well, despite the fact i miscalculated horrifically with my finances (thus leaving me with $40 until next week) i had a wonderful weekend and it has a lot to do with my roommate. i suspect that 20 years down the road, we will still be best friends and we will be loud old women drinking spiked tea and making lewd jokes about big burly men. people will *think* we have a boston friendship, but those people would be wrong. we're just so weird and dorky, no one else gets us.

anyway, christmas. i took my bad back and my bad sciatica to evanston with my roommate and we saw 'sideways' (yay for mature, funny, painful and well-written dramas). then we drove to andersonville to get our tree. we saw it immediately - so tall and full it was the platonic ideal in trees. i think we both stamped down any pangs we felt during the tree-buying. when the sky is dark indigo and the air is crisp like a salt cracker, there is nothing more romantic than buying a tree, running your fingers over needles and branches, thrusting your face right in the tree. but we ignored all that. so, lickety split, it was cut, wrapped and strapped to the top of A--'s car. we dragged it upstairs and jammed it on our stand and just gazed at it, like it was a newborn.

whee, our tree!

so we let it rest that night. quite frankly, my back and lower regions were so mysteriously wrenched that i couldn't have handled a bulb if my life depended on it. still, i managed enough strenghth to go on a date that ended surprisingly well. i will blame the 5-minute necking in his front seat on all that tree business.

so now the tree is decorated - it is all golden, peachy and coppery beauty. it's so tasteful and pretty it hardly bears any resemblance to us at all. we have lights, boughs, wreaths, tinsel, lights, ribbons and have i mentioned the lights? (A-- thinks they're sparkly.)

but it's official. christmas is here and we are absolutely drowning in holiday cheer.