How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

I'm sorry. Could I suffer from a worse case of writer's block?

I swear, it's not like I have nothing interesting going on in my life right now; but for some reason, none of the thoughts running through my head have made it to print, at least not in a way I'd deem intelligible, or entertaining.

My weekend with my mom was fun. Or, it was as fun as five days could be with two people in a one-bedroom apartment, when one of those people's internal clocks is set to EST and wants to wake up at 5 AM and go to bed at 8 PM, and the other person doesn't. Guess which person I was?

When I wasn't bitching and moaning, we did manage to have a lot of fun. We saw two movies, Borat and Bobby, and had two celebrity sightings straight from TV Land - Meredith Baxter Birney and Danny Pintauro (not together, though that would have been amusing). (I should mention that I've had some good celebrity sightings lately, including Sean Hayes at Fred Segal a few weeks ago and Christian Slater at the airport just a few weeks before that.)

I drove my mom back to the airport on Saturday, did some errands, and then just came back to my apartment and chilled, enjoying the silence. Although, and I noticed this the last time she came, my apartment seems weirdly empty and lonely in the hours most immediately following my mother's departure, almost like the apartment itself misses her presence.

I woke up on Sunday morning, decided I really needed to get my act in gear and book my tickets home for Christmas. I am taking the week off between Christmas and New Years, and taking myself on a tour of the Northeast. I'm flying into Boston on Christmas Eve and staying in town for a few days. Then, on Wednesday or so, I am going to make my way to New York to see the boy, and hopefully make a pit stop in Stamford along the way to see my friend Rebecca. I'll be in NYC for about a day, but then the boy and I and a bunch of his friends are headed up to Vermont for a ski weekend, which I am ABSOLUTELY SO EXCITED FOR, I can't even tell you. I love to ski, and don't get to do it nearly as much as I'd like; to be in a condo with him and his friends for New Years instead of dealing with the usual city scene that night is more than ever could have predicted for myself last year at this time. Although I find it ironic that I live so close to some of the greatest skiing in the country, and I'm headed all the way back to the east coast to do so. But then again, the act of me dating someone in New York only after I moved away is ironic in itself, so take THAT, Alanis Morissette.

Plane tickets booked, I decided to take advantage of the (kind-of) nice day yesterday by going for a hike in Runyon Canyon. I got to La Brea with no problem, and then sat in traffic, at one single stop light, not moving an inch, for 35 minutes, as everything north of Sunset closed down for the Hollywood Christmas Parade. ARRGH. When I finally turned around, I decided to pop into Target, but that was a complete madhouse as well, although I did manage to buy everything I needed and still get out of there in half the time that I had sat in traffic. I do believe things happen for a reason though, and I think I was supposed to not hike yesterday, because, instead, I went to the gym, and had the best run I've had in a long, long, time. I ran almost 7 miles in an hour, and while my time used to be much better, I really haven't had the patience or the desire to run so much at all lately. I left the gym feeling invigorated, that things had worked out the way they were supposed to.

I came home to a suddenly COLD apartment, turned my heat on for the first time all year, and settled in for a cozy night of Whole Foods and Desperate Housewives. As I curled up on my empty couch with a glass of wine in one hand and a new photo album to start in the other, I thought to myself how much I truly have to be thankful for. Even if I can't always put it into words.