Trapped

Sunday morning was spent working on coloring the borders of our homemade Corny Christmas cards.  Comforting work, that -- the patterns are embossed, so all I have to do is embellish them with my red and green Sharpies.  This is followed up by dabs of silver dots all around the frame (my favorite part, of course).

As usual, I'm about two weeks late in all of this, but I've grown so used to always being behind with my Christmas cards that this has become part of the tradition.

In the afternoon we drove down to Manteca under gray skies and picked up the Corny photos from Costco and did some other shopping.  By the time we were done, it was almost four o'clock.  In our hurry to get home before dark, we decided to skip grocery shopping at our favorite market in Modesto and stop at a smaller one that was on the way home.  It was a noble plan, but was quickly doomed to failure when we ran into a former neighbor whom we hadn't seen in about ten years -- a nice man, but one who obviously felt that he needed to catch up on the entire ten years.  It took about 45 minutes before for Bruce and I to finally gracefully (I hope) escape.  You can imagine my horrow when I ran to into him again in the cheese section.  Fifteen long minutes later (in which I uttered about 10 words to his 10,000), we finally made it to the checkout line.  He cheerfully followed us, talking the entire way.  When we'd paid the cashier we got in a final "Merry Christmas!" and then swiftly pushed our cart out to the parking lot.  Our not-so-laudable goal was to be gone before he came out.  Not exactly the Christmas spirit, I know.  But the man is cheerful, happily married and simply loves to talk (listen -- not so much).  

Neither one of us said a word as we drove home in the dark, but it was lovely listening to Christmas music.