It's been a while!

The past couple months have been insanely busy for me. I started this posting a week ago. Holidays are nice, but stressful. I set a new record this year for having five Christmas parties scheduled within one week. It has been crazy. My time on the computer is very limited thanks to my little helper. He discovered the switch on the power strip, so if he's in the computer room with me I usually end up rebooting a few times while trying to do stuff on the computer. My computer time has mostly been devoted to making a DVD to send to Gary. When we bought our camcorder a year ago we were told that the video would transfer from the hard drive of the camcorder to the hard drive of the computer and then you could burn it to a DVD. I was told all I'd have to do is plug the camcorder into the computer and push the button. For technologically handicapped people like me it isn't that simple. I spent a ridiculously enormous amount of time figuring how to get it to work, the whole time wanting to cuss and swear and smash the stupid thing to pieces then throw it out the window. Luckily I figured it out before it came to that and I even got it mailed in time for Gary to get it for Christmas. So in the past month and a half besides getting ready for Christmas and making Gary a DVD here's what we've been doing. I picked out new carpet and got it laid in our downstairs living room. This was to replace what was damaged when my fridge broke and leaked into the basement. I thought picking out new carpet would be fun, but it really wasn't. I've never picked out carpet before so I had no idea what to look for, and I am very indecisive. The samples all look so different when you look at them in different light or turn them different ways. Josh isn't much of a shopper either, but he enjoyed running all over the carpet stores and climbing on top of all the rolls of carpet. I liked how it turned out, so hopefully Gary will too. I also got a new kitchen floor put in to replace what was damaged because of the water mess. This was really easy to pick out because I liked what we had before. Gary liked it too so I got something pretty close to what we had before. So far I like this better than what we had before. The water damage warped some shelves in the food storage area, so they built me new ones. They have replaced the drywall that was damaged, and fixed a light fixture that shorted out because of the water. I just have to have them adjust that a little and I think they'll be done with the repairs. I've almost got everything put back together now the way it was before the water mess happened. Josh likes to do everything Mom does. He's seen me use the eye lash curler, so he decided to try it too. I took the makeup away before he put it on so I wouldn't get into trouble with his Dad. Josh sees me cuddle up under a blanket all the time, so now he does it too. The other day I was sitting on the floor and he put a pillow behind me, got the blanket and his books and brought them to me because he loves to read stories with the blanket and pillow. Melissa was doing a little studying for finals, so Josh decided he'd better do some reading too. He loves to climb on Melissa. In case I haven't mentioned it before, Melissa (my younger sister) moved in with me at the beginning of the semester. She's finishing up her teaching degree at UVSC. This semester she had a pretty heavy load, so she wasn't home much, but still it was nice to have her around. Next semester she's student teaching at Payson High and probably won't be as busy as she's been this semester. One night Melissa and I had a little fun tearing out the divider in my front room entry way. I wanted to replace the ugly vinyl in my entry way, and thought I may as well make it match the new kitchen floor. Gary and I had talked about pulling that divider thing down, so Melissa and I were trying to figure out how to do it. She picked up a hammer and experimented a little. Then I took the hammer and started banging away. Before we knew it we'd ripped it out. I had never actually used a skill saw before, but power tools are always fun to use. So I borrowed it from my cousin who lives a block away and Melissa kept the camera handy since working with power tools always makes things more interesting. I managed to get by without losing any fingers or toes or anything else. Now we've just got some patching to do.

This is what the room looked like after we tore that thing down. It makes the room look so much bigger and really opens it up a lot. I like it so much better. Gary really isn't going to recognize the house inside or out by the time he gets back.

I managed to get the Christmas decorations up. I still have a couple things that I intended to hang up but still haven't gotten around to it. I didn't even finish putting away Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations until a couple days ago. This calendar was the first thing I put up though, and each day I let Josh pull something out of one of the pockets and put up. We had a calendar like this when I was a kid and we always fought over who got to put up the baby Jesus on the 24th. We used to rearrange the calendar putting camels in the sky and angels in the stable in an effort to make my youngest sister, Andrea mad. My mom still had the pattern to make one like what we had as kids so she made one for each of us and Josh loves it. It is usually the first thing we do each morning, and during the day he'll stand under it and whine because he wants to put more on it. Each time we put something on it he tells me what each item on the calendar is.

This is my pathetic looking tree. The night it was first decorated it looked nice, but since then has been redecorated on a daily basis. I put all the ornaments I don't really care about near the bottom of the tree. Josh pulls them off until he has accumulated a little collection. Then he tries to put them back on the tree. He can do it, but not very well. In the process he bends the branches every which way. I got tired of picking up ornaments pretty quickly so they slowly made their way out of Josh's reach until the top half is now heavily populated with ornaments and the bottom half is rather bare, and the branches are all out of shape. At least Josh is having fun with it.

Gary sent me a DVD full of pictures and little video clips he's taken with his digital camera. Sometime in the very near future I intend to post some of those pictures and do an update for him. More than likely it will be while I am in Richfield at my parent's for Christmas because more people will be around to entertain Josh while I do it. I haven't even had time to see all the pictures and video clips yet, but I am very much looking forward to a couple days off work so I can hopefully get some things done that I haven't had time for.