Happy Dances

323. Arby's Dipping Sauces. They make me happy. They make my taste buds do little happy dances as I combine my horsey sauce with my golden mustard on the curly fries. Their little happy dance is a perfect little lunch treat after. . .

324. FINISHING THE GRE!! And - oh yes - doing so well. It doesn't seem right to toot your own horn. We are supposed to be humble and unassuming. But - It feels so good after struggling just to keep up with the laundry and the S-Train's creativity, and trying to fit my own creativity somewhere in the middle of dishes and yelling at the kids to "Close the DOOR," to actually go somewhere and do something terrifying (like math after fifteen years of math atrophy. - Oh, by the way, good thing I've been helping with 5th and 6th grade math homework - I've got decimals and fractions DOWN!) and come out of it with a result that says, "Oh, by the way, even though you feel like a bit of a slow top when it comes to running your house, you are ACTUALLY PRETTY SMART." Whew. It's done. I'll have normal conversations with my children that don't sound like. "Sorry. I can't. I'm studying." Now, where did I really want to go to school?

We will now take you back to our regularly scheduled program called - "Getting Ready for Christmas. One week and counting."

Christmas Lights

322. My candles. I found some plastic Christmas window candles this year. A steal at 50 cents each! The very BEST part about them is that they have little light sensors built in. Every night they turn themselves on. Every morning, they turn themselves off. They are battery powered, so I'm not worried about chords. And - a bonus - they flicker like real candles! I LOVE coming home in the evening or the morning after seminary to see their happy shining glow. It reminds me of times long ago when candles in the window were a guide home and a signal that someone was waiting for you. It reminds me of the tradition of leaving a candle in the window for the Christ child at Christmas. As I remember these things, I want my home to be a place where my family feels that someone is always waiting for them, and I want to make it a place where we look for Christ in our lives and see Him in everyone who comes to visit.

UUUUGGGH! The manly grunt.

321. Sending Mr. C out for a week of Manliness. Mr. C just spent most of last week up with his brother hunting deer. Why does this make me smile? Because he comes home so much calmer and happier. That time tromping out in the freezing woods and processing venison seems to be soothing to his spirit. Someone asked me if I was going to "put my foot down" because of something he was going to miss. NO WAY. This is his time to go out and grunt like Tim Taylor and shoot dangerous weapons and endure the freezing cold and come back hauling food to the cave. It makes him happy. And I'm in big favor of things that add to the general happiness of our family.
Of course, I wouldn't want to do it. All that manly stuff will put hair on your chest.

Major Accomplishments! (for me)

320. I Made My First Web Page!! This was SO hard and so fun. It took several intense days and all the avoidance I could possibly throw at it, but I got it done. They say that learning something new throws you into disequilibrium and it takes awhile to adjust to what you're learning and get your equilibrium back. Well, several times during this process I thought my brain was going to explode from trying to figure out what I was doing - but now I get it. I can now write a web page in BASIC html. I can even see how this could become easy if I kept at it. For some people, this is so elementary it hardly needs explaining. I needed to be walked through the process with baby steps.
So - here is my ugly little baby. You can get there by clicking here. (And there are even internal links to other pages!) There are lots of things I still want to add and tweak and, and . . . But it's a start!

Now I'm off to conquer the CLUTTER that has resulted from mom not paying attention to any sort of house keeping while working on her project for two days in the middle of putting up the Christmas decorations. Our house looks like a small bomb exploded. Most of the debris is Christmas related. Hopefully I'll have fought the extra stuff down to the basement by the time I have to take cranberry sauce up to the school for the fifth grade's Dickens Dinner.