Advent-ture

This coming week is the final week of classes for this semester, with finals next week. It is nice to be almost done, though in many ways this semester has gone by very quickly. I've enjoyed teaching my classes, started working with some fabulous students – a graduate student, an honors student, and volunteer research assistants, made progress on getting research projects going, and set up some wonderful new lab space. All in all, it's been a productive and enjoyable semester.

That said, I'm very much excited for the start of the holiday season. Last night we had a potluck dinner for American Thanksgiving (two days late, but since there aren't any days off for American holidays here we have to make do) and ended up having 15 people and a huge amount of food. It was quite enjoyable, and was our first attempt at hosting a party in our new house. Although our house is relatively small, the layout is really quite good for hosting, and I think we'll probably try it again soon.

With Thanksgiving over, I went out shopping today for some new Christmas decorations for outside. I bought some LED lights that I'm hoping Jeff can hang from the roof (they are some ingenious lights that have clips attached to the strands, so hopefully it won't be too onerous or dangerous), some solar walkway lights with candy cane striping on the bases, and some red, green, and gold ball ornaments to hang on some of our trees outside. I will try to get a photo once things are all decorated.

And I have some holiday excitement to look forward to as soon as I'm done with this post. Last Christmas Jeff bought me an advent calendar that is wooden with little doors opening to little cubbies that can be filled with whatever you like. Jeff is filling the odd doors and I'm filling the evens, so tonight is my night to see what Jeff put in door number one for me. I have always loved advent calendars (I love the countdown to Christmas, and having an official start to the countdown), and when I was little we always had the ones that were just paper and had pictures behind the doors. Then at some point I found out about chocolate advent calendars, and the dilemma was that of course I wanted chocolate but those calendars were never as pretty as the paper ones. So now I have a pretty advent calendar, and I don't know whether there will be chocolate behind the doors but I expect some kind of delight, and it feels like the best of both worlds. Who says that Christmas is for kids :-)