Hark How the Bells! (or "You Know It's Winter in Baker When...)

Geeze, it's not even December yet, and we are thoroughly enmeshed in the Christmas spirit. On Wednesday, Nathan and I got our Christmas tree from my parent's property. Of course, what should have been a simple and quick outing turned into a two-hour long exodus when our dog took off chasing some of the deer that frequent my parent's "back forty". But we finally tracked him down (20-30 min later), found our tree (after much hemming and hawing), and got it home. Bandit, being wet and covered in burrs, got to ride in the back of the truck with the tree on the way home...a lot of cute pictures will be added, I just haven't had a chance lately to upload any photos from my camera.

While Nathan was back at work, I succeeded in getting the tree into the tree stand and into our house. I ended up having to trim some of the top of the tree off because it was taller than our 8' ceilings. After I got out of rehearsal, Nathan and I turned on Home Alone 2 (a tradition of Nathan's), made some hot chocolate, and decorated our tree. Our house smells SO GOOD! I used all the limbs I had to trim off (otherwise the tree would have taken up our entire couch area) to decorate around our nativity scene and various other places around the house. I honestly wish I could decorate like this year-round, but then I guess it wouldn't be as special. It's a good thing we got a big tree this year, because between Nathan and I we have a TON of ornaments. This is only going to get worse as my family has a tradition of my mom buying my dad and I a new ornament each year, and I've carried that on. Here's Nathan's ornament for the year:



Ha ha ha, and it's so true! Thankfully he got a kick out of it!


There are now huge piles of snow down the middle of all of the streets in Baker. These will eventually become large berms which will remain until we have a major melt in the spring. For those of you who are familiar with Baker, those piles are a welcome sight because they mean that it's truly winter! I actually missed those piles of snow when I was on the other side of the state. This morning marked the first appearance of the piles of snow. And yes Carly, I'll take pictures of Main Street for you. ;) Everything here is now covered in a couple of inches of snow and we're suppose to get even more in the next couple of days. Right now the sky is that steel grey color, so it looks like the entire world is encompassed in various shades of white.

Other than all that, life has been pretty straight forward. My days off were filled with decorating, attempting to pick up after the effects of decorating (still have a ways to go on that), rehearsals, two loads of dishes and four (yes, FOUR) load of laundry. But all that laundry meant that we got to sleep in clean sheets last night. Which leads me to my next, and last, point...

I firmly believe that one of the best feelings in the world is climbing into a bed of clean sheets/pillow cases after having showered, shaved your legs, covered yourself in lotion, brushed your teeth, and dried your hair. You're clean, your bed is clean, all the sheets are straight and not crumpled. It's lovely. If I had the time/energy/money, I think I would wash our sheets every day!

List Makers, Unite!

I've talked a couple of times on here about how I am more than slightly obsessive about making to-do lists. Well, I'm not alone. Here's a blog centered completely around making to-do lists:

http://www.todolistblog.com/

I absolutely love the post "Eight Surprising To D0 List Facts". I fit in 7 of the 8 points that she talks about, I'll let you guess which one I don't do. Oddly enough, a lot of people equate list makers with being anti-procrastinators...thing is, I am a HUGE procrastinator. It's one of the things I like the least about myself.

(short break: It's currently snowing...under blue sky. How...?)

The other post I loved was a couple of posts below the Suprising Facts post, entitled "110 Things to Do Before He Dies (Written in 1998)". I wrote a list like this a couple of years ago, and I now have no idea where it is. Maybe I should start again. Some people would argue, "What's the point of making a To Do Before I Die list when you don't know when your deadline is?" I don't think it's so much about accomplishing ALL of those goals before you die, as much as it's about remembering your dreams and reminding yourself to live life to the fullest every day.

If you couldn't tell, the makers of this blog just recently published a book entitled (what else?) To-Do List. I may have to track down this book.

3 Cheers!

Just had to share that my husband is amazing...

He just brought me a peppermint hot chocolate on his break!

He's a keeper.

Love you honey!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree...

