Story problem.

Pantone divided by E.T. = the love child of brioche and fruitcake. SemperFi gave me a delicious and ridiculously expensive PanETtone for Christmas today. (I suspect it came from Neiman Marcus. He accidentally left the price sticker on the hangtag, and I almost swallowed my tongue.) I had not brought breakfast from home as I normally do. Nor was I in the mood to get breakfast from the deli, because we were having our Christmas potluck today, and I knew I was in for sodium overload. (I'd eaten half a Costco muffin right after waking and before I finished binding off the second Fetching and working the thumbs on both.) I spent about an hour and a half, between legitimate tasks, weaving in the ends this morning, so that I would have it to the admin in charge of Secret Santa well before our lunch hour.

About an hour before lunch, I carefully unboxed the panettone and cut myself a sliver. May I state for the record that panettone is to any fruitcake but my late mother's as blackthorne needles are to craft store bamboo needles. Or cashmere is to hemp. Or Trader Joe's triple ginger cookies are to the scalloped-edged rock-hard ginger cookies of my youth.

You get the idea.

Lunch was amazing. I took small portions of almost everything that was offered. (This is not to imply that I took gargantuan portions of some items, although I was certainly tempted.) The only biofeedback I got was about 3:00 this afternoon, when my body realized that someone had spiked the mac and cheese with finely diced jalapenos, and what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks had I done to us?

Thankfully, part of the final gift from my Secret Santa was a package of TJ's dark chocolate covered ginger. I ate a couple of those every few minutes until my innards stopped grumbling. The rest of the afternoon passed without incident.

I bought the first item for the family gift bags after work. The first place I looked for it had sold out during the day, but a kind man called one of the other locations, and they had enough for my purposes. He told them to save them for "Christmas Lights" (me) because I was wearing my jingle bell earrings and a necklace of miniature Christmas lights that a different Secret Santa gave me last year or maybe the year before.

I smuggled everything into the house, toasted an English muffin and slathered it with the last of the Wholly Guacamole, washing it down with buttermilk. My meal was interrupted briefly by caroling from my ward's youth with one of their leaders, a Christmas card from the RS presidency, and a plate of cookies. I ate one and gave the others to Middlest, as the idea of eating anything sweet right now just feels rather gross.

I'm sure I will have recovered by morning.

But for now I am going to play one last hand of solitaire and stagger off to bed. I was up until 12:30 last night, knitting my fingers to the bone. No further knit will happen tonight, even if I downloaded a pattern for fingerless gloves that Middlest wants, to Ravelry. I should feed the dishwasher, but that's just going to have to wait until tomorrow morning.

My name is E.T., and I am phoning home.