Musings

*The Pointer Sisters should not sing Christmas songs. I'm all for "I'm So Excited" and "The Neutron Dance", and had a childhood memory come to mind when I heard them attempt "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". This memory includes My grandma's house, wearing my aunt Kristin's roller skates and listening to her record. RECORD. I'm sure I had on a nice pair of short 80's shorts, too.

*I always think I have so much time before Christmas to get everything done, and then BAMM! it's a week before and nothing is wrapped and the one little craft I want to do isn't even started.

*If I hear the Mannheim Steamrollers or Whitney Houston's "Do you hear what I hear?" one more time... I have XM radio in my car because we don't have radio where we live (so primitive...) and I love Christmas music, so we listen to one of their special holiday stations. My favorite station plays too much of the afore mentioned songs. I did hear "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" by the Bare Naked Ladies and Sarah McLaughlin (I slaughtered the spelling on her last name...) it was a great duet.

*I made Christmas cards. I addressed the envelopes. They are not sent yet, but will be today. I am going to post it on my blog so that my blogger friends whose addresses I don't know can get one, too.

*I am prefacing this one by stating the obvious fact that I LOVE COOKIES. (All you have to do is note my weight gain for evidence). I went to a cookie exchange and was disappointed in other people's baking skills. My no-bake cookies didn't turn out EXACTLY how I wanted them to- they were a little dry. But the taste was still how it was supposed to be. It just amazes me that a food that has essentially the same ingredients can turn out so differently. Now, maybe I am spoiled by my mom and mother-in-law's cookies. I love my mom's chocolate chip cookies, and my MIL makes a wicked oatmeal cookie and a snickerdoodle. It was just a little sad. There were a couple of chocolate chip cookies that were good, Costco brand included, but other than that, I was a little sad.

*Not holiday related- I am surprised that Ed is still alive. He has eaten two craft foam discs in the last two days. They were the size of quarters, maybe bigger. They only way I knew he ate them was when I changed his diaper. I refuse to dig out evidence for "fun" because that grosses me out. I have to say this about the boy- he has a really high metabolism. I think I'll find an example of the foam discs and the marble from last month and take a picture of those. He also had a very interesting diaper a few hours he ate three crayons. Where is his mother while he is doing this? (In my defense- I have pulled MANY, MANY items out of his mouth, including, but not limited to: more craft foam, crayons, hunks of play dough, money, small toys, rocks, dog food, Kleenex, cotton, fabric, string, and most anything else that he can find.)

*Last one- Ryan has finished all the digging for our house. This includes the house (finished long ago), septic, leech lines, and the trench for the wire, water, and phone lines. Our soil is so sandy, it's like digging in the dry sand at the beach. So the "trenches" are really more like canals and swimming pools. It's amazing how much dirt has been moved. The canal for our lines is 400 feet long, about 6 feet wide, and about 4 feet deep. If we had different soil, we would have used a trencher, not a backhoe, and the trench would have been something like 3 feet deep and 12-18 inches wide. Ryan was so happy to be done digging-so tedious and boring, and it doesn't seem like it helps in the actual building of the house. But, now he can start going UP from the ground. His goal is to be framing by March.