Nothing like the close confines of a car trip to showcase the pungent filthiness of Lily. It was a lovely, sunning, winter day, so she got a bath. Even after spending hours drying in the sun watching me work, she had still not decided if she was ready to forgive me yet.
Poorly Lily is seriously feeling sorry for herself and cursing my name!
Now all clean, she’ll get a brushing with the furminator (which for some reason, she does not love) and then she will beautiful, puffy and suggliable!
A few days before Christmas I was getting ready for work when someone knocked on my door (and Lily went wild barking). Thinking it would be UPS delivering the crock pot I bought myself as a Christmas present, I was surprised when I opened the door and there was a long skinny package bag there. On opening it I remembered that several months ago I had given a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation and they would send me 10 trees. Well here they were — not 10 but 12 little twigs that were suppose to be trees. The biggest was about 28″ tall and the shortest maybe 8″. 3 Eastern Redbuds, 4 White Flowering Dogwood, 3 Goldenraintree, and 2 Crapemyrtle. Here is a gardening challenge — getting these little sticks to someday become a flowery forest.
I didn’t have time to deal with them then, so I stuck the bunch is a vase of water and proceeded to slog through the next 2 weeks of work. On my second day off after the work marathon (first day was spend entirely in bed being ULTRA lazy), I had to come up with a solution for what to do with all of these twigs.
A bucket of baby trees — but what to do with them?
I found places for 3 of them (dogwood in the front berm, crapemyrtle south of the driveway and goldenraintree in the herb garden southwest corner) but I want the rest to go in beds I haven’t dug yet — along the back fence and near the back of the house. So I had to stick them some where and the only bare patch I could think of was the garden.
Most of my new little trees will have to live in the garden until I can come up better plan.
That will do for now.
And that crock pot I was expecting. It came the following day. Here is the first thing I cooked in it —
First crock pot adventure. Louisiana-style short ribs with spicy cole slaw. YUM!
short ribs with spicy cole slaw. Pretty yum! I think I am going to like this new toy but I am going to rename it the slow torture device — it makes the whole house smell AMAZING while the food is cooking!
As a rule, I don’t usually get very excited about holidays. Growing up our family never made that big of deal about them. There are some exceptions but generally it was moderate build-up to moderate let down. And working in newspapers for so many years, I have come to think of holidays as a lot of extra work in the build-up and then having to be at work instead of enjoying the day with my family. It’s made me a bit of a Scrooge.
But I LOOOOVE Christmas lights. Since moving out on my own, even during the years I knew there wouldn’t be presents or other festivities, I have almost always put up Christmas lights. This year, I knew the holidays were going to suck because we would be seriously short-handed at work and I would spend the 2 weeks of Christmas and New Years toiling away. So I took the week before Christmas off and tried to get my festive impulses out of the way.
House looks super festive with Christmas Lights!
This neighborhood goes all out on Christmas lights and I think I made a reasonable showing, especially compared to my immediate neighbors — Charles (northside) had a string across the front of the house and Jason & Liz (southside) string around their front porch.
I also spent 2 days of my vacation making about 8 dozen cookies of all different kinds and all were at least somewhat delicious! Then I made cookie plates and delivered them to all of my neighbors — They were all grateful and impressed! I took the rest to a Christmas party at Adam and TJ on Saturday night. It was a lovely evening and all of my Rex Hamilton children were there (except Ryan, who just moved back to Wisconsin). Fun, festive fun!
Then, Sunday was SUPPOSE to be my Christmas, with fancy dinner, open my few presents, possibly phone calls to the fam and maybe a movie while having a couch snuggle with Lily (she got a furminator for Christmas and I was eager to try it out!). But not to be. Woke up Sunday morning and was puttering around when work called and said someone was sick with the nasty flu that was wandering around, so I had to go in. Christmas Cancelled!
That was the start of a horrible 16 day stretch of working 12 hour days with half of the copy desk either out with illness (damn that flu!) or on vacation (damn you Micah for letting so many people be off at once!). But at least the final day was fun. My good friend, and shasta daisy contributor, assistant Metro editor Mr. Dave Kern retired. We had a grand Columbian send off with songs (Mr. Editor guy to the tune of American Pie — so awesome!), nice speeches (mine was a good mix of funny, yelling and weepy) and cake! The following night there was a big to-do with more singing and seeing lots of old Columbian folks. I even chatted with a few people that held my position back in the day — one guy had it BEFORE I WAS BORN — that was surreal!
Mr. Kern rocks out at his goodbye party at Scott Hewitt’s house. Sorry the photo is so blurry — I was laying on the floor shooting up.
Glad the holidays are over for another year! Even if that means I have to take down the Christmas Lights!
The Overall[s] Adventure 
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