I’m trying to get to bed, but wanted to keep up with my posting, so here’s another “hit random and share the first ten songs” playlist. These would be the songs I was listening to while writing cards to my “b” friends (those whose last names start with “b,” rather than friends I am less fond of):

1. “Christmas Ain’t Christmas, New Year’s Ain’t New Year’s without the One You Love” — The O’Jays
2. “Getting Ready for Christmas” — Paul Simon
3. “It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way” — Jim Croce
4. “Christmas Eve” — Ringo Starr
5. “My Grown Up Christmas List” — Kelly Clarkson
6. “One Foot in Front of the Other” — Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
7. “Silver Bells” — The Judds
8. “When the River Meets the Seas” — John Denver
9. “All Alone on Christmas” — Darlene Love
10. “Away in a Manger” — Lisa Richards

This weekend will not permit a lot of goofing off, but luckily, much of what I hope to accomplish isn’t tedious, just time-consuming and multitasking-incompatible:

• Finish my Christmas shopping.
• Finalize the Christmas mix.
• Write half my Christmas cards.
• Start the Christmas baking.
• Go to Sarah & Meghan’s Christmas cartoon & cookie party.
• Go for a 15-minute bike ride or walk both days.
• Do laundry.
• Buy cat litter.
• Knit.
• Sleep. (Off to work on that one right now!)

How about you? What’s on your agenda for this final weekend before Christmas?

Three beautiful things from my week past:

1. Neighbors up the street have put hot pink flower lights on their ornamental tree outside. It’s very pretty looking.

2. A friend is in from out of town, and we get to have dinner with her and catch up on how she and her husband are doing.

3. A coworker who’s been out of the office a lot on travel recently notices my haircut. It’s cute, she says, and makes you look taller and thinner.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

I’m in a funk and find myself unwilling or unable or unmotivated to pick up the needles and finish the thumb gusset portion of the fingerless mitt you saw a couple weeks ago. It looks not especially different from that shot, except that I tinked back to where I should have started the gusset increases when I was knitting on it last year and have knit that ripped yarn back up.

Usually when I hit this point in a project it means I ought to be working on something else, but a) I don’t especially want to work on anything else and b) I wanted these gloves done this year so I could wear them for the Christmas season, which now measures three more weeks. So I should just suck it up, buckle down, and finish them. We’ll see how that goes…

The good news is that I have not suffered from similar problems with my reading. Yes, it’s slowed down some from the pace I had earlier this fall, but I’m still on pace to surpass my goal of reading 60 books this year.

Delancey (my apologies for the incorrectly focused shot) was written by Molly Wizenberg, who writes the cooking blog Orangette and co-hosts the food podcast Spilled Milk. I don’t remember how I stumbled across her blog, but I follow a handful of food writers and she is one of them. She has a light style that I appreciate, and when she and fellow food writer Matthew Amster-Burton decided to talk about food in an audio format, Rudi and I took to it right away, enjoying their humor and their willingness to visit any subject, from less common apple varieties to the junk food of the 1980s. I did not read Molly’s first book, but Delancey is a) about opening a pizza restaurant and b) has appeared on several best-of lists, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It seemed particularly timely since Rudi is currently trying to figure out what his career dreams look like from here in our 40s and how to get himself on the pathway to achieve them. I’m hoping that seeing how another couple worked through it will prove enlightening, at the very least, if not helpful.

Not yarning along with Ginny.

While I have hopes in the final two weeks of the year of sharing some of the things I’ve been reading in 2014, I thought it was time to start planning for next year. I know I’ve been woefully bad at blogging books since I did that stint of judging the Cybils two years ago, really, and I’d like to get back to writing about what I’m reading again.

I’d also like to broaden my reading a bit and so am planning to join a few reading challenges/readalongs in 2015 in addition to my annual participation in Carl’s Once Upon a Time challenge.

First up is Play On, hosted by Half-Filled Attic. This challenge asks participants to read a play a month for the first four months of the year, divvying them up by era: ancients, Renaissance, post-Renaissance, and a freebie of your choosing.

This seems reasonable and jibes with my desires to read more non-novels, to read more classics, and to read a Shakespeare play a year. I may be looking for some suggestions as we get closer.

A child of the ’80s, I can’t help but be a fan of John Denver and the Muppets: