Celebrating Christmas!

The Christmas cactus looks very Christmasy with lights on it. 

Today is Christmas day here at our house.   My son and his girlfriend arrived last night  and  we had a low key Christmas eve celebration last night.  Now it's morning and I am the only one awake, but I'm thinking about waking everyone up so we can get this party started.   :-)   as early as this afternoon I have to be right back to reality as my daughter has a doctor's appointment.

Santa made it! 

Merry Christmas!

Seasonal Typo.

I was typing as fast as I could because it was almost the end of my shift and I seriously wnated to get out of my chair.  You know that in the past, I have laughed at my tendency to leave off the first letter of words when I type quickly resulting in such classics as "No history of  rug abuse." and "No known rug allergies." but today, I typed that the patient is a "Danger to Elf".

  :-)

Trying to work up some good cheer.

I'm not being very successful at it, truth, be told, but I am doing the next thing with the holiday preparations.  I wrapped a few presents today.  I listened to Christmas music.  I lit a chocolate scented candle that smells so good, it is probably fattening.   We had the Christmas Cantata at church, which went well and the Christmas play last night, which is always fun.  I enjoyed talking to some old friends.  I'm feeling a bit stressed that we have doctor's appointments this week and next week, I have to work on Christmas eve, Christmas day and the day after, that my son and his girlfriend are not coming to visit until after Christmas and I don't know when we are going to celebrate and to top it off, an opening came available in the assisted living facility that we were waiting on and we have to move mom sometime in the next 30 days.  I'm also dealing with the occasional wave of grief for Christmases past that hits me every now and then, like this morning, when I was in the kitchen washing dishes.  Oh well.  Everything including Christmas changes and we have to adapt to it.

I made this art this morning to help me get in the spirit, whatever that means.

Still, feeling a little like this ....

Scrapghan 4 is done!

I think the pictures of the completed afghan wash out the colors, so I posted a couple of pictures in the middle here of it being worked on.  It's really beautiful.  Just in time for Christmas gift giving.  :-) 

Good articles elsewhere. :-)

Both Penelope Trunk and Laura Grace Weldon have good homeschooling/parenting posts today on their blogs.

What Made You Start Homeschooling - Penelope Trunk 

Toes Making a Fist - Laura Grace Weldon  At first, this one does not seem to be about school or homeschooling, but if you read it in light of this one Kids will never tell you what's happening at school.,  it really makes you think.  

My kids were in public school for 6, 2 and 1 years and they came later and told me things that had happened, but did not tell me anything at the time.  Nothing was too bad at our school, but it was just better for us all, with the kids home.

A few things.

Things are always busy around here and this week, busy x3 or 4.  We went to a concert the other night, and saw Mercy Me with the Louisville Orchestra.  It was cool, but security was tight and took a long, long, long, long time and we missed the first few songs.  I was very disappointed.  The first picture, below, is the stage, the second is a closeup of the ornate column that was beside my seat and the third, is the long line to get in.  I know that security is necessary, but I wish that we had been warned of the time involved.  We got there 35 minutes early and ended up 15-20 minutes late.  :-(  

This picture is a chalk drawing on posterboard that my daughter had done one night on a whim, put under her bed and forgot about until she was cleaning the area under her bed the other day and found it.  If I had drawn something that good, I would not have forgotten it.  :-P.

It's hot chocolate season around here.  In this house, we make some seriously good hot chocolate and this week, we've been making it fancy with whipped cream and sprinkles.  :-)  

School is going on though not very energetically and the kids took the ACT test yesterday.  They think they did okay.  We'll see in 4-6 weeks, I suppose.  This photo is of my work, and a sample of the kind of thing that voice recognition does occasionally.  The VR at my current job is a ton better than the VR that made me leave my old job, but it's still frustrating sometimes .. and also funny.  

We're getting ready for Christmas.  I've got almost all of my shopping done.  I just need to get something for mom.  Speaking of mom, there is an opening in an assisted living facility closer to home and we are pondering moving her, so pray for us and for her as we try to do this.  

I hope that you all are enjoying the holiday season!  Sometimes the stress gets too much and tries to take away the joy, but I am trying to savor the good things.  

Work related funny.

I use word expansion software to make my production as a medical transcriptionist faster.  Most of the time, I just leave it on, which makes for funny searches sometimes in search engines.  For some reason on Shorthand , I have heros expand to hemorrhoids, so today, I searched on Amazon for The Legend of Zelda, Triforce Hemorrhoids.  That's going to be funny when the have a meeting about what people searched for ...

