Month: December 2018

Starting off with the sunrise this morning.

Beautiful…again!

Google decided to ‘help’ by sending me their ‘enhanced’ version of one of the photos I took this morning of the sunrise.  Sky was just not that blue….but it is pretty anyway.

Christmas Day…so for some reason, I didn’t take a photo of breakfast or dinner.  But I did capture some of the action between the eating.

Present opening and checking out the stockings too!

I think this one was a hit Auntie Kim!

It led to some sort of shooting contest to determine who could open their stocking first to see what was inside.

I am not sure who won…but it wasn’t me.  Might have been Gpa.  Zombie Nerf bullets flying everywhere along with a chainsaw sound….I made sure he took that one home with him! 😉

Another pretty popular present:

For those who are having a little trouble figuring the one above out – that would be a kitty with a beehind that is larger than the opening to the tunnel…Yes, Fidget our Maine Coone kitty.  AND he does get in it…regardless of the snug fit, at least part of the way.

My cats are weird.

(thought I’d get one of those…in – yeah that’s me in an emoticon)

After dinner there was some serious gaming taking place.

Ummm….no I didn’t win this either.  I came in third I think.  And if I didn’t, it is my blog and I will say I came in where ever I want.

The Chicago portion of our family didn’t make it to our house. but we did Facetime with them for a little while after dinner.

My daughter also texted me some nice photos –

That would be one of our Grandsons in his Fireman garb.  Well maybe not the pants, but he looks ready to put out all fires that fall within his area! The fireman clothes were a Melissa and Doug toy in one of the boxes we sent to their place.

Cute!

We are expecting quite a bit of snow in the next 24 hours or so…we will see how it goes. We are north of the Twin Cities now and so they are predicting a lot more that they should get in the southern suburbs. Right now we really don’t have any.  It is gray outside now and is getting colder.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!!

Happy Wednesday!

Sunrise today:

Half an hour later:

Another beauty.

While watching the sunrise I noticed the backyard Christmas tree showing its various colors vibrantly:

Nice!

Inside this morning:

The tree is at the ready for tomorrow morning!

Mandy: MOM….TAKE DOWN THIS WALL!  I can’t get to the presents…AND Merry Christmas everyone!

Happy Christmas Eve Day!!!

 

Happy Winter Solstice!

Doesn’t really look like this today.  This is a sunrise from a few days back. Now there is no snow and no sun. Cloudy, gray and dark inside the house this morning.

So…what’s new around here. Let’s see, OH yes….

I spent the last couple of days accomplishing a task I really dislike and I am not really very good at.

Gifts are all wrapped and ready! Yesss!!  Oh, and due to  Mandy, Fidget and Lemme not being able to wait for the proper time to unwrap the presents, we have a short Expen wrapped around the tree    No longer do we have a sad, lonely looking tree, it has lots of friends. Now it just looks incarcerated.

Also, a few days ago was my birthday and my husband gave me a new Galaxy Smart watch. I have since added a new face to it for the holidays!

Snow falls in the background, cute. And when I tap it, it switches to Santa.  This watch does a lot of pretty cool things.

I found out, using my phone, which is also only a couple of months old, I could make my on emoji.  So I did that – took a selfie and then it walked me through all of the options to create one that supposedly looks like me.

 

Hummm…so what I didn’t know is that it created an entire set of emojis doing different things.  I find them pretty funny and I was looking for a gray hair streaks option but it was not offered.  What???

Yeah…that’s me… I look just like that.

Anyway….okay moving on.

So dealing with this a lot these days – see below:

One little kitty…

With bad intent….

When you put this cat together with something he shouldn’t really have there is generally chaos, so I gave him a box he can get into easily. Normally he shoves himself into a very small box and looks like this.

We will have to see what he can do is a box that is larger than he is.

That’s it for now.

Happy Friday!

 

 

 

Okay – lots to cover so let’s get going!

Yesterday – yet another beautiful sunrise.  Not so today though, gloomy and grey.

This sunrise shot was from the day before the one above.  We have had warm weather for December and you can see there is a bit more snow on the ground in the above photo taken day before yesterday, than there was for the one taken yesterday morning.

Now I am going to complain –

So I started taking a new probiotic and when I opened the new product…this is what I found. This big plastic container held 30 capsules.  I mean seriously – what a waste of everything associated with this item.  Takes up too much shelf space, waste of resources, total overkill to sell the product.  So I won’t buy it again, I will look for another, plus when I got it the seal was broken underneath the cap.  I counted the capsules and they are all there, but I just thought is was disturbing on all counts.

Okay – done with the complaint. 🙂

Day before yesterday was my birthday and the kids came over in the evening for a little bit. Always so much fun to see them.

Especially my grandson.!

Who is generally pretty silly. This is actually a tree topper he has on his head.  But I think it fits him very nicely.  They were getting ready to leave and I had this hanging on my coat stand by the door, just to ‘holiday it up’ a little in the hallway by the door.  He couldn’t resist.

Last night was his first Band Concert and the 6th grade band rocked the house. Photos below

Waiting for it to start.

Getting ready to begin below.

Below – Playing in their Holiday Hats.

And the hat he is wearing actually is a Tigger Christmas hat his mom got when we took her and her husband to Disney World one year.

We have photos of her wearing it…I will have to find the photo and scan it in. It was before digital photos I believe.

And then it was over.

The kids cleaned up the stage, put chairs and music stands away and then came out to meet their fans.

