I had an excellent weekend, thanks for asking.

1. Friday: easy day at work, then a good run on the track afterwards. Denny and I went out with friends for a graduation/birthday get together in which we feasted on pizza and shiraz. It was fun. The we came home and watched an episode from season 2 of Coupling, my current favorite show. It’s not often that a sitcom makes me actually belly-laugh on multiple occasions per episode.

2. Saturday: ran some errands, got some Christmas shopping done, then went to Des Moines for the family get-together on Denny’s dad’s side. They play a game where each person brings a wrapped gift, then you draw numbers. The first person chooses a gift and opens it. The second person can either open a new gift or take the first person’s. The third person can open a new gift or take the first or second person’s, and so on. It was pretty fun. The gifts Denny and I contributed were big hits: a lava lamp and a peel-off one-a-day Onion calendar. Denny’s dad opened the Onion calendar at first and couldn’t figure out what it was. He thought it smelled like onions.

3. Sunday: very productive. I got just about all my Christmas shopping done, and I made some jaunty stockings to hang from our mantle, got a good run in, and offered moral support and occasional help while Denny cooked one of his first major meals: spaghetti with homemade sauce and meatballs. It was delicious. My run was also really good. If you had told me even six months ago that I would be able to run a mile, walk for a minute and a half, then run another mile, then do probably another mile and a half broken up with occasional bouts of walking, I never would have believed you. Running the mile in P.E. used to just about kill me. For perhaps the first time, I’m going to be able to make entirely character-based New Year’s resolutions, since the fitness thing is shaping up on its own.

And now, just a short little week before the holiday festivites begin in full swing. Whoooo!

Hey, you should check out Denny’s site, because he posted a link to that preachy email forward (“Rah rah go war you have it so easy but the war guys have terrible lives hooray for war!”) that, despite its annoying tone, is interesting in that it contains a picture of Denny’s brother Michael sleeping in a ditch.

(Look, people, I recognize that soldiers put up with really horrible conditions. War, General Sherman and many others have said, is hell. I just don’t think exploiting the soldiers’ living conditions for the sake of propaganda is a good logical argument. I mean, I can think of a way that they’d be safe at home in comfortable beds, and I dearly wish Michael were. Of course, Michael’s always been sort of the ditch-sleeping type, which I mean in the nicest possible way.)