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.  :-)