#140: Oh yeah... It's all coming together... 🧑‍🎄🎄❄️✈️

  
 "You don't need to buy a Christmas tree," roomie tells me. "Shortly after they finished building the house I got one on sale shortly after Christmas. It's been stored under the stairs for 15 years." 

    So Friday morning he digs it out. It's the old style sort, with the individual, color coded branches. Not too terribly difficult to put together. But, where to put it? It'd take up half the living room upstairs-- this is why he'd never set the thing up (it's 7 1/2 feet tall!). So what do I do? Move the downstairs plant rack back into my room and set it up on front of the window by the front door. 

    Next step is the lights. I had an old 180 light set packed away. I decided you can NEVER have enough lights and started a list. More lights? Check. How about a tree topper? I had the old light up star; but the LEDs were dim.  Maybe I can use that in the upstairs window somehow. So, new topper? On the list. There isn't a close outlet to the front window--extension cord? Check. Probably a timer as well; despite that they're LEDs (which don't pull a lot of juice) you don't really want them on all the time do you?  (spoiler alert: roomie implied they should be on ALL THE TIME. I got a timer anyway.)

    Then I looked at the ornaments. I have 50 billion raccoon ornaments (one of the reasons I got the idea of putting up a BIG tree; they won't all fit on my little one) as well as a few others; roomie's got a few floating around (mainly owls, for some reason I thought he liked them and tied one to his present every year past few years, last year's ornament however was a siracha bottle!) I decided I can always go to the thrift store (they have tons of ornaments) if I needed more of those. 

    I also put up my little tree--can't forget that! I have a few ornaments that would get totally lost on a big tree, so my little tree didn't get left out.  Will snag some photos and post them so you can see the Christmas nighttime goodies. 

    At any rate, by the early evening I had it pretty much figured out. Blue Star wasn't as busy as I thought it would be; I think it helped that I wasn't out there on Black Friday at 5 am like everyone else. Trust me my dears, there is nothing worth having at Blue Star at 5 am, Black Friday or not. It's cheaper and easier online if you want hard to get stuff or cheap.  You can save that right hook normally reserved for The Person Taking The Last TV, for your Uncle Larry when he starts going off about how "the right person won the election". Be sure to send me photos of the resulting black eye you gave him. 😉

    In other news, my youngin is coming to see me graduate! I am excited. I managed to snag tickets so they wouldn't have to drive. There was much research involved before I figuratively "pulled the trigger". I have never bought tickets for myself, much less anyone else. But it seems to be a fairly easy process as long as you have the correct information.  Apparently this is a big step; they've "never flown alone" before. But I have faith in them (plus a couple extra bucks for travel insurance!) So that's all sorted.  I can't wait for them to meet my friends here and they can see what it's like in Badhairland. 

    Car appears to be fixed. Roomie removed the back seat and installed the new fuel pump assembly in less than an hour. Boy howdy is the new one louder than the old one though! You can certainly hear it kick on when you turn the key. Not complaining though, as long as it works. It's one of those aftermarket parts from Ebay, so while it's working, I wouldn't expect it to work EXACTLY like the old one. And if I can hear it I know it's (probably!) working. 

Thanksgiving, or should I say Friendsgiving, was  AWE SOME.  Roomie smoked a turkey (and it was dee-lish) as well as baking a ham (also good). There was homemade cranberry sauce (Also courtesy of roomie--sooo good). There was pumpkin pie. There were rolls. I made deviled eggs (which tasted better than they looked; I never can peel the damn things and have them look nice!) There was mashed potatoes (slightly lumpy and lots of garlic just the way I like em). There were a couple different sweet potato dishes. Someone even brought Tikka Masala and rice!   The only things missing were stuffing and gravy, which no one thought to bring. Doesn't matter; there was enough to eat and we all ate too much. 

I'm glad I stuck around for the holiday, even though I missed my friends out east. 

More soon! Including photos of the Christmas stuff.
Jinglin dose balls, 
Kraneia