December to-do list

The past couple mornings it's actually been colder in Houston than in New York, and it's taken all my willpower not to jump on the next plane home, light a fire (turn on the fire), and get to snuggling with my sweet husband and those adorable kitties. It's a bummer not to be home at this time of year. Last Christmas was so lovely, with family time and friend time and together time, all in our cozy, Christmas-y house. BUT. I'm here until January 1, and CM will be here with me Dec 21–26. Christmas at home is not in the cards. Luckily, NYC is wonderful at Christmas (if it would only SNOW finally), so to cheer myself up I've made a holiday to-do list for the rest of the month.


1. Go to the Big Apple Circus at Lincoln Center

2. Buy a (real) tree and decorate it

3. New pjs on Christmas Eve

4. Watch Love Actually

5. Take a tour of department store windows

6. Drink peppermint hot chocolate with whipped cream (maybe simultaneously with #5)

7. Check out NYC's Christmas markets

8. See movies (tentative list, in no particular order: Les Mis, Skyfall, Lincoln, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, The Hobbit, This is 40)

9. Exchange stockings with CM

10. See the Rockettes  (Check. And it was everything I could have dreamed.)

11. See the tree lit up at Rockefeller Center


What's missing from this list? Anything we shouldn't miss during the holidays here?

Taschen

Do you guys know about Taschen, a German publisher of amazing coffee table-worthy books on art, design, and travel? The Strand has a special mezzanine devoted to Taschen books, and whenever I browse I always want to take them all home with me (it's probably a good thing I don't actually live here). They're mostly pretty affordable (except when they're not), and they're beautiful.

When we were in Brussels, we happened to pass a Taschen store, and CM and I were mesmerized by the variety of books. I'm dying to visit all the stores. Don't you love bookstores?

If I was planning a Taschen Christmas, here's what I would buy my loved ones:


For Mama Bossy:

Design for Obama
A collection of posters from the 2008 campaign.











For Papa Bossy:

Early Travel Photography
The photographs of Burton Holmes, who took incredible travel photos at the beginning of the last century.









For CameraMan:

Audrey Hepburn
CM's favorite.












For myself:

4 Cities
Pocket-sized guides to Paris, New York, London, and Berlin. Why don't I own this already?

Which ones would you put on your wish list?

Of-the-month

It is practically impossible to choose presents for my mother. She doesn't wear things like scarves or jewelry. She's only mildly excited by bath products. Her cupboards are full to bursting with dishes and kitchen gadgets. For birthdays and Christmases, I tend to fall back on the standard books, CDs, and DVDs, with the occasional tickets to something thrown in.

Last Christmas I tried a variation. I gave her one book and told her it was the first monthly installment of a Book-of-the-Month Club. There's no formal club, of course—I've just been sending her a book I like once a month through Amazon. We tend to have a lot of the same tastes in books, and I love choosing what to send each month. Sometimes we talk about what we've read and sometimes we don't, but I like knowing that we have these shared books in common.

I'm enjoying my DIY Of-the-Month Club, but I'm intrigued by these other, more organized clubs as well—perfect for gifting (or treating yoself).

Birchbox: For $10 a month, you get a box of deluxe samples of beauty products every month. Perfect for the girly girls in your life.

Bacon of the Month: Yes…just…yes. Perfect for the bacon lovers in your life. So, everyone.

Mistobox: Delivers special artisan coffee samples every month. Seems like a good way to enable the caffeine addicts in your life.

Harry & David: The original Fruit-of-the-Month Clubs. I used to ask for this every year for Christmas, and every year my mother would remind me that I am never anywhere for 12 months straight to receive crates of fruit. (This is, oddly, the same argument CM gives for not letting me get a kitten.) So practical. Sigh.

Although it's been said, many times, many ways...

 

 

Merry Christmas to you and yours,

With love from me and mine



Christmas card 2009

Christmas card 2008

Although it's been said, many times, many ways...

Merry Christmas to you and yours,


With love from me and mine


Last year's Christmas card

Standby: Christmas. Christmas: GO!*

We're starting the holiday a little early here in the Bossy-Melear household. Packages from his side of the family have been arriving steadily, and of course we couldn't contain ourselves, so we opened them all. My favorite is a subscription to The New Yorker. I can't wait to pretend I am one. From my $400 a month Houston apartment. Cue smug laugh here.

