Putting up the Christmas Tree

Yes, it's that time again. You'd think with 11 months notice I could be farther along. For years we put up our tree on the weekend of my birthday (the 9th), but after all these years I realized that I was cheating myself of time to have a little more fun eating birthday cake and shopping. So this year we started on Thanksgiving weekend.

We STILL have this old tree from my mother in law, and I REALLY don't like it. The tree I want costs nearly $500 so until it is on sale 90% off, I will be using this one. First Ron puts up the bare bones of the tree:


Then we go outside and trim the blue spruce in the back yard and bring in a pile of branches which I tuck in the ugly old tree to give it some Christmas smell and liveliness.







After that the lights and multiple garlands go on. This year's theme is red and white. All the ornaments are, duh, red and white, and the ribbon garland is candy cane striped. Then there's a wire garland that's wild and shiny and it's topped off by my 40 year old red ring garland made from throw away rings I picked up at Ralston Purina when I was working there in the shipping division.

Next comes the ornaments. This year Zach, age 6 and Zoey, alias Bat Girl, age 3, are my helpers. Zach seemed overly concerned about glass ornaments breaking. I assured him that as long as he wasn't throwing them around, that sometimes they do break but it's okay. Guess who broke an ornament? Yea, me!





It's nearly finished. Ron brings in the train and houses and then it's time to plug it in and step back to adjust branches and perhaps a few ornaments! The only thing we forgot to do this year is turn on the music to The Nutcracker. I don't know how I missed that one important tradition we've been doing for years and years.



The last thing that gets done here before putting the extras away is to hang a wreath from the light fixture over the table. All the ornaments on it are ones I managed to save from my childhood. This is my favorite decoration in the whole house.

dancing deer

I woke with a jolt this morning in the middle of a dream when my husband touched my shoulder and asked if I wanted to see the deer in the back yard. Sunday there were 5 of them, but I missed seeing them that day. I made my way to the family room window and watched two female white tailed deer having breakfast between the brush row and the pond.

They are certainly creatures of beauty, elegance, and good sense. You could tell by watching when a blackbird flew too close they stood gracious, but rigid and still until there were no apparent signs of danger. The best part this morning was watching them as they played splash in the water. After chewing a good meal and getting a drink from the pond, they found some puddles of water (easy to find after it's rained every day for a week) and they started to play, splashing and running around and jumping just like a couple of children that have been turned loose on a warm summer day.

I'm sure they played like this for several minutes - something I've never seen before. Ron said he might buy a salt lick for them to lure them in. We live just a mile or so away from Bush Wildlife, and I think it's deer hunting season there. I'm glad this family has found a safe haven in the brush where the food and water are plentiful and where we can watch them play and run.

God's gentle reminder & a computer game

If any of you are on Facebook and are on my "friends" list you have surely noticed that I enjoy a good game of Bejeweled. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a grid of colored jewels and the idea is to make moves to create at least three connections in colors to gain points.

In the game there are "multiplier" gems. When one pops up and you can attach two more to it, your points double or triple. etc. Recently I had some treatments done to my back and I was off work for three weeks, so during my inactivity, I played a LOT! One day I noticed the harder I TRIED to make those connections, I was timed out and my scores were really low. The next time a multiplier gem came up, I didn't waste any time trying to make the connections. I went on my way busting up the obvious ones, and lo and behold, these connections happened on their own without any effort on my part, and my scores greatly improved from there.

Too often I find myself running ahead of God trying to do things my way, on my own timetable when it's convenient for me - doing the obvious without really listening for direction. I forget that HE knows everything, and he is not blindsided by circumstances, or shortsighted by lack of knowledge.

The harder I try to do things that are good and right are like trying to make those connections happen with my own power. When I watched those gems blast away into huge points, I realized how much easier my life would be if I just trusted Him for direction to connect with the things He is anxious to give me, like peace and patience, and kindness and a good set of listening ears...and maybe another high scoring game or two!

My Life in 30 Days

I owe it to my friend Kay Dixon for encouraging a swap with 5 people called Thirty Days. We were supposed to find a suitable journal and write and/or illustrate 30 things we didn't want to forget. Then we would do a round robin and send our books around to each other until we all had a chance to read through each others lives.

I had a real hard time trying to pick just 30 things to enshrine in this book. I'm a deep thinker and started more than once to make a list. Parents, childhood, teen years, marriage, parenting, weddings, grandchildren... I couldn't just pick out thirty, so I did what I do best, I procrastinated.

Although the journal was always on my mind, I could not get my thoughts together enough to satisfy myself. I started with 2-3 stories, but I still couldn't get into it. The last thing I wanted in a book was stark white pages filled with just words. This isn't how I saw my life. Then one day Kay let me off the hook. She said make it what pleased me. Put some art in it. It didn't have to be longhand, it didn't have to be in any kind of order, it could be typed. That took the heat off me and she also gave us an extension in time.

Here's the front of the book so far. There's room for more when I find the right thing.


After I got going on the cover I started to do what I really like to do and collaged the next couple pages and then made an introductory page with my picture on it.



From here on the collages and entries are about my childhood, trials and errors in trying new art techniques, and using interesting pictures I have had in my files for years. I thought this would be a good place to bring them out and save them.

















This is the inside back cover that is not finished.

This is the back cover:


I have mailed my book to the first person and when he is finished looking through it it will go to 3 others before I get it back. I'm already setting things aside that I want to add to it when it comes home. I'm anxious to see what the other four books look like. I'm going to be like a dry sponge ready to soak up a lot of new ideas.

Marco - "Prolo"

This time of year it is easy to hear kids in pools yelling Marco - and the familiar echo - Polo! But for me I started crying out for some Prolo Therapy. It's an interesting non evasive way to tighten up loose ligaments by injecting a glucose solution in the ligaments. The ligaments become irritated and tells the brain it needs new tissue. Voila! In 8 weeks or so, I will walk straighter and have more stability in my knees and low back.

After getting about 30 injections in my low back and both knees, I took three weeks off work. Some days I could actually feel exactly where the "mending" was taking place. I took a lot of pain pills and spent a lot of time napping, but now I've reduced the use of those pills and am heading back to work.

Ahhh. I love my regular, normal, sometimes interesting life and am looking forward to some mobility without pain or drugs.

All of the pages for our 13 Week Journal have been traded. I'm not sure yet how the others are putting their pages together, but this week I spent hours and hours working on mine, getting pages to fall into the right places (didn't always happen) and filling in blank pages with my own work. I'm quite pleased with the outcome, and with no further adieu, here it is: