Happy Thanksgiving

Five Things I Look Forward to During Holiday Season
The holiday is a very narrow window. You can start decorating for Thanksgiving, if that’s your thing, a weekish ahead, but you can’t start on Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving. If Christmas lasted all year, it wouldn’t be special. You got to respect the red and green.

1. Christmas songs
Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Joy to the World, Jingle Bell Rock, Silver Bells, I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas. You know, the essentials.
2. Chex Mix
Even the burnt stuff. And People Puppy Chow too. My husband buys it year-round, but it just says Christmas.
3. Cheap tinsel
Silver and red and blue… maybe even at the same time! You can buy enough skeins of it at Dollar General to deck your house, truck, and work cubicle for less than ten bucks. Hilarity ensues. And after you take it down, Christmas lingers until you vacuum.
4. Sneaking surprise presents to the wrapping table.
I love surprises anyways, and when they’re happy feel-good gifts from your loved ones, even better. So just wait until your parents or kids or siblings leave the room, run down the hall, grab your stash from your stock drawer, scurry back to Grand Central Wrapping Station, and get those corners perfect before they return.
Granted, this is not as much fun since I moved away from home. It’s the thought that counts?
5. Feeding cows in the icy mud
Okay, maybe that’s not really the best. But it’s unavoidable. It’s farm life. It’s home. It’s family. And that’s what the holidays are about.

Happy holiday season!

Friday’s Five Things

Friday is rest day, and for most of the rest of 2015, the first day of my weekend. It’s the day I get to sleep in, start in on my to do list, and go to bed thinking,  “And there’s still TWO more days!” I don’t know why I can’t be productive during the week.

I did laundry and baked cinnamon rolls (Pillsbury again, one day I’ll make them from scratch) and we went to town and did some shopping… Welding supplies and house supplies and Walgreens. It’s so much more fun to shop with my Better Half. We rented Mortdecai with Johnny Depp for at-home date night. Now he’s plugging away on the closet reno (it’s going to be so awesome!) and I’m attacking the kitchen. I did a quick inventory of what’s where, so I can think about purging. One day, we’re going to get to reno the kitchen and that’ll lose two cabinets to get an open concept, so I need to do some reorganizing before that happens.

Friday, being the freest day, may be my new official Blog Day, and thus needs a theme. Three Things… Five Things? Five Things Friday. I like it.

Five Things… always in my fridge:
1. Strawberries (chopped or whole or turning mushy…)
2. Single-serving plain Chobani yogurt
3. A bag salad (also possibly going mushy)
4. Deli sliced turkey (oven roasted Land O Frost is my fave, but I’ll vary with the sales)
5. Beer. It takes me two weeks (or longer if I’m training hard) to go through a six pack, but some nights a cold glass bottle is so sweet waiting on pasta to cook or on the front porch with the sunset.

I was reviewing my past blog posts last weekend, adding categories and tags, and realized I’ve been struggling with balance in my life forever. Here’s to the struggle.