I'm trying to get my Christmas shopping done without too much whining this year.  So far, I've bought one thing, so, so far, so good.

Fun and then not - so- fun!

We had a craft bazaar and luncheon at our church and it was great!  Ours is the last table in this series of pictures.  My daughter and I both sold plenty to get our table fees back and more.  We were very happy and excited and tired when we came home.  We started to watch Elf and I laid down on my back with my head kind of hanging down and that pushed me into a bout of vertigo that was the worst ever.  I felt like throwing up.  I staggered to the right when I would try to walk.  I had to hold onto the walls.  I remembered that the NP last time had had me to a set of exercises so I googled 'exercises for vertigo" watched a Youtube video and did the exercise 3 times, but I think only correctly once.  I seems to have worked, thank God.  I could not live like that!  It was awful.  So there was the fun and then the not-so-fun.  

Christmas is coming!

I'm starting to have my yearly Christmas shopping panic attack.  I haven't even started yet.  The Christmas tree is behind schedule this year, but it finally got finished last night and when I got up this morning, the stockings had been hung on the wall with care, reminding me that I need to get some things for them too, which I hadn't even thought about!  Eek!

Does anyone panic about Christmas shopping like I do?  I do it every year.  I think I need some kind of intervention!

As I have went on through the day, working and going in and out of the kitchen/living room area, I realized that my Christmas decorators not only got the tree up last night, they decorated a bunch of other things; the entertainment center, the stove hood, the kitchen light fixture, the doorways and a mirror in the entry way.

It makes me smile to see the house all decked out.  :-)

Good week.

We had a good Thanksgiving week.  Our oldest son came home and we had a very laid back, not rushing around much kind of week.  We did have to rush on the actual Thanksgiving day, but other than that, we did not do too much of anything.  It was great! 

I took this picture of the sunrise one of the mornings when I put the dogs out.  Isn't it beautiful?  

Now, oldest son is back in Mississippi and we are going to get into the routine again and add into that, trying to get the Christmas shopping done, a craft show and some other festivities.  We will be celebrating Christmas late this year, when our oldest comes back from Mississippi so that will give us a couple more shopping days (trying to look at the bright side of him missing Christmas Eve and Christmas Day for the first time ... ). 

Family Time!

This week, I don't have any doctors appointments, no 4H meetings and nothing on my schedule except work and family time.  Our oldest son has been home since Saturday and we are thoroughly enjoying spending time as a family.  We've been playing board games and on the WiiU that my youngest son bought himself in a pre-black Friday event and mostly talking, talking, talking.  All the messaging in the world just doesn't take the place of talking in person.  Phones come closer, but we are not phone kind of people.  :-)   We have done something similar to Skype in the past and that was fun, but out internet is not the best as supporting that, because it's slow.

Our son's sweet girlfriend did not get to visit this time and we miss her, since we've already become attached but she will get to come back with him for Christmas.

Today is my day off work, so I am off to run some errands and do a little bit of pre-Thanksgiving shopping!

Homeschooling is out for the week because it's always out when our oldest is home, for maximum family time.

Working at my MT job.

I'm still a medical transcriptionist, working at home, despite many job applicatins and a couple of interviews, here I still am.  Today, I'm okay with it.  I got a lot of new accounts last week but they haven't been as bad as I anticipated.  I don't like change.  Today, the doctor I am typing for, got on the phone and immediately said very snottily, "Please. Transcribe. Every. Word. I. Say."   If it were my last day of work here at this job, I would .. and the last sentence I just typed would read as follows:

Um.  As was noted above, uh, uh, the patient has grown significantly, uh, uh, uh, and appears to be in a growth spurt.  Since uh, uh, uh, one year ago, um  there has been an approximate 17 pound weight gain and the patient um, has grown greater than 5 inches.

Annoying.

Talking about weird stuff.

