It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

It snowed almost non-stop in Detroit this weekend, and since I didn't have to drive anywhere, I loved it! This morning I had to LITERALLY shovel snow off my car, but roads were decent and I made it to work alive so all is good.

I only have 5 (well, 4 and a half really) more days of work before going home for Christmas and then to DC for New Years! I have a countdown on my cubicle wall. Can't wait. Work is zero percent stressful, because I do what I want and am not ever busy, so I'm not really looking forward to this as a break like I usually did during college. Still, I want to see my family and celebrate with them for Christmas. And I want to see all of CARTRZ for the after Christmas fun!!

Here is my countdown! I just took this on my webcam. Don't worry I'm on lunch break.

This week for Catholics is all about joy, because we light the pink candle on our advent wreaths (the rest are purple) and call it Guadete Sunday/week! Guadete means rejoice. We like Latin. We also like joy. Really, who doesn't? And even though I'm not crazy about the color pink and think yellow would have been a much happier choice, I still love this week and how close we are getting to Christmas, another time that I love!
Oh, also I got in to grad school last week! So that is a great reason to be joyful! I still have to figure out money to pay for grad school, but I will worry about that when it is "Worry about money week".

These two are pretty joyful

Yesterday, my housemates and I got super crafty. We've been pretty crafty all month, because we are poor and need to make a lot of our Christmas gifts. Probably if people were to watch us on Sundays this month, they would think we were Martha Stewart clones. I am bad at some crafts that involve drawing or coloring, because I am impatient, but I have my sewing machine in Detroit so I can do fabric related crafts and show off my really limited sewing skillz. I helped Laura make mittens and an earband out of old sweaters while Rachel knit and Denise watched. It was adorable. I am also learning to knit, with Rachel's help, and I really like it. It's a thing I can do while I watch TV so I feel productive. And we all know I love to watch TV.

I can't show you the after picture of this craft because it is a gift

We also had our community outing this weekend on Saturday. We do this once a month and it's usually going out to dinner and/or doing some activity with our board of directors from the parish. We were going to go to a German restaurant but the snow was so crazy we decided to keep it local and just go to our director's house for pizza and games. Also I got to drink wine out of a mug. I might have drank too much, gotta keep warm somehow! It was a lovely weekend all around, and if I was a better photographer I would have taken pictures of how beautiful the snow was.

This is a picture Ashley took of Laura sledding. SNOW.

At work lately I have just been going to doctor's offices to tell the office managers and nurses about NSO (this is the organization I work for). We have mental health services, but not everyone who needs them knows about them, so I am supposed to be responsible for marketing and outreach. I'm not so sure I'm doing it right, but I try. Anyway, I feel like mostly what I do at my job is learn about all of the difficulties that people face in getting all their basic needs met. Families need to call around to so many places and even with a case manager helping them it's hard to find work, housing, food, and to deal with teachers and administrators at schools. It gets me pretty sad sometimes, but other times I feel really helpful because I can help by looking up resources or helping with phone calls because I am less busy than the social workers in my office. Anyway, this is a job for Zacky and Rachael: fix America so life isn't so hard for poor people. Maybe just make it so poor people aren't poor anymore. That sounds easy enough.

Well I really didn't have a theme for this post, I just wanted to say things to you. I have a really cute picture of my niece in the snow but I can't post it here, so maybe I'll text it to y'all later.

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS.