This year I’m totally jazzed for the holidays. I don’t really know why, but I’m all about wine and cider and decorating and spiced coffee and giving gifts and shopping for the holidays and hearing holiday music on the radio and loading up my iPod with it (although it appears Zannah beat me to it!). For some reason I’m particularly set for it, and most years it could come and go and the most I would feel is a touch of depression.

For some reason, this time around it’s completely different; I want to bake cookies and cupcakes, I want to mail holiday cards, I want to have parties and trim the tree. It’s nutty. I’m wondering if it’ll last past the turkey-induced haze of Thanksgiving. Frankly, I’ve always experienced the holidays as the “obligation season,” involving trips to and from various family homes for quality time that I always seem to think I could spend better elsewhere, but still time well spent – this year, while I’m not terribly looking forward to the obligations of the season, I am looking forward to the festivities. Here’s to spending a little less time at the office and a little more time embracing the season.

In other news, Raevyn and I have decided to take the money we would have spent on one another and put it towards the components for new computers for ourselves. We’ve decided to futureproof ourselves as much as possible and build shiny new Intel Core i7-based gaming rigs, complete with quality parts that will give us the ability to play some of the wealth of video games that have been released so far this fall. Suffice to say there’ll be some gaming goodness under the tree this year.

The work situation isn’t really going anywhere. It’s still absolutely maddening at worst and amusedly annoying at best, but I’m keeping my options open. Freelance writing is doing me well right now, let’s see if I can drum up some more of that. If not, I wouldn’t mind picking up and moving to a place like New York City or Seattle to look for jobs in my current field; I’m sure I could find something in one of those two cities that doesn’t either involve working directly for the government (not that that’s a problem, it’s just difficult to break into if you don’t know someone or aren’t being recruited by a contractor) or doesn’t require a security clearance that I don’t have. If anyone has any ins for federal employment though (especially now after the election!) let me know.

But back to the holidays. I think I need to pick up a couple more bottles of wine, jugs of cider, and some mulling spices. I want to make this house smell like the holidays, and drink like it’s the holidays as well. Maybe I can get some tidying up done while we decorate. Let’s do this thing.