Ten Reasons to Celebrate

1. I got my Christmas shopping started and completed in about an hour on Saturday. Then I went home and wrapped all of them. I may be a Last-Minute Man, but I'm the man when it comes to pulling it off.

2. We're getting new carpet installed in our living room today! The benefits of having an older house without a gigantic "great room": our new carpet won't have any seams because the room is 15 feet by 13 feet, and the carpet comes in a 15-foot roll. Suh-weet! This is the room we spend a lot of time in. Now we just need to find a new entertainment center for our TV.

3. My truck was due for a state inspection, so I had it inspected yesterday and got a free car wash. Yippee!

4. I'm wearing clean pants.

5. The sun is shining, and even though we won't have a white Christmas, it's supposed to get really cold. That should help get everyone in a nice holiday mood and provide a good enough reason to sit around inside clutching steaming mugs of some hot beverage.

6. The flu has flown! In fact, today was the first morning I returned to jogging. It was like blowing the cobwebs off my lungs and returning completely to the land of the living. I hate sitting around and doing nothing for too long.

7. Two short work weeks in a row, but not too short. It's tough trying to get all my work done in a really short week (like Thanksgiving week's three days). We're wrapping up on Thursday so we can all have Christmas Eve off, too. Then we'll do the same for New Year's Eve the following week (and then I'll have my regular Monday off, so it will be a four-day weekend!).

8. Bosses who give large, unexpected Christmas bonuses are cool.

9. Wives who like to cook are cool, especially when it's in several different rooms of the house. Yowza.

10. Cutlets who are growing up too fast are cool, and he gets cooler every day.

Merry Christmas, and may your reasons to celebrate outnumber your reasons to moan.