I’ll have a reflective/forward-looking post up later tonight or tomorrow, but today I’d just like to tell you about our morning and how we are ending our year.

My father was visiting yesterday and mentioned he had a pine tree in a pot that he needed to get rid of. He also had something at his house that needed fixing and wanted Mike to come do it before She Who Shall Not Be Named returns from her trip to Texas. So Mike decided to just follow him home yesterday and do it then since he didn’t know if he’d have time any other day.

He fixed what needed to be fixed, decided to take the tree, and got some paperwork dealing with some land my mother owned a share of. I’ll write more about that on a later date because maybe you all can give me some good advice about how to deal with making sure the land and the mineral rights become mine and LG’s and that swsnbn doesn’t get her grubby little hands on it just to spite me if something happens to my father first.

Anyway, the tree that Mike took was a tree that had grown from seed from the pine tree that had lived in front of the house I grew up in for most, if not all, of my life. If I can find a picture of the tree in front of the house, I will post it later. This morning, Mike planted it in our back yard. Hopefully it will not go into too much shock from being moved from pot to ground, but it’s been living outside and it’s pretty well established, so I’m hopeful it will be okay. I love that I have a little piece of my old house here with me. That’s a good thing.

The other thing we are doing this morning is cleaning/reorganizing LG’s room for the new year.

LG, by the way, is filthy. She loves to play in the dirt. She sure didn’t get that from ME (as my father attested to yesterday). But I guess it’s not a bad thing. Even if her clothes are FILTHY. *sigh*

As I said, I’ll write the obligatory out with the old/in with the new post later, but until then, I hope all of you are having a great weekend, that you have a safe New Year’s Eve and that 2007 brings you more joy than sadness.

Mike and I took Little Girl to the Phoenix Zoo today - her first visit to our local zoo. A good time was had by all. :) (Read on …)

Since we hadn’t been out of the house yesterday, we decided to accompany Mike to mail a package and make a quick stop at Home Depot yesterday afternoon (although we waited for him in the car since it was a REALLY quick stop).

Once he got back in the car, he tried to get LG to tell us where we were, which she didn’t, so he had to remind her.

Mike: Say Home Depot!

LG: Home Depot.

I glared at him momentarily. He said he wanted to get her to like HIS favorite store.

Me: We like Target don’t we LG?

LG: Target hug! Target kiss! Target love you!

Me (smugly): That’s right! We love Target!

LG: Yummy Target!

Me: Absolutely! You can get all kinds of yummy things at Target. You can’t get anything yummy at Home Depot!

LG: Hug Target!

Me: And you can get all kinds of things to HUG at Target. You can’t get anything to hug at Home Depot!

LG: Big Target!

Me: Yes, indeed, it’s very big! What color is Target?

LG: Red Target!

Me: That’s right! Target is RED! (Take that Papa!)

Mike: What color is Home Depot?

LG: Orange!

Uh oh.

Last night we had a party for our church choir (you gotta do it after Christmas is over so all the stress is gone…lol!) and so LG didn’t get to bed until after 10. And Mike and I got to bed even later than that. Mike got woken up because the stupid alarm was going off at the church, but then after that we all got a good night’s sleep. Okay, I woke up at 6:30 or so and couldn’t go back to sleep so I surfed a bit and then went back to sleep for awhile. But the good part? I did not actually get out of my bed until about 10:15 am. Mike got LG around 9:45 and brought her into our room to hang out. But seriously people…I can’t remember the last time I stayed in bed until after 10. Heavenly.

Today is going to be a lazy day since all the stress of the holidays is over for us now. Yay! Nothing else to do or prepare for. All done. Whew.

Tomorrow we are hoping to go to the zoo weather permitting. It’s supposed to be 59 degrees tomorrow which is COLD (for us - yes I’m sure you cold climate people are thinking…59? SHORTS WEATHER!), but the forecast says sunshine, so we’ll bundle up in layers and go and hope the animals are out basking in the sun after a couple of days of clouds.

Mike has taken the week off from the day job and it’s nice to just be able to hang out and relax. :)

Today is National Chocolate Day and I’m totally going to eat chocolate. And potato candy. And whatever else I can before next week when I have to be a good girl again.

Our tradition the day after Christmas used to be that our friend C would spend the night and we’d make our ornament lists after poring over the Hallmark Dream Book for the umpteenth time. I’d print out three copies and we’d study them like we were studying for a final exam. Then we’d go hit Osco on Christmas night to grab any Hallmark ornaments they might have and then get up at oh-dark-freezing-our-butts-off-thirty in the morning to hit all the Oscos in the general vicinity, then take a break for breakfast at IHOP and then start hitting all the Hallmarks we could until we were either exhausted or had found all the ornaments on our list.