When it became very clear that the present I had bought for CameraMan was not going to make the trip to Oregon, we decided to open our presents tonight instead. His present took an entire roll of wrapping paper to cover, it was that big (yes, I am wasteful and anti-environment, I know. Don't tell Al Gore.). Mine, on the other hand, came in a very small envelope. His present? A new soundbar speaker system for our TV, which will replace his 5 speakers, subwoofer, receiver, and miles of speaker wire. It's already set up, sounds great, and looks bee-yoo-ti-ful.

My present? 9 private salsa dancing lessons with CM as my partner! I am so excited—I cannot wait to start (and cross of #30 on my list)! The lessons don't start until January 4, and it's a good thing we have to wait, because a few hours ago I stubbed my left baby toe so badly that I became mildly hysterical, laughing and crying and gritting my teeth and swallowing unladylike expletives. Unfortunately, the pain has only gotten worse since the incident, and putting on even the softest sneakers finds me limping around moaning. Not ideal for dance lessons.

Tomorrow we are Oregon-bound for the Bossy Compound, where I'm hoping that a few days of lying around eating cookies in my pajamas will heal my toe and keep me in the Christmas spirit all week long. I hope you all have equally ambitious plans for the holiday.


*Stage management humor: always hilarious.

Dear Santa,

Thank you so much for the present that arrived today. It was wrapped beautifully, but as soon as I saw it, I couldn't help it…I just had to open it right away.

You sure know how to wrap a present. It took a full 2 minutes of concentrated trying before I was able to tear it open, but what was inside was definitely worth the wait.

Please be sure to thank Mrs. Claus for sewing me my beautiful new tiger mouse. There's something about that mouse that makes me a little crazy, but I can't quite put my paw on what it is.

I stayed in bed all morning and part of the afternoon, so by the time I unwrapped my mouse, I was ready to play. The mouse loves to jump in the air and taunt me with its long tail, so I have to bite it and show it who's boss (me). It also becomes a lot more obedient when I hold it tight in my paws and kick it hard with my feet.

All that playing was exhausting, so I'm signing off now to go back to sleeping on the couch next to my mom. Thanks again for my beautiful gift.

Love,
The Bossy Cat

Makin' a list, checkin' it twice

I am just starting to recover from the non-stop party that was our week in Vegas. I had an amazing time, and it was one of the best Christmases on record. I hope yours was, too.

If ever there was fertile ground for crossing off To-Do List items, Vegas is the place. In the spirit of the list, I won't count #1 or #90, even though I did the Vegas version of both. I did, however, find two others to cross off in the short week I was there.

71. Eat snails the next time I'm at a restaurant that has them on the menu.

As an added bonus of our romantic/anniversary(!) dinner at the foot of the fake Eiffel Tower, there were snails on the menu. So I had to eat them. And they were delicious. Kind of anticlimactic, actually, because there was nothing uniquely snaily about them. Mostly they tasted of garlic and pesto. Also, I was hoping they would be served in their shells so I could re-enact that moment from Pretty Woman. You know the one I mean. Instead, they came in a dish (see picture) that made them very easy to eat. CM reminded me that not every single list item is going to be incredibly exciting to complete, and that the point was that I was doing something for the first time. And really, who doesn't like garlic and pesto? I would order snails again.

29. Go to Vegas. Stay somewhere outrageous.

Ummm…done. I went to Vegas. I stayed somewhere outrageous. It was glorious. After going into countless hotels and casinos on the Strip, I can safely say that if I go again, I would stay in the Palazzo again in a heartbeat. The room was luxurious, the view was gorgeous, the service was impeccable, they took our minibar items off of the bill for absolutely no reason, and they gave us free money with which to drink and gamble. How's that for outrageous?

9 down, 91 to go. I think that's pretty respectable, don't you?

Although it's been said, many times, many ways...

Merry Christmas to you and yours,

With love from me and mine

Dreaming

Last night I had the craziest dream.

I dreamed I was eating escargots and moules frites and drinking red wine in a romantic bistro at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I was sitting by the window and I could look out and see the lights of the Tower itself. In my dream, I took an elevator to the top and took pictures of the view from every angle I could find, and then I had dessert: mousse au chocolat and pots de crème and raspberries.

I dreamed I was sitting in a café in the Piazza San Marco. In the distance I could hear a gondolier singing as he paddled his boat along the canal. Street performers walked right by me as I munched on caprese and pizza con salsiccia. After lunch I walked along streets filled with designer boutiques and got lost on purpose.

