May your day be merry and bright and filled with all things Buc-ee's!!

Okay, maybe that's just my wish. My new neighbor seems to be a fan of Buc-ee's as well.

Take care and have a super day whatever your plans are.

MWAH!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Christmas is a mere week away. Hope you're well and ready for your holiday celebrations, whatever they may (or may not) entail. :0)

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Check this out! I mean click the image and look closely--really study it. It's an amazing thing.

While it may look like a piece of child's art done with scissors, glue, and staples--it's actually a painting!

Here's the artist's website: Bill Braun Art. DD showed me a clip of his work via Tik Tok, and I knew I wanted to share it with you.

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Along with the monthly letters I've finally gotten diligent about sending to my Grandma in Denmark, I send a floral arrangement to her for her birthday in August and for Christmas. It's gotten to be more and more of a challenge to find Christmas themed arrangements that can be made / sent in foreign counties--namely Denmark. In fact, 1-800-Flowers didn't even have any. They had regular flowers, but nothing for Christmas.

However, after much Googling I finally found an online flower retailer who had Christmas floral arrangements available to send to Denmark. Unfortunately, it was a little more expensive than it used to be, which is probably due to several factors. The most important thing is that Grandma gets flowers. If I'm not mistaken, Grandma turned 98 this past August, so she's not gonna be around too much longer for me to send flowers to.

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Shopping is almost done! Two identical gifts to buy--I know what it is, just a matter of swinging by the specialty store--and one last gift for DD. She's somewhat of an Anglophile and she discovered the British Emporium in a nearby city, so we're going to check it out on Thursday.

All that's really left is the wrapping part. Which I'll probably work on a little each day when I need to take a sitting break.

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DD and I went to see Wonka yesterday (12/17/23) and we both enjoyed it. Despite Timothée Chalamet's amazing performance--he did all the dancing and singing himself and he was charming as a young Willie Wonka--we probably won't be re-watching any time soon.

We also spent too many hours watching the Netflix Series "All the Light We Cannot See" which was aaaaaamazing. I highly recommend it. But do it when you have four hours to watch because even though it's broken up into four episodes, it's that compelling.

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And, in case you're wondering, DD and I have not yet worked on our gingerbread row house kit...probably this weekend.

Since I won't post until the new year...

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you and yours.

Take care!!

On a recent trip to Target, DD and I came across a plethora of gingerbread building kits and I'd been reminiscing about the faux gingerbread houses of previous Christmases and how it's been a while since I'd done one. You remember my redneck gingerbread house from years past and GI Snow, right? I can't remember the last time I did this but it's been a while...

I verbalized the thought that maybe I could recreate the row houses and DD was like "Or we could just buy this." So we did. :0) We'd planned to work on it over Thanksgiving weekend, but that didn't happen. So new target will be a couple of weekends hence.

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Came across this on X/Twitter last week and thought it pretty damned amazing--enough that I wanted to share it with you all...

This is Jim Thorpe, first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States...He represented the U.S. in Track and Field in the 1912 Olympics. Look closely at the photo, you can see that he's wearing different socks and shoes. This wasn't a fashion statement.

According to @fasc1nate on X, on the morning of his competition, his shoes were stolen. Luckily, Jim ended up finding two shoes in a garbage can. (Luckily??!!??) That's the pair that he's wearing in the photo. But one of the shoes was too big, so he had to wear an extra sock. Wearing these shoes, Jim won two gold medals that day.

Sadly, the rest of his life was tragic for many reasons, but this just goes to show that where there's a will, there's a way.

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I've been working on cleaning my home office in preparation for rearranging. I had too many things crowded in my 10' x 10' space and it was getting to me. Having an L-shaped desk sticking out into the middle of the room hasn't helped, and I may end up with an arm of it still sticking out, but maybe in a less obtrusive way...

I also wanted new fairy lights-- The ones in the living room have worked great. They've been up for three years now and are still burning brightly morning and evening when the timer turns them on. I attempted to buy similar lights for my office, but basically didn't get the correct ones so back to the drawing board. I have to go hunt down that Amazon order and go from there. :0)

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This past weekend, I also put up my tree... I bought an additional string of lights and spare bulbs so we have a tree with lights (not on when I took the picture) but no ornaments...I'll be working on that this week.

And the HOCKEY TREE is back!! Or will be once the hockey-related ornaments are added. :0)

Have a super week. We'll catch up in a couple of weeks.

Take care.

Image courtesy IMGBIN.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Hope your holiday plans are all that you want them to be. It'll just be three of us as Casa FitzGerald. The menu's been decided and we're all looking forward to an extended period of time off. As a teacher, DD gets to enjoy a full nine days of R&R. I'm grateful for my four...

As we celebrate Thanksgiving later this week, let me share a few things I'm thankful for...

1. My family and friends, of course, including you faithful readers.
2. YouTube and the Internet in general where there is soooo much information that you can learn anything you want.
3. The people who share their hard-won knowledge by writing books.
4. Living in the land of the free and the home of the brave...
5. Dallas Stars hockey. :0)

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As the final weeks of 2023 chug along, it's time to look ahead to 2024 and ponder my fresh start goals...

I'm pretty sure my primary areas of focus are finances, health and wellness, writing, housekeeping, and then there'll be a few things I'll file under miscellaneous. Not sure how I'm going lay things out--all in a jumble as in years past or as a mini list for each sector.

I'm combining this with my vision board items because many of them overlap. I'm also going to break down anything I can into quarterly goals so I can see them in bite-sized chunks.

Last year I had sixteen (!) items on my list. Granted--certain things I would do anyway like read, but the financial stuff is all new. Some things I'm just trying to improve on or, honestly, keep myself accountable for--like sending letters to my grandma!!

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Remember when I said the next book I was going to read was "The Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey? Well, I lied. I'm now reading another book about options trading. It had me from "hello."

The very first chapter talked about positive financial mindsets and vision boards, just to name two. And those are two things I'm totally on board with and have learned about in previous books and from YouTube videos. They're things I've already worked to incorporate in my life, so for this latest book to include those things right at a moment when I'm looking down the barrel at a new year and had needed to align my various "course of action" tracks into a single streamlined version--I mentioned this two posts ago--seemed providential. :0)

Full disclosure--I didn't get a new vision board created for Q4 as I'd planned. I've been in learning mode and I've got a lot to ponder and decide, so I'm just gonna look ahead to 2024 and let the remainder of 2023 cruise on by vision-board-less.

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You know what I've been doing lately...?

Cross stitching. Yup, I'm back to a tactile expression of creativity. I'm creating patterns for my store and sometimes I like to actually stitch them myself.

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Last but not least, let's talk hockey.

My boys in Victory Green are having themselves a great start to the season despite some deficiencies. And right now, MoneyPuck has them with a 10.9% chance of winning the Stanley Cup through November 15th. Highest for all teams at this point. :0)

Posted by Jen FitzGerald at 6:00:00 AM No comments:

Labels: finances, looking ahead, miscellaneous Monday, vision boards