I've discovered another problem with this blog. I am just not a good story teller. Aside from having realized that I need to keep this thing vague so that I'm not offending people, I just do not have the ability to make my life sound interesting and engaging. If I turned this blog over to Bryce, it might be worth reading, but for now I deal with the fact that it's just plain boring. That said I will try to figure out what I can say to make my lovely weekend sound worthwhile...

I spent a fair amount of time with Frank, which was good and left me with a nice, contented feeling. I feel sorry for the guy with the way work's been going. It just seems like if people are consistently working 12-15 hour days, and going in on weekends, there's a problem in the process. That's not a functioning system. He's in St. Louis for the week again, and his Christmas party is on Saturday. I hope that all goes well and he gets to relax and have some fun. Sonali came with me to drop off his watch last night and got to see his place. She was really funny about how much she liked it. Ah, enthusiasm. I'm not sure whether he was annoyed at our interruption, or pleased because he's proud of his condo.

This weekend also involved the adventures of the Christmas tree. I've always bought small trees, and they've tended to come with a stand nailed to the bottom. Not so this year. First, I had to buy a stand, which I was unable to put together, meaning that the tree lived on our kitchen floor until I could borrow some WD-40 and a wrench from Catherine. That meant that I spent much of Saturday into Sunday just feeling dumb, because I wasn't bright enough to put up a Christmas tree. That left a nice mess, but the tree's up now, so I guess it's all ok. Second, I do not have enough ornaments/garland to decorate this tree. I'm not really willing to compromise my aesthetic sense and put cheesy ornaments on it, so I need to find some cheap and fun ones. This could entail a trip to Cost Plus. That's exactly what I need, another trip to the mall.

And this brings us to Megan's Power-shopping Trip from Hell. Oddly, spending the whole day shopping after getting very little sleep is not so much fun, especially considering that I spent enough money to send the grad student in me into convulsions. It started out with two simple goals: 1) cocktail dress 2) outfit for "dressy" holiday party. It ended up leading to shoes, tops, skirts, a dress, and makeup. After all of that, only one item is being returned. It was one of those shopping days where everything goes a little too well. I even found a great skirt at Banana Republic...on clearance...at a price I could actually afford...

Now, what made it hellish was primarily the cost, but also the fact that after starting in Dupont I ended up doing laps around the Pentagon City Mall as I struggled to find something to wear that night, and returned to stores multiple times. The ultra gay man wearing too much make up helping me at the Stila counter didn't help either. I was grateful for the Metro because if I'd had to worry about parking in the holiday madness I might have gotten violent. Speaking of which, I got to see the best of humanity while I was shopping. At DSW some sort of fight broke out in line and a woman actually ended up spitting on another customer. Now that's classy.

It's time for things to get interesting. There will be lots of visiting in the next month, with a couple of people actually coming to me, which is fun. I guess that once I've finished finals and conquered the office Christmas party my next dilemma is the case of the Ishii family tamale party. How much ex-boyfriend awkwardness can tamales, an adorable toddler, and her very sweet mother make up for?