After getting back from New York, I was so looking forward to a relaxing, long Thanksgiving weekend. My first weekend as a Los Angeleno. I'd been given the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off work given that we'd just had eight days of work straight, so I was counting on a five-day weekend. Wednesday was gorgeous, although I can't remember what I did with myself. I know that Ben and I felt very close after our first week of being apart after living together for a month and a half.

Thanksgiving Day was equally beautiful, though we didn't have much opportunity to enjoy it. Ben spent the day slaving in the kitchen, cooking an 18 pound turkey, with stuffing. We'd been invited to Bill and Stefan's for Thanksgiving dinner with the gang, but somehow Ben ended up providing the main course. Getting it cooked was one thing; transporting this vast thing in the back of my SUV up into the Hollywood Hills quite another. My car has stunk like a poultry slaughterhouse ever since.

After years of dreading holidays like Thanksgiving, since it always meant a choice between being alone or eating with people I didn't particularly care about much, it was nice to look around the dining room table and see the candlelit faces of Ben and my new friends. Afterwards, we drove home and got ready to go out dancing at a special Thanksgiving event called Avalon, downtown. As usual, Ben and I had a great time despite the music, which was nothing special.

The rest of the weekend was very sleepy. We went to the gym, went to movies, did our Christmas shopping. At one store in West Hollywood, we were the only customers apart from Kevin Costner and his female friend (his wife?) He even spoke to me in that silky twang of his, when I asked if he minded if we buy our one item before the shop clerk wrapped the $450 dollar's worth of candles they were buying.

Oh, speaking of celebrities, we went to see "Alexander": it was as bad as the reviews made it out to be. A horribly, drawn-out, preachy preamble with a doddering Anthony Hopkins, and then two and a half hours of flatly paced, bloody mayhem. One of the few redeeming features was the tenderness in the scenes between Jared Leto (as Hephaiston) and Colin Farrel. It must be the first huge American picture to portray homosexual characters as bonafide, physical heros. Anyway, the gorgeous Jared Leto was in my first class cabin coming home from New York last Tuesday.

Living together in such intimacy with somebody is still relatively new to me, and I find I'm still going through some adjustments. Four days with Ben at home was beginning to make me feel surprisingly claustrophobic, and on Sunday night, when Ben had to work, I found I wanted to get out of the house alone. I'd also found, over the course of a weekend where I did a lot of the driving, that Ben's tendency to want to correct my behavior is becoming more pronounced. It mostly made me laugh, like when he said "honk" just as I was reaching for my horn. But on one occasion, while we were waiting for Bill and Stefan to join us for lunch, he took a "corrective" action in front of the host, which I felt was undermining. I didn't make a big scene about it at the time, apart from telling him that it didn't make me happy (he apologized). But we had a good talk about it in our couples' therapy session on Monday.

I haven't mentioned so far that we're in couples' therapy. No, it's not because we have major problems; it's because I want us to avoid having major problems in the future. Ben had been initially resistant to the idea, thinking that it made us look like we were in crisis or something. Besides, he's never had therapy of any kind, so isn't a big believer in the process. But he went along with it for my sake, and I think by now he sees the value in it. And it's amazing what you learn. In our discussion on Monday, I realized that it's very hard for Ben not to be overly directive. He runs a lab full of graduate students, and spends the whole long workday being directive. I think it's difficult for him not to carry that behavior into his private life. But it's something he's going to have to work on. I've already had one boyfriend who undermined me in public; I don't want another.

Another thing we did over the weekend was take a second look at a house in Laurel Canyon, on a quite lane that ends on top of a bluff. It's a three bedroom, two bath, with huge decks, and a two-hundred-and-seventy degree view of downtown LA and the surrounding hills. It was a magnificent, clear day, and you could see Mt Wilson capped with snow tens of miles away. By Tuesday we'd placed an offer on the house, and just this evening, after a couple of counter-offers, we agreed to a price, and the house is hours, assuming our finances come together like they look like they should.

If somebody had told me in February that by the end of the year I'd be buying a million-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills with my boyfriend, and two big dogs, I'd have thought them crazy. What a surprising year.