Achey-breakey Christmas

Keith hates Christmas music.

Well, okay, he doesn't hate Christmas music. He hates the way I play Christmas music (24/7 from Thanksgiving to Christmas). So, this year, in an effort to increase marital bliss, I've created a special Christmas play-list. It's about 60% Christmas music, 40% Country music. That way we're both miserable part of the time. That's what marriage is all about, right?

All this to say, I've been decorating the tree to a rather random combination of Amy Grant Christmas and Garth Brooks Live, Volume 2.

With the new house, I have a new home for my Christmas Village. This necessitated a trip to the craft store and more Styrofoam. I love having the village, but putting it together is not my favorite Christmas-chore (2nd only to putting the frickin' lights on the stupid tree - all to the sounds of Garth Brooks, seriously I need help!!). But this year, I had to build it all over again, suddenly, my collection that wouldn't even fit on the fireplace mantel in the Ballard house, is dwarfed by the gigantic fireplace mantel/spare room. But I suppose that's an appropriate metaphor for our entire house now. All of our Christmas decorations, that once made our entire house (which was really one big room) seem so Christmas-ey, now barely fill the living room, let alone the fourteen other rooms in the house. But anyway, I digress... (or should I say meander), here's the finished product:

And our room is beautifully decorated (even if it is only one room). I think Keith likes it, this way he can go into any other room in the house if he needs a break from the Christmas-ness. But just give me a few years to increase my supplies...

Notice the blue painter's tape by Brian's feet. That's so we don't stub our toes on our invisible furniture. Eventually (theoretically), our visible furniture will come, but for now we're stuck with the invisible stuff. But, not to worry, they have assured us that it will all be here by Christmas. But then, they said something similar about Thanksgiving, so I'm not so sure I believe them anymore.

Thanksgiving was a roaring success. The turkey was moist and flavorful, the company was fun, and dinner was on the table at 2:00 on the dot (not bad for my first Thanksgiving dinner). I even made home-made bread and my own flower arrangements. I'm becoming so domestic, pretty soon I'll be washing my own dishes (okay, probably not).

Oh right, and back to the music? Now, I'm listening to "Tender Tennessee Christmas" and Keith is downstairs massacring "Margaritaville" on the guitar. And all is right with the world...

Three years later...

Three and a half years ago, we went on a Caribbean Cruise for our honeymoon. We had such a fantastic time, that this year we convinced Denise & Dwayne to join us on the trip. This trip was also fantastic, and we had a wonderful time. But when I got home and downloaded our photos, I realized that we really are creatures of habit, since half our pictures looked eerily familiar:

Really, they were two different trips, I swear!

Home Improvement

You learn a lot about a person after you buy their home. For instance, with the Ballard house, we learned that Ron should never be allowed to repair or build anything...ever. With our new house, we've learned a few things about the previous owners: they loved catalogs, they were extremely hard on the house (seriously, how do you manage to chip every toilet bowl in 8 years?!?), and they had a much higher tolerance for things than I do. Now, I understand how when you're selling your house, there's an attitude of "I sure hope the water heater lasts until after we sell" (which it did, but we had to replace it anyway), But there's a limit, in the 7 weeks that we've lived here, we've cleaned off the roof, re-done the phone system, repaired the furnace, replaced the "piece that makes it work" in the dishwasher, and this week we will be replacing the chirping thingy in the garage that will (hopefully) make the hot water stop trying to pound it's way through our bathroom wall.

Two weeks ago, we took on our first real home-improvement project. Real being defined as something we don't pay someone else to do. The kitchen cabinets, although beautiful, sleek, and modern, were also IMPOSSIBLE to open. I'm still nursing the blisters I have on the tips of my fingers from pressing as hard as I could on the edge of the drawer and pulling in the vain hopes of actually getting the drawer open. So, off we went to Home Depot to pick out some drawer pulls and knobs. After a not too horribly long time of hemming & hawing about which ones we should pick (with both of us thinking it really doesn't matter as long as they work and aren't too ugly, but unwilling to say it), we headed home with 12 knobs (we needed 13, but that's another story) and 5 drawer pulls.

