Holy shit, a regular blog post on a Saturday! I still have to try and make this quick, as I need to get ready so we can head out to Idaho for the weekend. But that's just the thing -- this event happened at work yesterday afternoon, and after this weekend, the Idaho trip will overshadow anything else I have to write about. I don't want that to overshadow the Third Annual Holiday Cookie Exchange & Holiday Sweaters event.

(This year they left "Ugly" out of the sweaters part. I guess because everyone's too weak to risk assuming a sweater someone thinks is pretty is actually ugly?)

Anyway you can view the full photo album on Flickr here. Once again I have a record number of photos -- well, for the Cookie Exchanges, anyway; not for all the holiday office parties of any kind that we've ever had -- a history that is slightly convoluted: We had official company-wide holiday office parties from 2003 to 2007 (I took no pictures at the 2003 one); Kibby and Shauna and I started organizing Merchandising Department Holiday Potlucks in 2008 and those lasted four years until 2011; four years we had nothing, until the Cookie Exchanges started with our first holiday season at the new central office location in 2016.

Back in 2008, the office parties were discontinued in lieu of applying the mass of money spent on them to staff gift cards as holiay bonuses. Pretty much all of us were down with that. I always liked the parties, though, and found these "Cookie Exchanges" to be a nice middle ground: office-only; located at the actual office (now actually big enough to accomodate parties of various sizes); smaller in scale and taking place during regular office hours.

A nice touch added this year: sugar cookie decorating! That's what everyone is doing in the above photo that I think could be used on a brochure for working at PCC. The cookie templates were all mitten shaped, but I decorated mine with pink backgrounds ("What a surprise, pink!!" said Marilyn on Facebook) with Christmas Trees on them. I wanted the green and red sparkles to suggest Christmas lights; Im not sure how well that worked. I sure got lots of compliments on them though -- I made one for Shobhit and one or myself.

The official "event" was scheduled in the office kitchen between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon yesterday, but most of us were done within about half an hour. Aimée, the Office Manager, also put out paper templates for the Nobel Physicist Snowflaks she and her son made and were hanging on her desk (get your own template here), and a couple of people were still hard at work on those as 3:00 approached.

Anyway, I took 26 photos, which is a lot for this couple-hour afternoon event -- 9 more than I took last year; 13 more than I took the year before. I got a lot of pretty great shots, though: of cookies people baked and made; of cookies people decorated; of fun holiday sweaters. Go to Flickr to see them all!

That did cut into part of my day, and it did leave a fair amount of work left undone when I am also taking Monday off to travel back from Wallace, Idaho -- but, I also got a fair amount of work done so I'm feeling okay about it all; I certainly got everything done that had yesterday as a deadline.

And then I walked straight to Bill's Off Broadway, for the second month in a row Happy Hour with Laney, for the same reason: it was to be right before we saw a movie at the Egyptian Theatre across the street. Shobhit actually met us there for Happy Hour -- which is why it cost me fifty bucks this time -- but he did not join us for the movie.

The movie was at 6:30, so Laney and I went out of our way to meet at 5:15 to maximize time at Bill's after work. Shobhit met up with us at 5:30. We had a lot of talk to cram into just one hour, so that made it feel kind of frantic. But it was mostly fun too -- a little bit of political talk due to Shobhit, but not too much.

Then, at 6:30, Shobhit broke off to head over to Whole Foods for the day's cheese sale, and Laney and I went to see her first viewing and my second viewing of The Favourite, which I gained a deeper appreciation of upon second viewing. I still hated the fisheye lens cinematography, which Laney didn't even really notice. She really loved it, I think.

Anyway here's a picture of us at Bill's Off Broadway before Shobhit arrived.

[posted 7:40 am]