Who is this guy in the funny hat??

Yep – the famous baritone player we had just heard on stage!  Job well done, Sir! 🙂

I also mentioned that I want to show you the decorations on the front of the house.  I will have to take some photos when it is dark out, I just never remember to do it.

But I did take some, though it is still light out.

First you can see  – next to none of the houses on our street are decorated.  Just a couple.

This is looking down the street toward the house, it was a bit darker outside but my cell makes the photo look lighter. Not sure why folks out here don’t decorate much.  Could be because, like us, they have just moved in, in the last few months?

Coming up on our house, that’s not one of our cars in front – the neighbors on both sides of us have their family over all of the time, and probably some friends….So there always seem to be cars parked in front of our house. Since they have their kids over so often, I am surprised they don’t decorate as well.  The neighbors DO say they really enjoy our decorations though.

Not a lot for the first year.  We don’t have our gutters on yet so we will have to take everything down so they can put the gutters on, otherwise we’d leave up the light ‘holders’ all the time. They are clear and you can’t see them very easily unless you hang the lights on them. So we stayed away from hanging them on the entire front of the house this year. We are getting older so maybe we won’t ever do more than this…we will see next year. But this year we were having to find everything due to only being in the house for a month at the time we hung this stuff up. So nothing real fancy.

Sunset!

Not out the window of our house, but close to where we live.  I always do sunrises but it was so nice out I just had to take the photos.

So gorgeous – never get tired of them.

Just want to leave you today with this thought:

Just sayin’….  😉

Happy Wednesday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not much to talk about today but the weather… it is beautiful outside high will be around 35 degrees – which is fairly warm for December in Minnesota.

Another nice sunrise…can never have too many of those!

Still haven’t wrapped any presents to put under the tree.  I am still getting them in. Maybe I will start later today.

Poor little tree, standing all empty underneath.  Part of that is because I know the cats AND the dog will not leave the gifts alone and it would be nice to get to Christmas morning with presents all intact.

I thought I had a photo of the time I left Mandy home alone with presents under the tree…with no short little expen around the tree.  Let’s just say I found out a lot of things the kids were giving me ahead of time. 😉

BUT as I was looking for a photo of that (which apparently doesn’t exist) Look what I came across!

That was Mandy right after we got her.  We got her right after Christmas when she was 2 years old, now this year she will 11 on January 1, 2019.

Mandy now:

She almost looks like two different hounds!  All of the dark fur on her face has turned to white.  She is even sweeter now as an old lady than she was as a youngster.  Such a good girl…even if she does like destroying Christmas wrapping! 🙂

Ummmm – guess that’s it for today!

Hey, it’s Friday!!!

YaY.

Happy Friday!

Sunrise today!

 

Beautiful morning.

During the weekend we did all sorts of things.  One was to go past our old house and see what changes the new owners made…well on the outside, looks like they are also redoing the inside.  We were in the area and just did a drive by.

This is how it used to look:

Looks like they painted the brick white and though the garage doors were brand-spankin’ new – they changed those out too.  It’s all good – their house now.  A good face-lift for the place. They kept the front door, which was super nice with a beautiful side light, left it the same color. Good to see they are taking good care of it.

Another thing we did was go to the Monster Truck Jam on Saturday. That was fun! We enjoyed it.

This was the local guy from MN.

 

 

 

The Minnesota driver did really well.

This is Max D (I think his name is). He was super Awesome!  I have a video and I will see if I can get it up on the blog for folks to see.

And of course…

The ever popular Grave Digger was there as well as Son of a Digger.

Mohawk Warrior was there, he ended up losing his Mohawk when he landed on the roof  after a jump.   Even though he rolled his car at some point, he came back to do other events.  Some of the cars that were running, by the time they finished the free style event, only had the inside frame left of their cars left. The outside of the body was smashed all over the track.

And going also allowed me to see the inside of the new stadium – US Bank Stadium where the Vikes play.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a couple of consumers I recognized….

Consuming…. 🙂

 

Mandy: TOO loud for me, I stayed home!

I like Christmas lights in the house (and outside too). I will have to get a photo of the outside lights.

 

Around here today:

Mandy has been playing a lot lately. Toys all over the place…

And the result is:

Mandy: Mom leave me alone…I’m tired! I have been working pretty hard!

And then there are these two guys –

Fidget

AND

Lemme

Both of them have ‘TROUBLE’ for a middle name.

Fidget: WAIT!, I have a middle name?????   I didn’t know that…..Cool!

Happy Thursday!

We had a lot to do this last weekend, mostly with the motorhome.  We had to drive it up to the dealer in Garfield, MN – couple hours away… and during the drive to pick it up there was hoarfrost making it look like a wintry fairyland.

Nope – not a black and white photo….this is actually the way it looked that morning.

Beautiful!

All we did is take the camper to ‘another’ place to have things done from the Dealer who did the maintenance.  Once it is done at the place it is at now…working on the chassis,  we will go and get it (this coming weekend) and take it over to another place where they will finish up the work needed and store it until we leave on our vacation in a few months.

And this is the newest member of our family…we will be paying for it for sometime to come. 😉

We needed to get a plate put on the car in order to accept the tow bar on the camper so we can pull it around.  Here it is attached to the camper.  Better photo at a later date.  It is a Chevy Equinox.

Mandy: And this is what you do on cold gloomy dayzzzzzzzzzzzzz……

Happy Tuesday!