We just got home a little while ago from our son's house where we went for an early brunch, then drove my parents home, installed the storm door in their kitchen and did a little Christmas shopping. I got the last two bottles of lavender linen water for 2 of my girlfriends and some cheery little cocktail napkins with snowmen on them.
It's snowing like mad here now, and from the looks of it, we'll have quite an accumulation by morning. First thing tomorrow I have to take Mom to the audiologist for a new hearing aid as the last one has been missing now for 10 days. Then it's the annual Christmas lunch with my friend Christine, the one who just got back from Dubai on the 7th. She's leaving for her place in Florida on Wednesday until some time in February, so we had to make it early this year. Her life sounds much cushier than it is in reality, though.
I erased almost all of my soap recordings last night to make room for some movies I want on there. The darn machine only holds 50 recorded shows. Is that the norm?
I'm going to take it easy until 5, then pour myself a glass of something yummy and attack the Christmas tree and get that out of the way. Ted's downstairs shredding things. The noise is starting to drive me a little nuts.
I survived the trip up into Maryland yesterday, although I did have moments of slipping and sliding, but had a blast with my dollmaking buddies once I got settled into the class. We finished a little early (4:00 pm), so by the time I loaded up my car, and got back on the road, I made good time, and was home by 6:00 pm. (I had gotten up at 6:00 a.m., so it was still a long day.) My husband and I had carryout dinner from one of our favorite local restaurants.
Today, our son showed up late morning to help my husband put up some outside Christmas lights. As it happened, he arrived just as I was serving breakfast! It was a nice treat to have him eating with us this morning.
I had planned to address an issue with our tree which has turned into an irritating little problem, and then I had wanted to spend the bulk of the day making that pattern/doll that I have to finish for the little girl.
Well, our dog freaks out over certain sounds, and the noise that a stapler makes is one of them. Unfortunately. So, instead of sewing, and repairing the tree, I had to calm the dog so that she wouldn't destroy the inside of the house! I finally managed to shower, and get dressed, but I realized that I needed a second pair of hands to help me with the tree. By then, my son and husband had gone over to Lowes in search of additional lights, so I had to put that on hold again.
The bottom line is that it's now late afternoon, our son has gone back to his place, but will come over for dinner later, and my girlfriend is going to arrive at 5:00 pm for a brief visit, and h'ors d'oeuvres/drinks. In the meantime, I'm going to get my husband to help me with the tree, and then start cooking.
I just hate it when you have a full day planned, and towards the end of it you realize that it all went poof without any of the primary planned tasks having been accomplished.
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Oh, I hear ya, Moore. There have been plenty of days like that around here, too.
Speaking of trees, we had to pay a whopping $50 for the Fraser fir this year. $50!! Isn't that a bit outrageous? It's just a blast fussing and decorating for hours only to have all of it back in boxes and stashed away in less than a month. Not! A girlfriend just called to grouse about her own decorating woes, said she knew I'd sympathise. Oh yes, I do!
This year I'm limiting the Christmas paraphernalia to the living room and dining room. The rest of the house is going to stay plain. I hate it when I find Christmas coasters under the family room sofa in May. Depresses the heck out of me, lol. It reminds me of an old aunt, who, bless her heart, used to leave their Christmas tree up until spring. It was in the den front window, so when we drove up the driveway, it was the first thing we saw. Gave me the willies. Very Miss Haversham-ish.
Every year I swear that I'm going to start leaving notes in people's mailboxes if they don't get those damn decorations down in what I consider to be a timely fashion, something to the effect that if you can't take the damn things down, please don't put them up. I never do that, but I want to. Is there anything more gauche than seeing those awful icicle lights on eaves in June? *shudder*
Oh, and another thing, while I'm whining. What's up with all the blue Christmas lights this year? Is blue the new white/clear? They're everywhere! I don't dislike them, but they don't seem very Christmas-y to me.
KaeEll, the wife of a former Director of the CIA (and I can't think of which one right at the moment) made a confession a couple of years ago that even her super sleuth husband hadn't detected right under his own roof: she was leaving their Christmas tree up all year long!
It turns out that they had a very large living room, with an enormous screen in the corner, at one end. They would always remove the screen at Christmas, and that's where the tree would go. And where it would also apparently stay! LOL...!!!
She confessed that she would simply replace the screen in front of the tree, along about January 2nd. Her husband simply assumed that it had been taken down.
