Meeting a stranger and more on Christmas

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before but I recently heard an interview on the radio about a blog here in Ottawa called Hello Ottawa.  The writer, Anne, interviews "regular" Ottawans, tells their stories and includes a few pictures.  In the interview the Anne mentioned that she had plenty of volunteers but that transcribing the interviews is a very time consuming task and so she was having trouble keeping up.  I sent her an e-mail offering to help out and we arranged to meet yesterday.  Well, it was tough for me to get out of the house, get on a bus and head to a mall in order to meet someone I'd never seen before but I did it.  She was very nice and I, being incredibly nervous, babbled a bunch of boring nonsense about me and my life but she was very kind and seemed (or at least succeeded in acting) interested. 

So she will be sending me MP3 files of the interviews and I will transcribe them and return them to her.  I'm thinking that it should be fairly interesting because the articles she has already posted are interesting peeks into peoples lives.  I just have to watch that I don't put a great deal of pressure on myself to do the transcriptions quickly.

On another note, D has decided that she is going to celebrate Christmas properly this year with decorations and everything so I'm going to try to.  Decorations are a sore spot for me because everyone is keen to put them up and have them to look at but I invariable end up taking them down and packing them up again.  (John would help but I usually do it while he's at work).  The only parts of the decorations I really love are the little coloured lights and the shiny tinsel garland so I'm going to focus on that, but I haven't really formulated a real plan yet.

I have pretty much decided what we will get for Jessica and Derek.  It will be one gift each but I think it's something they will really like and might actually surprise them.  Each gift is rather expensive so there will only be the one really and maybe a few little things so I hope they won't be terribly disappointed.  I know Jessica prefers to receive more little things than one big one but I just don't know her well enough to come up with a bunch of ideas for her.  I also think that although stockings used to be one of my favourite things when they were little, they have become receptacles for a bunch of crap from the dollar store, candy and toiletries that they would've got anyway.  No of which are really gifts and the stockings definitely don't contain any surprises anymore.  I'm sure you've guessed by now that I want to do away with them all together but I'm not sure how well that will go over but if they both want stockings they can do them for each other.  Hey, that's a great idea!  That's what I will suggest.  They do stockings for each other instead of gifts and we will give them the one biggish thing each. 

Anyway, the important thing here is that I've decided that I will try to make Christmas what I want (thanks Spanner and Sharon) and not be shamed or guilted into creating something for others that will make me miserable.