Between Nathan and my conflicting schedule, we just recently realized that there isn't going to be a day where we can leisurely go look for a Christmas tree until Dec 21st. And that's just not acceptable. It's always dark by the time Nathan gets off work on my weekdays off, I'm working this entire weekend, and next weekend I'm going to be in Boise for Christmas shopping with my mom. That pretty much limits the daylight hours where we are both able to go tree hunting. So instead, Nathan is taking an hour and a half lunch on Wednesday, and we're going to go up to my parent's property on Pine Creek to get our tree.

Here's our dilemma. We want to put our Christmas tree in the upstairs living room, where everyone can see it. But the way we have our living room arranged, the room is essentially cut in half, because it's very awkward to arrange it as one large space, seeing as the room is very long and narrow. One half has our two couches, the tv, and a book shelf. The other half has another dining table and chairs. Now if we put the tree in the half with the dining table, there's plenty of room, but it makes it very awkward for passing out presents on Christmas day. But if we put the tree in with the couches and tv, it will be fairly cramped, we won't be able to have a very big tree, yet it will be easily accessible for present dispersal. I guess we'll just have to see how things pan out once we actually get the tree.

Beyond tree dilemmas, we also have a dog dilemma. Bandit loves his doggy door, and I still fully appreciate the beauty of not having to freeze my butt off while he does his business. But yesterday Nathan put the baby gate up between the back landing and the back hallway, so Bandit could come inside without having access to the whole house, and then put one of his doggy beds in the landing for him to lay on...which Bandit then destroyed. We think he was getting back at us for delaying his dinner for an hour (Nathan brought me dinner at work). Not only were there bits of doggy bed in the landing, Bandit somehow managed to get a majority of the destroyed bed outside, through the doggy door. Maybe we should start calling the back landing The Bunker. Nathan took some great pictures, which I will add to this post in the next couple of days. You just have to laugh, because what else are you going to do? So now Bandit has to survive without the benefit of a blanket or bed in his Bunker. Oh, and did I mention he has started bringing his outside soccer ball in through the doggy door with him?

Countdown Ticker!

I just had to share my newest triumph...the Christmas Countdown Ticker!!! After using Arly's html as a starting point for the code for our blog, the layout is kind of messed up. Which translated into lots of struggle when trying to put the ticker onto our page! Every time I tried to place it at the top of the page, it somehow squished our posts into the sidebar on the left. When I tried to put it into the sidebar, it was too big and only showed half of the ticker. I seriously battled with it for about half an hour before I got it arrange juuuuuuust right. So now you have it. Our page, complete with Christmas Countdown! Only 29 days to go!

Boo HTML!

Now that I have a cramp in my mouse hand, I finally have our blog looking like I want it to look! YAY! As you can probably tell, I'm excited about this. I mean, I've only been working on it since about 10 am or so and I just now got it to where I want it. Did I ever mention that I hate html with a passion?! Ah well, now our blog is in the holiday spirit, and it's suppose to snow either tonight or tomorrow...don't worry Carly and Arly (hee hee, you two rhyme!), I'll post more pictures.

Big shout out of thanks to Arly for helping me figure out how to play with my blog html in order to have a more fun blog! And thanks to Carly for letting me steal her awesome background (not that she had much of a choice or knew I was doing it)!

PS...I've been listening to old Christmas music all day on live365.com...Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside! Happy Holidays!

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wow, has it really only been 4 days since Thanksgiving? It feels so much longer than that.

As hectic as our Thanksgiving was, the following weekend was the complete opposite. When I got off work on Wednesday at 6 pm, we immediately jumped into the car and headed to Burns, where my parents are now living. We stopped off in Ontario to run a few errands...I forgot about the hour time change and ended up only have 15 minutes in JoAnn Fabrics, which is NOT enough time to pick out fabric. We didn't get to Mom and Dad's until about 10:30 pm, and geeze was that a boring drive! The only thing that kept it even mildly exciting was the threat of a deer (or herd of deer) jumping in front of our car at any moment. The closest we came to that was a 4 point buck on the edge of the road...yeesh.