I dreamed I skipped the rope line at an exclusive nightclub and was ushered right in, where a man in black stamped the inside of my wrist. A guy with an earpiece took my drink order, and a pretty waitress in a skimpy dress brought my drink right away. The music was loud and the lights were dim, so I couldn't tell for sure, but I'm guessing there were probably movie stars in the corner booth.

I dreamed I was in a casino, and someone gave me $100 in free credits for slot machines. In my dream I played it all, in $1 machines and 5¢ machines and 1¢ machines, and then I won $207.

I dreamed I sat at the edge of the water and watched dolphins leaping. I saw a baby dolphin swimming next to its mother, and I looked through a window under the water to see them swimming. I dreamed I wandered through a forest and saw white lions playing, and leopards snuggling, and 5 tiger cubs napping and bathing each other.

Then this morning I woke up, and I was in Vegas, and it was all true.

I could get used to this.

Filing a complaint

Dear Weather Gods,

It may seem like hubris to complain about the weather here in Houston when Mom and Pop Bossy have been snowed in all week in Oregon and the upper Midwest is getting some kind of blizzard tonight, but still, I have to ask…what the hell are you doing up there?

Twice in as many weeks we've been forced to turn on both the heat and the air conditioning on the same day. We've flip-flopped from 78° highs to 30° lows. As I write this, the humidity is 93% and I'm sweating in my short-sleeved shirt. A few days ago, I was wearing my new Thinsulate-lined coat and wishing I'd brought my earmuffs. I've been looking forward to ice skating in Discovery Green since it opened, but when we went there Wednesday evening, the fog was so dense it made my jacket wet and there were puddles of water on the ice. Instead of skating, we went inside for mojitos.

And I assume it's no coincidence that it snowed in Houston for the first time in four years on the one night we were out of town in Dallas, and then snowed in Las Vegas in the heaviest snowfall since ’79 less than a week before we arrive there. I wasn't even dreaming of a white Christmas, but I still don't like being taunted with it. If this is your idea of a joke, I can tell you one thing.

I'm not laughing.

Sincerely,
Humid in Houston

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Christmas at the Bossy house is often a last-minute affair. We usually wait to do much of anything holiday-related until after Papa Bossy's birthday (that's today—happy 60th, PB!), and it is not unheard of for the Christmas shopping to begin on December 23rd.

So when I baked my first Christmas cookies Sunday night and started my shopping yesterday (when it was 75° outside, I might add), I was pretty proud of myself for being ahead of the game. Until I entered the world everyone else lives in and discovered that Target was already out of tree stands and every brand of clear lights with green wire, that is. And then I happened to look at a calendar and realized that we leave for Vegas in less than 2 weeks. Ack!

While our laissez-faire attitude to holiday preparations might lead you to believe Christmas doesn't matter much to the Bossy family, you would be dead wrong. I love Christmas. Adore it, in fact. And I'm especially excited about this one because it's my first with CameraMan (and definitely my first in Vegas). So, in the 12 days left in Houston, here's what I'm looking forward to:

• Baking, baking, and more baking. My KitchenAid mixer is on standby, so please do send me your favorite cookie recipes, either as a comment or to littlemsbossyblog at gmail.


• Ice skating! Outside! In Houston! It's true.


• Attempting to shop efficiently and economically. Ha.


• Getting a tree, carting it home, setting it up, and decorating it.


• Lighting candles with wintry scents like cranberry and pine and vanilla.


• Keeping the Santa Mix on shuffle all day long.


• Stuffing my face with yummy things and washing it all down with hot chocolate.


• A continuation of our Christmas movie/Vegas movie theme. Next up, the original Ocean's Eleven.

Oh, and visions of sugarplums, obvs. What's on your list?

The Ghost of Christmas Present(s)

I'm well aware that Christmas is about so much more than getting presents. There's the whole Peace on Earth thing, spending time with family, decorating the tree, gaining 5 pounds, and the birth of that little guy with all the radical ideas. Here in Oregon, Christmas was about winter weather this year. It snowed all day, letting up just in time for us to go to the movies (Juno—go see it immediately). It was also about whole wheat popovers for breakfast (a family tradition, tweaked to accommodate Mama Bossy's diet), tea, German Christmas goodies, lazing, reading, and laughing about teen pregnancy (at the movies—duh).

But still... look what I got!!

