Happy Christmas Eve! It's a pretty low-key affair at my house; we have Grandpa over, nice dinner, everyone opens one present (except for Grandpa, who opens all of ours, obviously). No cleaning freak-outs, no preparing a shit-ton of food. It's actually rather pleasant.

We're under a winter storm watch, which, if it had been colder yesterday we'd already be under at least a foot of snow since it rained all day; thankfully, we haven't even gotten to sleet yet, so maybe we'll luck out and miss most of it. I don't mind snow proper, but they were calling for what was variably described depending on what channel I was watching as "wintry mix," "icy mix," and "icy mess." No, thank you!

Aaaaaand here's some random pictures.



Loooook at them being so cute! They didn't really get along those first few weeks, but now they're total bffs and nap together all the time, when they're not trying to rip each other's throats out in aggressive cat playtime.



Of course that's where he's sleeping.



Princess models her new winter coat.



The Christmas village! (Click for full size.) We finished it last year but I didn't get pics; we bought unpainted white plaster houses, like with the Halloween village, and painted them ourselves. It's unfortunate how the huge size and flash point out every single tiny flaw, because most can't be seen with the naked eye. It looks really snazzy IRL.

Hope everyone had a very merry Christmas. We ended up not going to see Benjamin Button that day (Laura was too tired), so it was a very lazy, sleepy day, wherein no one got dressed and flitted between the computers and TVs. I was very impressed that Laura and my parents, independently, got me the other two CSI computer games I didn't have. I also laughed when I opened a DVD my parents got me - Some Like It Hot - just before Sarah opened the DVD I got her - Some Like It Hot. Now we can fulfill our dream of watching Some Like It Hot at the same time, but on different TVs.

Friday we did our annual trip to Half Price Books and a Chinese buffet, which is always very welcome, but moreso this year after, like, three weeks of eating ham. Yesterday we saw Mr. Button, and I thought it was a wonderful movie. Normally a movie like that would be too long for me, but I expect it and am prepared for it from Fincher, and honestly, there wasn't much I could think of that could have been cut out.

Since I've been shut up in the house for pretty much the last week - aside from Friday, when it was inexplicably 60 degrees outside, it's been well below freezing, icy, and snowy - I've had a lot of time to try to occupy myself around the house. Therefore, icons!

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Last day in Texas. Laundry, packing, cleaning. I finished the first draft of my King Arthur script this morning and sent it off, and we TAs turned our grades in yesterday, so that's that.

I'm a little bummed, because of the six of us in the film lab class, I was one of the three scripts that didn't get picked to go on to the next semester. They had a selection committee, and one of the people on it, at my reading, asked, "What if her dad WASN'T a serial killer?" Which since the log line of my film is, "A young woman returns home and investigates her mother's death, beginning to suspect that her father was the infamous serial killer who terrorized her home town..." I kind of knew then that maybe I didn't have the best shot. But my professor gave me some good notes, and told me that the committee did think that I had the best shot of actually being able to sell my script, which was good to hear. I'll do a rewrite over the break anyway, since this will probably be my thesis script, since I put the most work into it.

UT Laura and I are going to develop a TV pilot next spring in homeroom, so we're using the break to do development on that project, mainly focusing on writing the Bible. I don't want to say anything about it just yet since it's way, way in the early phases of knocking ideas around, but we think it's a pretty cool concept thus far. And, I'll probably do a second draft of my Arthur script, because I'd like to enter it in festivals as well, since it's a genre thing and I'd like to come out with two polished(ish) scripts instead of just one. I also might see if I can do two scripts in revision class in the spring instead of just the serial killer one, although that may be biting off more than I can chew.

Ergo: busy break. Which is good in a way, since a lot of the time I just lay around on breaks and start feeling useless and depressed, and it's actually not all that much writing if I spread it out over the month (like, two or three hours a day, which seems like nothing when I was writing eight to ten hours a day during the crunches this semester).

Flying home tomorrow morning, yay! I think this is the latest I've headed back for Christmas, although I realized today that I have no idea what I'll be doing next year and how breaks and the like are going to shake out, so I've determined to enjoy this break as much as possible.