as always, the kids spent christmas eve with their dad, which left hubby and i to our own devices. hubby spent the evening fighting with wrapping paper and my pc's cd burner (it's looking like both the burner and the regular cd player will need to be replaced soon). me, i made cookies and worked on critiques.

you know, i really have got to stop lamenting that christmas is going to be a disaster. something always seems to work out for us. it's nice how everything seems to pull together last minute, but it's also a bit disconcerting to not be able to plan for it in case this is the year it won't work out.

anyway, i like doing christmas cookie baking, but for the last few years there's not been money for it. this year my hubby was determined to get at least the chocolate crinkles, so i also made him spend the extra $7 for pillsbury white chocolate/macadamia nut cookies. we already had eggs and peanut butter and sugar for my 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies. and i discovered we also had the extra 2 ingredients for eggnog cookies. we don't have enough to make the christmas cookie packages we've made in the past, but we have enough for tonight's dinner and to make a christmas tin for my mother and my ex.

and between trays of warm cookie goodness, i worked on crits for dii and sffhow. i have 3 for dii just waiting for me to type them up and post them, and one started for sffhow. i'll work on getting at least 2 sffhow ones ready for typing and posting and chapter revisions while oldest works on dinner under my supervision. last year she helped. this year she cooks.

i also ended up sleeping part of the evening off in the vein of my most recent weird sleep schedule: be awake 8 -10 hours, sleep 4. when i woke up again at 2 a.m., i checked a recipe and went right back to making cookies. good thing i did, the dough needs to be refrigerated for at least 3 hours. once that was done and sitting in the fridge, i checked to make sure i could make the eggnog cookies.

so, here i sit, at almost 5 a.m., baking eggnog cookies and, you guessed it, doing more crits, and waiting for the day to start. the morning rush of present opening by the kids, mother to stop by with gifts for kids and something for saxy's parents, the start of making dinner, saxy's folks coming over . . . all the good stuff we look forward to for the holiday. once the cookies are done, i'll probably play on the ps2 and crit.

hey, it works for me. ;)

merry christmas everyone.