Well, nowadays we are not quite that crazy. C is busy with her kids. Osco doesn’t sell Hallmark ornaments anymore, and our list has become smaller over the years. Oh, and there’s someone named Little Girl to consider as well. So we do still make our list and check it twice, but we don’t get up nearly as early and we have to start the morning by dropping LG off at her Grandma’s because Hallmark stores on the day after Christmas are not the appropriate place for a 2 year old. And also, because there is ebay, having to find every single ornament is not quite as urgent as it used to be.

Nonetheless, we did hit seven Hallmark stores, two Mervyn’s (which sells them as well), stop by an appliance store to price out dishwashers (and water softening systems - more on that in a future post), and Kmart (where we got the lights to replace the ones Mike never took down last year and of which only half are working - do NOT get me started on that…lol!).

How about you? Is the day after Christmas a day to decompress, or do you love the thrill of bargain hunting at the mall and elsewhere?

Most of the presents are opened (LG has not finished opening all of hers, because to get her to actually unwrap a present is something we didn’t have the time or patience for too many of today because Daddy had to go do mass and Mama had to start cooking dinner and she is just not that into opening presents for some reason).

The leftovers are in tupperware and (hopefully) in the fridge.

The in-laws and my dad are gone.

The kid is asleep.

The dog was rescued from the neighbor’s yard (she got through a little hole that Mike had apparently not closed up well enough, but is now closed VERY well - and really all she wanted was to get back to her own yard).

The husband survived doing three masses (two last night and one this morning) and then being ordered around by me after he got home from this morning’s mass.

I survived one mass and so did the kid.

We looked at Christmas lights last night.

Santa came and left many many lovely things for little miss two year old who was just totally excited and had to take time out to play with each one before she would look at anything else.

My husband surprised me by getting my opal ring repaired in time to put it in my stocking for me to find this morning. :)

We are preparing to make the great 2006 Ornament list for after-Christmas shopping tomorrow.

And basically it was a great day.

Hope yours was, too!

Tomorrow? SHOPPING! Oh yeah!

*R.I.P. James Brown

I’m going to try to tear myself away from my beloved blog for the next couple of days and focus on Christmas, so to all of you who make this blogging adventure enjoyable…

When I was a child, one of the things I remember most about Christmas was all the goodies my aunts and my mom made to give to each other. I remember my Aunt Ruth always made divinity, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything else that was made…just that I really looked forward to those goodie boxes.

I don’t particularly remember everything my mom made either, but I do remember the potato candy. You might be scratching your head and wondering how on earth you make candy with potatoes, but trust me, you can, and she did, and it was very yummy. I probably could have eaten every piece all by myself, I loved that stuff so much.

The last time I remember her making it for me was around 1997 or 1998 - the year they lived with us for awhile because of health reasons. I remember her sitting at our dining room table (because she wasn’t able to stand for long periods of time anymore) and making that candy for me because I asked her to, while I was baking all sorts of cookies and goodies for our treat plates that we were giving for Christmas. It’s a treasured memory, because it’s really the last time my mom and I were able to do that together.

The other night at the family party, we got to talking about family Christmas traditions - like eating “ethnic” foods on Christmas Eve (Mike’s family did ravioli and Rochelle’s family does Mexican, for instance), and my sister in law asked me what our traditions were when I was a kid. I talked about how we always went to my Aunt Frankie’s house on Christmas Eve and the whole family was there - a very warm and glowing memory in my heart. And then I remembered my mom’s potato candy. My sil asked if I ever made it, and it kind of made me sad to realize I never really had since she died, and that it would be a shame to not pass on that memory and tradition of her grandmother to Little Girl.

So today, I made potato candy. I was amazed at the chemical reaction of the mashed potato and the powdered sugar (it gets VERY watery and I do mean VERY, if you try this at home, before it firms up into a dough - you have to add a LOT of powdered sugar), and I wished beyond measure that I could call my mom and ask her if I was doing it right.

Mike, bless him, said, “She’s saying, ‘You’re doing it right, Karin! Keep going!’” And so I kept going. And I finished it. And so many feelings washed over me that when I was done I just cried in Mike’s arms for a few minutes.

