Friday, December 24, 2010

Visitors in the House!

Yes, my Christmas time guests are back again. Lyra and her mom boyfriend. (We'll call them K and M.) They got in Sunday afternoon after leaving Massachusetts pulling a U-Haul trailer stuffed with my mom's living room furniture.

(I forgot to finish this the other day so I'll write something quickly.)

In the few days they've been here Lyra, Luna, K and I have done a lot of walking in the woods. K and I have gone shopping, once for food and once for gifts.

It's Christmas Eve now and in an hour we'll be heading over to Uncle Butch's for a party. I made sweet and sour meatballs.

During this week Hal and M have been hunting and finally late this afternoon one has gotten a deer. They'll show up to the party later after they've hung it in the pole barn.

That's it for now, I am tired, and have to change clothes.

Merry Christmas.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Family Christmas Party Day!!

Today  Hal and I will attend the annual Family Christmas party for his side of the family.I drove down with his mom 2 days ago so she and I and her daughter could just hang out together and bake. I made an egg nog cake I've never tried before, home made applesauce, and I have a pineapple stuffing ready to go into the oven once I retrieve it from my car where it spent the night as the refrigerator is full.

Hal is driving his dad down this morning and have already left. Will take them about 4 hours to get here. We'll all meet up at J & M's home where the party takes place every year as they've got the biggest house in the area. It will be great to see everyone as not all could make it to Thanksgiving up north. Only one family won't be present as they are now in Texas, being a military family and subject to moving about a lot.

Other food that I know will be there are "Mexican chicken", a spiral ham, pumpkin pies, the famous C's cheese ball, cheesy potatoes, and undoubtedly several other desserts. Soda, tonic, pop, coke, whatever you want to call the bubbly, effervescent, fizzy, carbonated beverage will be the drink of the day.

Besides eating there will be a gift grab bag, one for women, one for men, everyone participating provides a gift, this year, the price limit was raised to $10. The children under 18 exchange gifts with another cousin whose name was picked for them at Thanksgiving. And after all this there is a "White Elephant" game where everyone gets to choose a mysterious gift that another family member contributed because he/she didn't want it. Gets rather silly at this point because some of the gifts are really awful or even useless to the one who gets it yet now and then one is pretty cool. those risk being "stolen away" by someone else with a really lame gift. Can be funny.

Well, probably should go get that stuffing out of my car and turn the oven on. One of these days I'll update the blog again.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

I Like My HDTV!

It finally arrived Friday. It has been held hostage since the 17th of November in a warehouse in Taylor, MI. The shipping company claimed they can only deliver to my area on Thursdays, and since last Thursday was a holiday (Happy belated Thanksgiving) they couldn't deliver till the other day. Oddly, they didn't deliver on Thursday, Dec 2nd, but instead Friday, December 3rd. Wonder what their excuse would have been had I asked why not Thursday?

However, what I researched and purchased was an LG 42 inch LCD HDTV 1080p 120 Hz. I must say it looks very, very good. Damn good in fact. Hal also hooked up all our speakers so we're getting Dolby 5.1 surround sound again.

We reoriented our living room to accommodate this set up. Essentially, rotated the furniture 90 degrees. The TV, as it's very thin compared to our cathode ray tube 24" TV is now on the bookcase against the staircase wall between our tall oak cabinets. Stereo remains on the left side and we moved all the TV components to the cabinet on the right. Hal removed the old TV cabinet to his camp and moved his 8 point deer head to that wall. Eventually, it will have a chair beneath it when my younger sister brings the family furniture here in 2 weeks.

Since we had to remove a lot of knick knacks from the shelves to make this rearrangement, I have to put them all back again with fewer shelves as those same components took those shelves over. So, slowly I am dusting and polishing and replacing. Might get it done by the time my sister, her BF and Lyra get here in 2 weeks.

Or not. But the TV will still look good!