the Greenway. Unfortunately, what feels freezing to me isn't really freezing when you're an ice sculpture (that's 40 degrees, in case you're wondering) and there was a lot of dripping and cracking going on!

10. I was looking forward to my walk at work, thinking that with the snow we got last night it would be nice and pretty....only there was hardly evidence that it had snowed. :( What's the point of freezing my butt off every day if I'm not going to get pretty snow to look at?!