ukrainian bell carol

I'm still listening to Christmas music. Today was a Christmas preparation day -- I spent the whole day cleaning, shopping, and talking to my family about shopping. I was quite productive, but now I'm exhausted and I didn't do anything that I should have done for work. As a result, I'm going to go to bed now so that I can get up tomorrow in time to drag myself south for a day completely full of meetings.

I'm over half done with my Christmas shopping (by dollar amount, if not by number of packages), even though the physical shopping I did outside the apartment today ended up being all for me. I walked down to Union Square and spent a couple of hours in the mall and in the shops around the square. The economy is clearly taking a toll on the holiday shopping season. For one, even though there are only two more weekends left before Christmas, and even though Union Square is one of the major shopping destinations in the entire city, it didn't feel any more crowded than a summer weekday afternoon. I didn't have to stand in line to check out at Victoria's Secret, when normally a stop there in a normal December would have resulted in an agonizingly long line.

It's too bad I'm not in the market for clothes right now, though -- the sales were amazing in that "it must be the end of the world" kind of way. The reason I went shopping was to look for a dress for my company holiday party. I thought about wearing the dress from my senior prom, but even though it fits and I like it, it's perhaps a bit too formal and it's also ten years old, so perhaps it should retire. I ended up getting a cute dress that was originally priced at $185 for only $22 at Bloomingdale's. I also got a bathrobe, to replace my college bathrobe, at Victoria's Secret for $29.50 (marked down from $70), and a pair of black boots from Nine West for $43 (marked down from $119). It's crazy that I got a dress, a bathrobe, and a pair of boots for less than the original price of either the dress or the boots alone.

By the time I carried my purchases back to my apartment, the physical exhaustion from shopping and the guilty exhaustion from avoiding eye contact with the homeless people by averting my gaze through my overpriced Bulgari sunglasses threatened to derail the rest of the day. But, I persevered; I talked to my parents while cleaning my kitchen and bathroom, vacuumed, took care of my finances, and generally tidied up. I need to wash some towels, go grocery shopping, and do the rest of my Christmas shopping this week, but in general I'm in pretty good shape.

I hope you all had lovely Pearl Harbor anniversaries! Goodnight!