Halloween weekend

In past years, our house has been covered with Halloween decorations. Pumpkins, on the verge of rotting, sat on the front steps; gravestones and cemetary signs covered the front lawn. Inside, the living room looked like backstage at a community theatre. Costumes and weapons covered the coffee table, end table and chaise.

This year with Jamie gone, the house is eerily quiet. Em is having a sleepover a few houses down, and it looks like she took her giant pumpkin with her. That thing weighed at least 25 lbs, lol.

Yesterday she went to school in her Mad Hatter Girl costume and it was a hit! At first she wanted to buy a costume but I talked her into getting a hat and building a costume around that and a Victorian jacket we cut down. After moving the buttons and slitting it down the back, I used a long black shoelace to put corset lacing in. She wore a blue satin bubble skirt, multi-coloured leggings and boots, and the other kids loved it.

We don't have any decorations up, but we do have a snow globe that has a skeleton couple dancing to Ding Dong the Witch is Dead and two crows that look down on you from the top of the desk in the kitchen. That's the extent of Halloween for us, this year, along with handing out candy.

Have a safe and happy weekend!

yummy gift

Since Bill didn't get paid until after Christmas, and he didn't get everything for me that he'd wanted to, he decided that last night should be Date Night, and that I should pick a restaurant to visit and consider the night to be part of our Holiday Celebrations. I almost always pick a steak house!

It was excellent. We started with scallops and shrimp, moved onto steak with garlic mashed potatoes and caesar salad (me) and salmon (Bill) We had Spicy Caesars and chilly Seabreezes (vodka/pink grapefruit juice/cranberry juice) and it was delicious.

It was very cold outside (-25°C) so we came home early and snuggled up under the blankets. Today we're headed off to the drugstore because I need to pick up some beauty products. Have a good day and stay warm!

Happy New Year!

Emily, Christmas afternoon

I love blogging.

The first time I ever saw a blog was during my time at Widownet, a message board I'd found just eleven days after Dale died. I spent hours and hours on that board. I started dating a year later and continued writing about that, but once I'd met Bill (I had been widowed twenty months by then) I needed another outlet. I fell fast and hard for Bill and wasn't willing to write about it when I knew so many people were still pining for their lost loves, so in June of 2004 I followed a link posted at the bottom of Kamai40's post. That's how I found journalspace! I'm not sure if Kamai is still blogging, but she was the one that introduced me to it and I took to it like a duck to water.

All through my LDR with Bill, through Jamie's teenage rebellion, through our transition of getting custody of Em and becoming a blended family, my career changes and ups and downs - I blogged through it all.

This past August was the first time in years where I just couldn't write anymore. I couldn't write about my disppointments or my financial difficulties, my depression or my fear. It seemed like I was paralyzed and started getting through each day in survival mode.

Now that there is light at the end of the tunnel, it feels like I can breathe again. I am looking forward to dropping my hours at work, taking some classes, and blogging again. Physically, I have very little pain and most of my Fibro symptoms are in remission. Getting another vehicle will be possible sometime in January. It might be damn cold today (-26°C) but inside my little house, it's warm. My husband has a short working day and I have the day off. The kids are happy and healthy and watching RENT in the living room.

I hope you all have a wonderful time tonight. Be safe and take pics!

lovely

I got this poinsettia by using 500 Sobey's points. It's cute, but those Sobey's points are useless - I think that you need to redeem 1200 of them to get a tiny bag of shredded carrots. Do American and foreign grocery stores do this? Award one point for every dollar spent just to track your shooping habits?

Ahem. Anyway, I like to get at least one poinsettia each year, to compliment the various silk ones around the house.

Tonight I hope to start wrapping gifts. Exciting!

I won't even wish for snow

Merry Christmas, 2009

Yesterday's snow made it really seem like Christmas, so I'm glad that the tree was up. And even though this year has been brutal in many ways, I'm really looking forward to the holidays.

We got this 7 ft. artificial tree last year and it really fits the space. It holds all of our ornaments and I love that we don't have to maintain it or clean up after it.

Do you have tree themes? For years I built a food theme around apples, candy canes, cookies and balls made of nutmeg but that changed the year that Bill came. I bought a group of family snowmen, one with each of our names on it. Em wasn't with us that year but we tell her she was with us on the tree. Bill has a little gold firetruck from the first year that he was here, and Jamie added a bear in a canoe from her trip to Vancouver in October. Dale has one of his gold medals tied to the tree with a red ribbon (my late husband was a Shotokan Karate instructor) The little snowman in the pic is part of a group that I bought last year.

Tokyo was a little put out because we took her spot from in front of the window, but she's making up for that by walking all over our entertainment unit. I swear she sheds more to get even, lol.

mid week

photographer unknown

Well, the truck went back to the dealership Monday night, with a minimum amount of drama. Not that I wasn't edgy and easily hurt that day, but it went okay. Bill drives an older pickup and he's been giving me rides to work.

The car we were looking at didn't have a/c, so we're back to square one but still hope to pick something up on Friday. That'll go a long way to making me feel more independent, even though my credit rating is in the toilet right now.

Onward and upward.

Since my family has decided they don't want to have Christmas, I've been a little down about it. My Mom turns eighty-one this Sunday and I just don't know how to have Christmas without her! I might have been okay had my sister wanted to do something with us, but they want to do their own thing as well. *sigh* For now, our plan is to volunteer at at least one place, do Christmas Mass at St. Mary's on Christmas Eve, and have Christmas dinner here at home the next day. I think we'll all go to a movie on Christmas night.

Jamie wants to start planning and saving for a trip next year - she wants to do Christmas in New York! That would mean no family vacation again next summer so I'm not sure how I feel about that. I love the idea of a holiday like that, but our financial situation would really have to improve!

I hope you're all having a good week, so far.