Some genius in my company decided that the second week of December was an ideal time to have territory reviews, with the sales force coming into the factory. Of course, before you can go up and tell all the big shots what you've been doing and what you think you're going to do in the coming year, you have to spend hours and hours putting slides and facts together, and practicing your delivery so you look semi-professional. And no one told the customers that we were otherwise occupied, so they kept calling and demanding our time.

In other words, it's been a very busy couple of weeks. But now that little bit of torture is done, and I'm ready to get into full gear on Christmas. In the next couple of days I have to:

1. Buy presents for everyone left on my list, which now consists of the extremely difficult and the impossible.
2. Bake another 20 or so batches of cookies.
3. Box up about half of those and send them off to the factory. (They were asking when they'd be getting their Christmas cookies when I was there.)
4. Take most of the rest to my customers.
5. Find my American Express card, which is somewhere with the ticket from the airport parking lot. It was very late when I got home, and I have no idea where I put it. I discovered it was missing tonight when I bought some ink for my printer.
6. Go see my grandson's screamer Christian rock band (I wish I were kidding) play at a coffee house Friday night.
7. Go see the Little Angel's church play Saturday night.
8. Convince the Professor that he wants to get the outside lights up before Christmas.
9. Go back to this wonderful little church we attended last week. Being the kind of Episcopalians who think they should never have changed the prayer book, we have been pretty bad about going. But we discovered that the closest church to us uses the old service at 8:00 AM. Prof and I went last week, and right after communion we looked at each other and said WHY haven't we been doing this? So we're going to get back in the habit of going every week.
10. Pick up breakfast for one of my distributors and have it there by 7:30 tomorrow. They are moving to a new building, and when I offered to help, the clever branch manager told me I could be of the most help by bringing them breakfast.
11. Clean my house. Visit my mother. Make my grocery shopping list. Cure cancer. Bring about world peace. You know, just a normal too-much-to-do kind of weekend.