After getting to Mom and Dad's, we had a glass of wine and socialized with my grandparents for about half an hour before all of us collapsed. The next morning, the boys got up and went goose hunting while I slept in and then helped Mom and Nanna get Thanksgiving dinner ready. My mom cooked an 18 lb turkey for 6 people, which translated into to a LOT of leftovers...the best part of Thanksgiving dinner, in my opinion. After dinner, Nathan and I immediately got back in the car and drove home, getting back at around 10:45 pm, because both Nathan and I had to work on Friday. I think both of us were bored to death on Friday...no one called into dispatch because they were all still recovering from their turkey comas, and the paper was dead because they had already gotten most of their work for the Friday paper done.

On Friday night, we had a bunch of people over to our house for a mini-reunion. Seriously, the majority of the people there were people that I went to high school with, and who hadn't been at the same place at the same time for about a year, if not longer. Let's see, the guest list included: Nathan and myself (of course, it was our house), Anna and Matt, Corey and Emily (and their son Ian for about 5 minutes), Josh Bailey, Aaron Bailey and his wife Melissa, Chris and Lily, Carly and her baby Stella (thanks for stopping by Carly!), Brandie, Kenyon, Anders, Dom, Steve, Dana and Cale, Will H...if I forgot anyone, I am so sorry! So yeah, we had quite the crowd, and it was way too much fun to have at least part of the old BHS group there! Carly's baby, Stella, was way too adorable and so well behaved...when I took her down to the basement where there were about 15 people talking over music playing, she didn't wake up even once. Carly, next time you come to Baker, you should come by for an afternoon and we'll just relax without having so many people around!

At around 9:30 Friday night, I got a call from our lead dispatcher asking if I could come in the next day to cover for a dispatcher who was sick with the flu. This completely bummed me out because I was so looking forward to having a full 2 days to spend with Nathan, which never happens! I told her that if she couldn't find anyone else, I could come in from noon until 6 pm, but that I'd rather not. I don't envy her the job of asking people to come in on their days off! The next morning, we finally got it worked out so that I got to sleep in, and ended up not having to go into work. So instead, Nathan and I went out for brunch at the Oregon Trail restaurant (yum!), then went to Aaron and Melissa's wedding reception. After that, we rented two movies, crawled into bed, and were very very lazy. In fact, we even took a nap.

On Sunday, we slept in, were lazy again, had beer pancakes (SOOO good), I ran some errands, Nathan brewed some beer, had pizza from Paizanos and watched Die Hard 1, then went to bed. It was so nice to have such a lazy weekend at home with Nathan!

In other news, Nathan put a doggy door in our back door, so that Bandit can come and go as he pleases. Mostly we got it so that he can get into the back landing area (which we're going to close off with baby gates) and out of the below freezing weather we're consistantly having. But there are other perks to this doggy door. Before the doggy door, this was Bandit and my morning routine:

Lindy gets up sometime between 5:30 am and 6:00 am, gets in the shower, gets out of the shower, gets dressed, dries hair, curls hair, puts on make up, lets Bandit out of his crate, feeds Bandit, goes outside with Bandit and freezes her butt off while Bandit does his business, puts Bandit back in his crate, makes lunch, puts together snacks for the day, runs out of the door to work a little late because Bandit took his own sweet time eating and doing his business.

Post doggy door, this is now our routine:

Lindy gets up sometime between 5:30 am and 6:00 am, gets in the shower, gets out of the shower, gets dressed, dries hair, curls hair, puts on make up, lets Bandit out of his crate, feeds Bandit, tells Bandit to go outside, Bandit takes himself outside while Lindy stays inside the warm house and makes lunch, puts together snacks for the day, walks calmly out of the door to work while putting Bandit back in his crate, enroute to work on time.

Now we just need to teach him to go immediately into his crate after going outside and to close the crate door behind him. Ha ha ha! It's amazing the difference one little hole in the door can make!

And that, in a very large nut shell, was our Thanksgiving weekend.