I can't believe it has been since before Christmas that I wrote anything in my journal. I was sure I'd written in the New Year. Damn, I'm a slacker! I guess I must summarize.

Christmas:
My brother came down to visit for the first time in years over Christmas and we had a great time because he actually spent time with us. We had Christmas morning on the 24th then went to see "The Compleat works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged)" at the Arts Club Theatre (a hoot!). After the show we made and ate the traditional Christmas eve lasagna, then James, Theo and I went to the Railway club to a sing-along with the Hard Rock Miners. A busy but awesome day.

Christmas morning we caught the 9am ferry to Victoria to see Theo's family. We had a good visit there with our nieces, who were both sick, unfortunately. The family had good laughs at me trying to keep child snot off me. Ahh, good times. The children were remarkably well behaved considering how late their Christmas morning was delayed (until after lunch, which was cruel and inhumane to all of us). We had fabulous meals and a really great time visiting with his family, who we really don't see often enough. I wish they lived closer.

It was awesome to be off work for 10 days. I expected to bustle around the house a ton but barely got to anything on my list. I was sick as usual and hung out with my brother the rest of the time. It was really great (the visiting, not the sick).

New Year's Eve:
I wanted a fairly quiet night so we went to Chris & Annelise's, played board games and drank too much. Waaaayyy too much. Blackouts too much. Soooo, I was having a good time and vaguely remember getting in an argument with Chris at midnight about the brilliance of Green Day and their status as punk rock. What I don't remember so well was attacking him when he didn't agree with me and phoning Mark and Allice at midnight to rant about it (and wish them a Happy New Year, I hope). Yikes!

New Year's Day:
Hooray for drive-thru Starbucks and Burger King croissanwiches.

I listened to the new Green Day album American Idiot 4 times today in the car as I drove to Bellingham and back - and sat in border lines. I have to say that it is an amazing - nay, I will unabashedly say brilliant - album (you should all buy it!) and that I'm a little bit in love with Billie Joe Armstrong.

Mum and I went tonight to the Chan centre at UBC to see a choir performance of a huge Berlioz mass. It was really cool. There were 3 different choirs added together with an orchestra. The horn sections of the orchestra were spread out through the theatre in the upper levels and during a bombastic section of the performance there were horns blasting in every direction. It was pretty awesome.

Speaking of awesome, the theatre itself was one of the most beautiful I've been in. Elegantly shaped with wood and chrome accents and a soaring ceiling. Colour me impressed.

The mountains had disappeared for a few days into The Grey (you might have to be a Vancouverite to truly understand) but have returned with a beautiful dusting of snow. Ooooh! They look so pretty and it makes me very happy to look out my window at work and see them like that. It makes me wish I skied. Well, not actually, but they're still pretty.

I put up my Christmas tree and it looks pretty too. I decided not to put up the ornaments that I hate and normally hide at the back of the tree, though. Instead, I am going to donate them to the Sally Ann or something so that maybe they can be appreciated on someone else's tree, even though they're kind of fugly. That's one of the cool things about this world, though. One woman's fugly is another's Christmas tree treasure.

I have been on a cleaning and purging kick at the moment. I cleaned the closet in our bedroom and got rid of 3 big bags of stuff and have since taken a huge bag of books to the second hand store for trade (yay! more books!). It would be so nice to have a significant decrease in clutter by the time we have people over for festive festivities PLUS I'm seriously sick of looking at it all myself. Down with clutter!

It turns out that the injury to my meniscus was a false alarm and I actually only have some degeneration of the cartilage due to a fairly common muscular imbalance causing mis-alignment of my kneecap. An MRI (paid for privately to avoid the 5-month waiting list - horray for 2-tiered medical) showed the damage, which is somewhat fixable through rehab exercises rather than surgery. I can't repair the cartilage as such, since once it's gone it's gone for good, but I can at least halt it from progressing further and make my kneecap track properly in its groove. Yay!

I'm thrilled that I won't have to have my knee cut up but in a way I'm sad because it means I'm going to have to do the work myself to get it better. Stupid work! My symptoms are still much closer to that of a torn meniscus - pain location, functional problems - but everyone knows that machines don't lie.

Or do they..?