A Time For Everything

 And the shopping is done. I ran out and bought the last gift yesterday afternoon. The tree is up & decorated and the presents are wrapped and waiting patiently for their unveiling in just three weeks' time.

The best part is that with the shopping and the wrapping done so far in advance, I can really enjoy the holiday season.

I've decorated as much as I'm going to I think, unless I get a wild hair in the next couple of weeks...but that's unlikely!

Here's my before and my after...

And yes, sadly, there are two sections of lights that have now burned out...I'll have to either find the extra bulbs and go through replacing each one in turn or just string in new lights next year... 

Hope you had a lovely weekend and here's to a  good / productive week.

Take care.

The tree is up!

DH helped me put it together and fluff out the branches. DD help me sort ornaments and update my list of ornaments that I've bought or made for the kids and DH (and myself) over the years.

The Christmas shopping is done! A few more packages still need to show up on my doorstep, but the decisions and ordering is done. Next on the schedule as far as presents are concerned is wrapping them. Next Saturday afternoon after my writers group Zoom party... I'll plop my butt in front of the TV and fire up one of my favorite movies (Penelope) and wrap as many presents as I can.

The Christmas menu has been decided. Hoagies! Remember, we're going "non-traditional" here. Food for the Brown-Eyed Girl and her SoulMate's visit has been purchased bit by bit each week. Not quite done yet but close.

Aside from wrapping presents, I still need to do a bit more decorating, which will also happen next weekend (probably), and cleaning. Yuck. :0)

Hope your Christmas preparations are coming along at a good pace.

Have a great week!

Hello There!

Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Mine was low key with just DD and me and her BFF, who came over after a very trying Thanksgiving meal with her family needing some love and cheer. DD and I watched the Star Trek reboot trilogy too. I love those movies.

The weekend as a whole was also low key and I accomplished almost everything on my to-do list. The tree now has ornaments. Garland decorates doorways. The number of wrapped presents under the tree has increased.


I binged watched both available season of Victoria. I found and unpacked a box of books from my shed--guess what I want to do now. :0) I completed gifts for my very dearest writer peeps. The usual weekend chores got completed too of course.


I've spent some good quality time with DD, and not just over the weekend, which I'm so grateful for. One of these days she's going to get her own place again and I'm going to miss her terribly.

Speaking of DD, our record is intact. What record you ask... Well, the one where the Stars have won every game we've attended in person so far this year. They even won the one game we had tickets for but didn't attend--I passed the tickets on to one of my employees, so the seats were still filled by us. :0) Unfortunately, they lost the following day, although they played a heck of a game. When they win the Reunion Tower Ball lights up in green and white.




You know, I meant to post Friday, but I was at home and working on crafty things, out of the normal routine of being at work or getting ready for work and it just didn't occur to me. But you were busy enjoying your own long weekend and didn't miss me I'm sure.

Have a great day and a great week... See you Wednesday.

I do still have to work today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, but I image it'll be fairly slow since I bet many of our clients will also be slow and / or have shut down their offices for one or more days. Which is good because I have a couple of projects to work on. I had a really good weekend though--

As I mentioned Friday, I went to a Stars game. The antics to get there as early as possible were Keystone Cop-worthy, but DD and I made it in time to score a pair of tickets to a game in January that I don't already have (partial-season) tickets to, so YAY! Also, the Stars won against a really good team in which there was only one goal--ours in overtime--and three fights and a ton of penalty minutes during regulation play. They also won Sunday afternoon's game which I did not attend as it was in New York. :0)

While watching Sunday's game on TV, I wrapped what Christmas presents I have and placed them under my new tree with colored lights.

It's been a while since I've had colored lights on a tree and it takes me back to my childhood when we always had colored lights.

At this point, the poor tree only has two ornaments and only because one never got put away last year and I came across it in a drawer when I was looking for something else and the other is an ornament I made for Sonshine a few years ago and kept hanging in my office for some reason.

I didn't make the trek out to the shed this weekend to find the rest, but that'll happen sometime between now and next Monday.

What I did do this weekend was load up all those "things" I've been clearing out the house and staging in the garage into the car and take them to a local donation spot. Man--that felt really good.


