Things that are lining up this week

Total Lunar Eclipse
E. Weiß: "Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt" Published, 1888.

Today there will be a gift wrapping assembly line in my dining room. Of course, I'll do none of it until Stinkerbell McBookeater goes home this evening. She's coming around noon, but if I wrap any gifts while she's here, she'll unwrap them all until she finds something that interests her. When she was little, it took awhile to find humor in that particular behavior because the others would protest when they didn't have anything to open themselves. This kid loved to celebrate and in her mind, every party was all about her--especially the gifts. Instead, we'll bake a few cookies while she's here. She loves doing that, too. Well, not exactly the baking part, but the snitching of cookies part.

I'm entering the second half of my long 4 day weekend work respite. While I usually try to keep up with at least reading the work obituaries (sick, I know), I can't this time. My laptop went in for an upgrade on Friday and the I.T. guru took my Blackberry, too. I thought I'd have withdrawal symptoms, but until I wrote this, I actually didn't think once about checking my emails. Since I get about 30 work related missives a day, there will be a price to pay on Tuesday with a minimum of 90 emails to sift through and answer. I expect I'll be a little busy that day. My girlfriend told me she deletes all of her work emails without reading any of them even though once in awhile, she deletes something she was supposed to have read and responded to in a timely manner. I wish I was that brave.

Speaking of Tuesday and things that line up, did you notice the full moon and the winter solstice have lined up for the first time in 11 years? Add the full eclipse of the moon, and that's an alignment that's not occurred since 1638. Evidently, I paid no attention to the calendar when selecting my long weekend off and chose that exact day to return. I'm trying hard not to worry about it beforehand, but I'm a superstitious wench. Just can't help myself. Perhaps I should try to put a different spin on this news...maybe it's a good alignment and I should go out and buy those lottery tickets now. The Megamillions jackpot will be $145 million and the drawing is Tuesday.

For a real change this year, I have both Christmas Eve and Christmas off from work. Since starting this job, I've always had Christmas off, but the night before has always been treated like any other weekday and my beloved schedulers have always loaded me up to prove they're heartless a point. I'm 2 for 2 in having someone die on Christmas Eve, too, so this is an especially welcome line up for me.

How is your week lining up?