I LOVED knowing this, and if I had a corner that would allow me to place a screen that large in it year-round, I swear that I would begin doing the same darned thing!
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
The only Christmas thing I put up is our tree, and that was only because my mother in law guilted me into it. We won't even be here for the holiday so it irritates me to have to decorate when we won't even be here. In fact we leave the Thursday before Christmas and will not be back until after the first. SO I have done what needs done. Our tree is one of those fiber optic ones so it lights all on its own. We can't do the real tree thing because of allergies that afflict all three of us.
Anyways, today we visited again with an old friend and her little ones. Poor Jolene had to say good bye to them again. But then the birthday party that I had thought was yesterday was actually today and Jolene had a blast playing on the bouncy things that they have. In fact we found out that they charge 8 bucks on Saturday's and Jolene can jump all she wants. Sounds like a good way to spend a cold winter Saturday this winter.
Not much else is going on. Getting ready to check on my Pats game.
Great story about the CIA lady, Moore. I gather she used an artificial tree, then. huh? My dotty old aunt's trees were real, so you can well imagine what they looked like come April. But oh! For a large living room and an unobservant husband! I might actually start enjoying Christmas a bit more then.
At the moment the living room has decoration boxes strewn everywhere. Husband said he just wasn't in the mood today. Says he doesn't even want dinner, just a cup of soup and some soda biscuits. He's in some kind of a funk, so there goes my grand scheme of getting this done tonight. It must be contagious, this Christmas tree thing. When I was filling up the water reservoir in the tree stand, no lights, couldn't see what I was doing, I ended up pouring over a liter of water all over the hardwood floor before I realised it.
Lordy, I do so HOPE that the CIA lady's tree was artificial. LOL...!!!
Up until 1988, I was a Christmas tree purist. I thought that owning an artificial tree was akin to treason; they had no wonderful seasonal, woodsy smell, they always looked artificial, they didn't have that wonderful hint of sap on their needles, and they just felt a bit like cheating to me.
However, by 1988 I was sick of the cost of buying a decent sized, still fresh Christmas tree. Also, I was tired of finding needles under my bare feet in July, of poking myself on prickly, dry needles when taking the ornaments back down again, only a few weeks after I had paid a king's ransom for my pretty, fresh tree, and sick of wishing that I could just bend that darned branch over to the right two inches to make room for the one ornament that didn't seem to fit anywhere.
When Christmas rolled around in 1988, it was the year when my oldest daughter was five, my son was four, and my youngest daughter was only nine months old. Life needed to be a bit easier! One day, a few weeks before Christmas, I happened to see an artificial tree that I could have SWORN was real...!!! Although I gulped at the $200.00 price, I thought that I could make it up with what I would save from NOT purchasing fresh trees over the next few years, and I also rationalized that I could still achieve the "scent of Christmas" by putting other fresh garlands in the house.
I took the plunge, and I have NEVER looked back! Nineteen years later, people still have to go up to my tree, and touch it before they'll believe me when I tell them that it isn't fresh. I don't step on stray needles in July anymore, and I can bend any branch I want to, if it suits my purposes to do so, in order to get all of my ornaments on. We've also probably saved over $1,000.00 on trees since 1988! Not a bad deal...
I'll never buy another fresh Christmas tree. Just the thought of having one cut down for me makes me queasy now when I know how convenient my artificial one has been, and how beautiful. Nope -- Christmas trees are free to stay in the ground from now on, as far as I'm concerned!
However, after nineteen years of devoted service, my tree needs one little repair this year, and this repair has slowed my progress in decorating it. If my repair doesn't work, then I'll simply turn the problem side to the wall, and deal with it after the holidays are over. So, KaeEll, I too have boxes strewn all over the living room, but won't be able to begin pulling out ornaments until tomorrow afternoon, once I'm confident that our repairs have worked. We also decorate a smaller tree in our family room, but it doesn't take very long to do. To tell you the truth, I could probably decorate FOUR large trees with the number of ornaments I have! It's ridiculous... I have ornaments from my childhood, I have aggressively collected additional ornaments since my husband and I first married, I used to ask for ornaments as Christmas gifts (and got them), and then inherited boxes of them (both contemporary and antique) from my husband's parents a number of years ago. I think that I have FINALLY reached the stage where I don't wish for anymore ornaments...
