The One In Which We Acquire a Dog...

...but only temporarily. Nick and Monica (see the Thanksgiving post) headed to the hospital on Friday morning for the birth of their son (who finally arrived this morning), so their dog has come to stay with us for a few days. Matt and I have been having a wonderful time with our canine houseguest (the cats are a little nonplussed, but being pretty good sports about the situation), and we're looking forward to having her with us for most of the week.

I'm not sure whether she thinks that our apartment is too cold or that our throw blankets are snuggly.

We finally got around to decorating for Christmas this week. Since we didn't want to spend very much acquiring big decorations that we'd just have to either ship back or get rid of in a few months, we kept things fairly minimalist this year. We did hang our stockings and put up an improvised Advent calendar (by the time we'd thought to purchase one, the stores had sold out -- I suppose that's what we deserve for delaying our Christmas observances until after Thanksgiving...)

I covered all the paintings and pictures in the apartment with inexpensive wrapping paper, and then used them to improvise our decorations. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out...

We debated for a long time, but ultimately decided not to buy a Christmas tree this year -- even the smallest trees are pretty expensive, and don't last very long at all. (Rather than the blunt-cut stump I've always seen in the US, the trees here have their trunks sharpened into a point and inserted into a solid stand. The tree would be completely dried out within days.) BUT, rather than forego the entire tree experience, we decided to bring a bit of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special into our apartment and decorate the ficus:

I put about six feet of tinsel and four felt stars on there...I'm really not sure it could stand up to too much more!

We also celebrated Matt's birthday this week! We spent his birthday night wandering downtown, including to Notre Dame to see their beautiful, gigantic Christmas tree and the Illuminated Nativity scene. We finally decided we were hungry and a little bit cold, so we picked a nearby restaurant for dinner. The food wasn't fantastic, but the ambiance was fun: there was a live pianist and both our champagne and dessert came with sparklers. (The French seem to use sparklers rather than candles for birthday cakes.)

Later in the week, I tried for a little taste of home: Texas Sheet Cake, from Ellen's fantastic recipe. I think I managed to over-sweeten the frosting (miscalculated the imperial-to-metric conversion for the sugar), but overall it came out pretty well!


For me, classes wrapped up last week, so all that's left is one week of exams. Matt's semester continues until February, but he gets two weeks off for Christmas and New Year's. We're headed off to Geneva on Friday afternoon, but are coming back to Paris for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We're still figuring out where to go for New Year's; I had been hoping we'd be able to go to Greece, but we're going to wait until things settle down a bit. (Since we'll be away, we likely won't be able to update the blog until we're back home next Wednesday.)