Keith got to work drilling holes in all our beautiful cabinet drawers. We split the work so that Keith was drilling and I was screwing in the pieces (perhaps not an equal distribution of work, but who am I to complain?). As an engineer, Keith always does this sort of project in a very deliberate, exacting manner (which I appreciate), but that means that sometimes he can take forever (which I don't always appreciate). So, while I was waiting for him to drill a single hole, I installed this on the back of our pantry door:

I am SO excited to have a pantry and a place for everything. When we bought the house, it had a hanger similar to this inside the pantry, but on the door they'd hung one of those fabric shoe hangers. Now, shoe hangers really aren't all that good at hanging shoes, I can't imagine they're all that good at holding pantry items. So now I have twice as much storage in the pantry and a special place of honor for our "extra golden-" fish.

But back to the drawer pulls. Keith did a fantastic job, and it is so nice to be able to open the dish drawer now without ripping off a layer of skin and/or fingernail. Our next few projects will mostly involve paint (and eliminating polka-dots), but that can wait until after Thanksgiving.

Failure

We're hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year. We're really excited to have everyone over to our new house, although, since our table hasn't arrived yet, I'm not sure where they're going to sit (more on that some other time). Anyway, today I realized that we don't have any sort of table cloth or center piece to put on either table (the one we have or the one that isn't coming in-time). So I had the brilliant idea to make a table runner this afternoon. I made a trip to the craft store (my second this weekend) and bought some burlap and fabric to try my hand at being creative.

Before:

With Thanksgiving several days away, I was short on time and patience, so I was hoping to be able to do the whole thing with a pair of scissors and stitch-witchery. Keeping in-mind that I was also in the middle of making mini-quiche for Thanksgiving, I worked on the project in 20 minute increments. I only have one mini muffin tin, so I would make one batch of quiches, throw them in the oven, then run downstairs to work on the tablecloth, run upstairs, take out the quiches, cool the pan, and start the process all over again. Looking back, it really is shocking that this wasn't super successful. So, I tried several options, each so much worse than the last, that I never even made it to the stitch-witchery part. About three hours in, after countless trips up and down the stairs, with burlap bits attached to every surface I've touched and permanently wound into my clothing, I threw my hands in the air and admitted defeat. So, here is the "completed" project:

And as an aside, today I made 12 dozen mini quiches. In my industry, we call this a gross...seems kind of appropriate at this point.

Here we go...

My first blog post, this is so exciting! I've always secretly wanted to be a blogger, but a few things have kept me back. One being that I really have nothing interesting to say - I'm not really very introspective, and I've never really been very forthcoming about my inmost thoughts (I think it's my stoic English side). But mostly there's a part of me (probably the English part again) that shies away from the narcissistic nature of blogs. Because seriously, how full of myself must I be to think that the whole world really needs to hear my every thought? (However much I may feel that my every thought has true value). How have I overcome these major road-blocks you may ask? Well, mostly by knowing that I won't send this to anyone, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever read my meandering thoughts. If you're self-absorbed in a vacuum, are you still a narcissist? I'm not sure, but I guess we'll find out.

Another thing keeping me back from a blog is that I was waiting to come up with a creative handle/name for my blog. Clearly I've given up on that idea. But my meanderings is probably a fairly accurate description, since I can barely keep a train of thought through a complete sentence, I think it's unlikely there will be much continuity between posts, but that too we shall soon find out.

Although I'm not really planning to send this blog to anyone (except maybe Rachel who finally convinced me to do it), I'm still planning to write to you, my dear imaginary reader, as though you truly existed. Because, really, if I wanted to truly write to No ONE, I could do it on paper and not monopolize the computer so much (and I could sit on something more comfortable than this orange ball we have at the desk). So, welcome to the journey, who knows where it will end, but it should be an adventure...