Having said all of that, I think that I'll go to bed now so I can have enough energy to decorate tomorrow. But, I could still SWEAR that I just did all of this only three months ago!
Scary...
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
We just have our little artificial tre ehere. I might splurge and get one of the really nice ones next year, but right now I figure that's and extra eighty bucks that I could spend on the kids .. so of course lol I do. I would love to get one of those screens to put my tree in .. hmmmm lucky lucky girl. However of course right now the kids get into decorating it. I think I might make the husband take it down this year. He hasn't done anything with the tree other than add the star. I could kick him sometimes. At least he was cooking dinner for us since I had to do all of the tree stuff.
My husband isnt even here for Christmas...if it wasn't for his mom making me feel guilty about Jolene not having a tree, she wouldnt have one. Thankfully its fiber optic so I dont have to fuss with the lights. Growing up that was always my dad's job. I was going to dig out my Nativity Scene but since we moved I am not all together sure where my Christmas box is. Argh
At about the same stage in my family as Moore's, we bought an artificial tree too. it was a pretty darn good one, and we used it for many years. But then one year one of the kids was in the school production of "Into the Woods" and the director called upon all those who could to bring in their artificial trees for the stage set. And so we sent ours along. Need I say more? That was the end of it.
The last Christmas for that tree was the squirrel Christmas. We'd packed up to spend the holidays, as usual, at the ski cottage near Collingwood (we did that for a couple of decades) and it was also the year we switched from oil to gas in the house. But the installers didn't bother to fill in the hole where the oil truck plugged in the hose. Squirrels made it into the house via that passage and lived off the candy canes on the tree, nested in my kids' bunk beds on the third floor and generally made the whole house a stinky horrible mess. We trapped them with those tender trap thingies and let them loose, but they had done sufficient damage to the artificial tree that when the school managed to lose half the branches, it was kind of a relief.
Oh, my God, KaeEll -- I am sitting here laughing at your tree stories. I can well imagine why that "Into the Woods" production was the demise of your poor tree!
The squirrel thing got to me too. We currently have a squirrel living in one of our soffets! We found the point of entry on the outside of our house, and nailed it up, thinking that the squirrel had already exited. About four hours later, we discovered that the squirrel had in fact NOT exited, but was at that end of the house, pitching quite a fit over the fact that he/she couldn't go outside.
So, my husband pulled off the piece of plywood that he had used, and we waited. Naturally, we couldn't wait all day, so we just left the wood off. I suggested that we might consider making it like a doggie door so that the squirrel can get out, but not back inside again. We may still do that...
In the meantime, we've heard a lot of scratching, thumping, and general bitching in that one soffet, every few hours. Fortunately, the squirrel can't go anywhere else.
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Speaking of squirrels ... what would you say they sound like if for instance they were in your attic lol. I was lying in bed and kept hearing a weird noise the other night. It sounded like some animal, but I couldn't put my finger on which one.
Moore, you can buy those doggie door things for squirrels - they allow the little critters to exit but they can't get back inside again. Which is great as long as Mrs. Squirrel hasn't had her whelps inside. That's exactly what happened at my son's. Long story short, he had to climb up and remove the door.
Speaking of squirrels ... what would you say they sound like if for instance they were in your attic lol. I was lying in bed and kept hearing a weird noise the other night. It sounded like some animal, but I couldn't put my finger on which one.
Sadly, Jess, I've had a bit of experience with this. They make all sorts of scurrying noises, and the occasional squirrel chirp, but most of the noises are in early in the day. If the noises are are mostly at night, then it could be raccoons up there.
Call the pest control guys! The one time my husband decided to take care of things on his own, we ended up in emergency for a bad raccoon bite on his hand. Luckily for us, the city had already given the local critters rabbis vaccine. That's a funny story all on its own.
Oh, your poor husband! That would completey freak me out...
Jess, I'm hearing thumping -- like he's scratching himself, and all-out scratching on the surface of the structure. When I first heard his "voice", it sounded a bit like a bird. It's kind-of like a cross between a bird's chirp, and a cat. Hard to describe.
He's also done a bit of housekeeping. We found some clumps of insulation on our back porch that he'd tossed out the entrance!
KaeEll, I'll see if I can find one of those squirrel doors. What a pain!
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Moore, pest control companies have them as well as (and this I found really surprising) gun shops! Have the pest guys install it for you because unless you don't mind your husband dangling from an extension ladder, they have to go in way up high.