When you have young people around, there always seem to be conversations about what superpower you would want to have if you could only choose one  (for me, it's instant travel anywhere I want to go) and if you could be half human, half animal what animal would it be?  (Bear, obviously, they eat all summer and sleep all winter!)    Often, the conversation comes up about what we would choose to eat if we were on death row and choosing our last meal.  For us gluten free peoples, Krispy Kremes is always #1, followed by things like dinner rolls, biscuits and gravy and pizza with cheese in the crust.  The other night, we were watching Hart of Dixie and the character on that show was trying to think what to say on a first date and came up with the death row dinner question, then she took it one further ... what would you have done to get on death row.  Hmmm.  Interesting.  I said that I would have killed Bridget and Racheal from Cardholder Services.  We get at least one of those scam calls every day, usually when I am feeling really bad or taking a nap.  :-P

Too much, too soon.

I started back to work yesterday for the first day since surgery and it did not go well.  I felt awful and my usual account did not have any work in it, so my supervisor assigned me to 4 more accounts.  Well, I've shared before all the nit-picky little things that can vary between accounts and how hard it is to keep up with what is bolded, what is not, what is verbatim and what accounts want you to edit the grammar and a million other things and then to keep these all in your head and make decisions in split seconds to try and go fast, fast, fast, in order to make enough lines to not get penalized, it's mind boggling and annoying and I hate it.  I spent half the day crying about it yesterday.  Then, I went to get my stitches out, thankfully my husband drove me so I could take a pain pill and nap a little on the way and then we went to meet some friends for dinner and had a lovely time, and then I decided to stop by Kroger and get my comfort foods which my husband had not bought at the grocery.  After my day at work, I felt in need of some comfort.  But walking through the grocery triggered an asthma attack and by the time we got home to my inhaler and I used it, I collapsed from exhaustion.  I did way too much on my first day back to real life.  :-(

Also, I hate my job more than ever, if that's even possible.

Art, art art.

I've done a lot while recuperating.  I use these sketchbooks, watercolor paint, watercolor markers and sharpies and usually some white accents with a Painter's marker.

! 

It's 45 days till Christmas.

I've had quite an emotional week, with the surgery, with having to wait from Monday to Friday to get the (again benign) results and then with feeling thankful for it.  Also, I found out that it's 45 days until Christmas.  This inspired me to do a 40 day challenge, 40 days of exercise, 40 days of prayer, 40 days of doing a gratitude journal and this challenge 40 bags of stuff decluttered from my house in 40 days. (It's supposed to go along with the season of lent but I'm doing it for advent.)   So far, I'm 2 days in and since there are 5 extra days to play with, I am going to be able to give myself some margin to get it all done.  I am also going to go a little easy on myself with the exercise at first because of the fact that I am recovering from what turned out to be a very invasive, very painful surgery.  I'm thankful to be alive though and so, so very thankful that I don't have to have an even deeper, more painful surgery like I would have had if they had found cancer.  I don't know if I'll be able to get all this done, but I will try.  Even if I got only 20 bags of stuff out of the house and exercised for 20 days, I'd still be pretty happy about it.  Better than not trying, right?

Also, what does this post have to do with homeschooling?  Well, that's where I started, the homeschool cabinet ... one bag gone!

The weather has finally turned cool the last couple of days and has been beautiful.

Pretty much nothing.

It's funny how your world changes when you have a surgery like this.  I went from having a relatively normal day to day life to having the kind of  life where I pretty much sleep all the time and celebrate things like taking a shower, sleeping in my own bed, eating solid food  and  making it 5 hours without a pain pill. 

My son in Mississippi and I  were chatting about the surgery and he asked what else I had been up to ... well., pretty much nothing.   I'll get there eventually.   

I did find out yesterday that the final biopsy result was benign and I don't have to undergo another, deeper surgery and so now I can concentrate on getting better and building up my strength and getting back into life.  

 

 Meanwhile I am going to keep o celebrating the small victories.  :-) 

So ..

I had my little old surgery yesterday, the surgery that I had gotten the idea was going to be quick and pretty much painless and leave a small scar.  Well, that was not the case.  I have a scar from the front of my ear at the top, down under my jaw that is at least 6 inches.  They kind of peeled back my face to get to the salivary gland and on top of that, the biopsy results this time were not conclusive so now, again, I am waiting for biopsy results.  So lots of fun here.  We're watching a Friend's marathon, I'm sleeping off and on in my chair (not allowed to lie flat yet) and trying to make the best of it.  My husband is an excellent caregiver and it's a good thing because my daughter is not all better yet from her surgery last week.  Prayers would be appreciated.

We had a spectacular sunset here a couple of night ago, but living in the woods as we do, this was the best picture we could get of it.  

 

Some art.