Getting rid of stuff is rather addicting. One hallway closet is pretty much purged now. Remember I said I'd gone green and was using tote bags now instead of plastic store bags? Yeah, I went through the rest of the tote bags I had--(I'm a tote bag ho.)--and picked out the best ones for holding groceries and, with three exceptions, got rid of the rest of them since I can only use so many tote bags and have my favorites. The other hall closet needs to be culled still, but, honestly, there isn't much left in there either.

I had to start a new pile in the garage, however. :0)

Lunch on Saturday with my dear friend, N, was delightful as usual. And she made me this--which was perfect even though she didn't know about the hockey tree when she chose designed the pattern...



I also got to visit with DH's family on Saturday and specifically with that family member with the medical issues and she's better. There's a ways to go and hurdles to surmount, but she's better. If you're the praying sort, please lift her up.

And that, my friends, is all for today. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week and a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Well, I was a bad blogger and didn't post on Friday. I don't have much of an excuse because I was up early and at the gym, but then DH and I got sucked into TV before we had to head south for our Thanksgiving celebrations. We had a delicious (as always) dinner at my in-law's house and just sat around and visited for a couple of hours before heading back home for a low-key weekend.

I did break out some Christmas decorations...garland and the strings of snowflake-tipped lights that go around the front window. I busted out the winter/Christmas votive holders and tea light candles too. I put up the tree, too, which took all of twenty minutes because the tree is only 18" tall. There's still more stuff I want to put up, but it's start and I have to find the rest before I can do anything.

Oh! I'm happy to report a weight-loss break-through. I finally dipped below the 132.8 lb. mark I haven't gotten under that in forever. I know it won't hold, but I broke the plateau, so I've got incentive to keep pushing until I can get below the 130 lb. mark once and for all and stay there. The biggest obstacle is going to be the weather now that it's getting colder. My warm cozy bed is going to be hard to leave each morning once the temperatures get below the 50s overnight. But I can the light at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully, I'll keep reaching for the light.

On the writing/publishing front, things are going mostly well. Book one is ready to go, with cover art and everything. Book two is with the content/copy editor and on her schedule starting tomorrow. No cover art as of yet. That's scheduled for end of January. Book three is in progress and I need to get my act together and finish it. Book four is done and ready to go to the content/copy editor and ready for cover art (end of February). Book five needs to be read and revised. Book six is in the planning stages. I have characters and a premise and some scene ideas, so once book three is ready for it's 2-to-3 week deep freeze (when I don't look at it in order to re-read with fresh eyes), I can juggle books five and six. I'm mostly on track. I'm not stressing because I am self-publishing, so I can push back deadlines, but I really, really want to keep my original goal of publishing on my birthday in June.

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend! Tell me what you did.

Well, after conversations about Christmas plans and where we're going and on what day, it turns out our five-person nucleus will be spending Christmas Eve and Christmas morning here at home and not in the usual locations--Christmas Eve at my in-laws' home and Christmas morning at the firework store.

Since we're gonna be at home...well, we needed the tree up after all. So with the help of a couple elves this past Sunday, DD and her BFF, the tree was put up and lights affixed. Then I spent a couple of hours hanging the ornaments.




Growing up, we bought real trees and always waited until the 15th to buy one. I kinda miss the scent of pine. Maybe one of these years, I'll convince DH. I actually passed a tree lot this past Saturday.

What about you? Artificial tree or the real deal??

Oh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the love of my life...

What are you doing here?? But just in case, I did pre-post this. I'm just sharing scenes from last year, since I'm in the midst of this year's scene.

Happy Saturday friends! Our countdown continues and the tree is up! When I was little, we always had real trees. The kind that smelled up your house and left dried pine needles in the shag carpet! When I reached high school, my mom bought real trees--ones that came in pots and didn't look like the traditional cone shaped tree. Once Christmas season was over, she'd take it somewhere to get planted. She was green *way* before it was fashionable. :)

These days, we put up a fake tree. One that gets assembled in layers. Our current tree already has the lights wound through it so it can be somewhat of a puzzle to get set up.

Most of the time we set it up in front of the window even though it blocks the view of the TV from one end of the sofa. One year we put it in the kitchen since we had no table in there. (That had to have been last year or the year before...)

Now, we don't have a specific date to put it up, just whenever I have the time and feel like it. And can coax the kids into helping me. Growing up, it was always Dec. 15ish--to coincide with payday--since we had to buy the real one each year.



And as I promised Friday, another of my favorite Christmas songs...Hark the Herald Angels Sing.


What about you? Real tree or fake? A specific date or just whenever?