Thanks, Grandma Bossy!

Thanks, Mama Bossy! (girl not included)

Thanks, Mama and Papa Bossy!
(160GB, in case you're wondering, exactly 8 times the size of my previous iPod)

It was a good Christmas, for all the reasons stated (and pictured) above. I hope you all had the best of holidays. Now I'm headed back to Houston, where I'm going to stay put for at least 6 weeks. I'll be back to work tomorrow (Magic Flute).

Happy Boxing Day, everyone.

Tradition, tra-di-tion!

Little Ms. Bossy is an only child. You know the type: the spoiled, overprotected, bratty, spotlight-hogging, I want a pony and I want it now, doted upon, unable to share, doesn't play well with others, overindulged, bossy (hmm), self-centered, self-involved, selfish, for god's sake give her what she wants before she throws a tantrum only child. Yep, that's me.

Please, people, it's Christmas Eve. The least you could do is look mildly surprised. I'm not asking for a loud gasp of shock or anything, but throw me a bone here.

Now that I'm (arguably) grown up and have outgrown the "I want a pony" phase (although I want a baby blue Vespa and I want it now), most of the time being an only child doesn't affect me much. I have friends that are as close as siblings, and I live far enough away from my parents that the excessive doting has decreased by necessity. I even like to think that I've escaped some of my innate only child tendencies. Not bossiness, obvs, but some of the others. Maybe.

At Christmas time, however, the only child reigns supreme, and I am no exception. Elaborate wish lists are created, not so subtle hints are dropped, far too many presents are received, and childhood traditions are kept alive long after childhood is over. I haven't been at my parents' house for Christmas since 2003, but we're falling right into our old holiday routine, starting today.

On Christmas Eve, Papa Bossy makes a nice dinner and then I open two presents: a Christmas movie on DVD, and new pajamas. Then I put on my pajamas and the three of us watch the movie together. This is a tradition.

On Christmas morning, I get up freakishly early (my parents are thankful that the definition of early has changed some over the years), get my stocking, and go through it on my parents' bed. This is a tradition.

It always takes a while to drag my grumbling parents out of bed and get them to come to the Christmas tree. Then I have to wait while they make tea and make their way to the couch, all of which takes much longer than I want it to. This is a tradition.

I pick the presents and the order in which they are opened, usually alternating one of my parents and then me. Anything to wear is immediately tried on, and each present is discussed briefly before moving on. This is a tradition.

Once all the presents are opened, Papa Bossy makes breakfast and we laze around most of the day reading our new books and playing with our new toys. This is a tradition.

It's been a difficult year in the life of Little Ms. Bossy, and Christmas is going squarely in the Making me happy category. Maybe I'm too old to still be a kid on Christmas, but when I go to sleep tonight it's still quite possible that visions of sugarplums will be dancing in my head.

Here's to tradition.

Glühwein and donuts and wurst, oh my

Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year (besides my birthday, of course, and that hasn't caught on as a national holiday yet). I love the decorations, the music, shopping for the perfect gifts, wrapping paper, the whole bit. (As you may have surmised, I don't really "put the Christ in Christmas," if you know what I mean.) Despite my love of the holiday, I am always among those who complain when the decorations go up before Halloween (especially those silly palm trees strung with Christmas lights in Houston) and the radio stations switch to playing nothing but Christmas carols.

But you don't hear me complaining this year. Vienna, she wears Christmas well. First of all, it's cold! And when I arrived here there was snow! falling from the sky! All making it feel very Christmassy. Also, the decorations, while not all tasteful, definitely tend toward the classier side. And then, there's the Weihnachtsmarkt (that's Christmas Market to you). At this time of year, the plaza in front of the Rathaus is filled with stalls selling ornaments, decorations, various beeswax products, and lots of stuffed animals. There is glühwein (so much a part of life here that the German Embassy in the USA has a recipe on their website) and other Christmas punch, chocolates and sweets galore, and savory snacks like baked potatoes and wurst. This is not your typical fair food (no chili dogs to be found).

I spent the evening yesterday wandering through the market. It was cold, but it wasn't that cold (or maybe that's just the glühwein talking). My camera is an excellent travel companion. She keeps me company so that I don't feel awkward walking around by myself, goes wherever I want to go, and often has an eye for things I don't notice right away. Here's some of what we did together last night. More, as always, can be found on my Flickr page.

Potpourri

Rathaus as advent calendar

Mmm... donuts