Killer Weekend Update

Long weekends are such a nice time to rest work yourself into the ground. 

1.  Thanksgiving--Shawn and I participated in the ritual stuffing of humans as sign of plenty at my parents.   Usually, we go to Oakridge to Shawn's maternal grandparents and several aunts and uncles, but Shawn was on call this weekend.  So we stayed local.  My Mom serves up her homemade turkey and (my favorite) dressing, but then she also serves this:

Cranberry sauce.  And yes, those ridges are the can mold.  How could anyone resist?

2.  Friday morning, instead of shopping, Shawn and I raked and bagged 25, 32 gallon bags of leaves.  Hey, gotta get rid of the pumpkin pie gut somehow, right?  Really, I just draw the line at putting up my Christmas festiviness when the yard is covered in fall leaves.  Just for a refresher, this what it looked like two weeks ago.

And here it is after:

3.  Friday afternoon, Shawn completed our vacation video.  He started with our raw footage (about 4 hours) and about 500 pictures and sliced, diced, and added a soundtrack and now, we have a nice 40 minutes compilation of the vacation.

4.  Saturday, oh Saturday.  We commenced packing away the fall decorations and tossing up the Christmas decorations.  We have 3 lit greenery swags that go over our front windows and the front door.  On a good year, I don't have to replace any of the lights.  This year, I had to replace all but one.  Last year I started replacing the greenery with pre-lit since the old greenery was about 10 years old and looking a bit sad.  So this year, when one window swag was all dead, I skipped to Ace Hardware to pick up a replacement.  They didn't have any pre-lit.  Neither did Home Depot or Hobby Lobby.  We found some at Lowe's that was quite literally as thick as a fake Hawaiian lei.  My existing 10 year old stuff looked better.  So I went back to Ace to pick up some since what they had at least matched my existing stuff. So two hours and some serious teeth grinding later, I got to start winding the lights.  

I was in such a good mood at this point, Shawn started using the soothing voice on me.  You know, the one you use when you're afraid the crazy lady might go ballistic on you.

Another 2 hours later, we were out with the flashlight, hanging the last of it.

Then as I was hunting for batteries for my candles (no electrical outlets=battery powered candles for the windows), I nearly glued my fingers together in a sitcom-ish turn of events.  Apoxy had leaked in the hardware drawer.  I'm thinking, "What's this sticky stuff on my hand?  Mmm. I can't seem to separate my fingers.  Wait.  That's bad." Some quick application of rubbing alcohol kept down the bonding.

5.  Today, we cleaned up the mess from yesterday since at 8:30 last night I gave up and went to bed.