I’m not exactly sure why, after six years, this Christmas seems harder than usual, but it is. Maybe it’s because LG is getting older and I wish my mom could be here to see her. I know she’s “here”, but you know what I mean. Maybe it’s because my father is actually going to spend Christmas with us this year for the first time since she died. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, my heart seems a little more fragile this year than for the past few years.

It’s funny, though, how the simple act of making potato candy, brought her so much closer to me than I could have imagined. I miss you Mom. But I will think of you with every bite of potato candy I take.

Me: Say yo.

LG: Yo!

Me: Say gurt.

LG: Gurt!

Me: Say yogurt.

LG: No-neck!

I receive an email each morning called “This Day in History” that tells of something that happened historically on whatever date it happens to be.

Today’s email talks about Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard as well as 11 people on the ground.

I vividly remember this event, although I didn’t remember that it happened so close to Christmas. I was 22 years old when it happened. It was suspected to have been an attack against the United States in retaliation for either the 1986 U.S. air strikes against Libya or a 1988 incident in which the U.S. mistakenly shot down an Iran Air commercial flight over the Persian Gulf. Either way, the images we saw on television of the aftermath were incredibly horrific and poignant.

In the summer of 2000, I was able to visit Scotland and England on a singing tour along with a friend. We drove past Sherwood Crescent in Lockerbie where most of the plane’s wreckage ended up and what at least in my memory is now an empty field.

What I remember as we drove past that site was how the buzz of voices on our tour bus ceased and the only voice we could hear was the voice of our tour guide telling us the story of the crash. And then silence as we all were lost in our own thoughts and allowed ourselves to simply feel.

What did I feel? It’s hard to explain really. It’s not like we stopped the bus and got out, but even just driving past the site of such a horrific disaster, you feel something. Whether it’s the spirits of those who have died, or just the energy of their terror still there, or maybe the peace their souls have found in the time since it happened, I don’t know. But you definitely feel something. And I won’t ever forget that feeling.

So today, on December 21, 2006, I remember Lockerbie, Scotland and Pan Am Flight 103.

I could rant about a lot of stuff today, but I’m not really in the mood for a rant. All I will say is that possibly every rude and stupid person in the city of Phoenix was in the grocery store today at the same time I was.

In other news, the good thing about being 40 (at least for me) is that my monthly visitor is more like a bi-monthly or tri-monthly visitor. The bad thing about that is that this is the month and my cramps have always been worse when it’s cold. So I’m slightly miserable right now and I will gladly kiss the feet of the person who invented 8 hour Tylenol because it at least takes the edge off of the pain.

And finally, I get to go to the salon tomorrow and that will be a nice little break. Too bad I’ll have to wash my hair before Christmas. Or will I? ;-)

Good thing number one: I went to our neighborhood Hallmark store to mail a package this morning and there were only two people in line in front of me. Apparently yesterday was crazy. I’m glad I waited until today since priority mail is supposed to still get it there by Christmas.

Good thing number two: The Phoenix Suns won their 15th game in a row breaking the record held by the 92-93 Suns who ended up going to the finals. That team included my very favorite player evah - Dan Majerle (which is where Majerle the dog got her name, by the way). Good stuff!

Out of the mouth of Little Girl today as she hugged and patted her sippy cup…

LG: Da milk is crying.

Me: Why is the milk crying?

LG: Da milk is sad.

LG: Poor milk.

Me: Why is the milk sad?

LG: Da milk have owie.

Me: Well that explains it.

Yesterday night was the family party and I could wax poetic on how awesome it is to be with family over the holidays which it is. Or I could bitch and moan about Mike’s parents’ dog which BIT my child on the upper arm at the party (not badly, but STILL). Or I could talk about how absolutely ethereal Marlene’s oldest daughter Social Butterfly looked as she danced in Snow Queen today. Or I could tell you that the dog basically got crated this evening when Little Girl was at her grandparents’ while we were at church (and is lucky I didn’t strangle her by the way). Or I could discuss how good hot pizza tastes when you only had one single chicken nugget for lunch.

But, I will just say that it was a busy weekend and the busyness will ramp up starting tomorrow until about December 28th when it finally settles down again a bit. Tomorrow I’ve got a couple of rehearsals and planning to do for Christmas and our choir party on the 27th.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Not much to say today as there is just way too much to do before our family get together this evening. Partly because we always had a hard time getting everyone together on Christmas Eve or Day and working around our church music schedule which tends to be pretty hectic this time of the year, a few years back (after everyone started getting married and having to split time between two families), we switched to a big party a week or so before Christmas. The best part about it is that all the cousins and extended family can come as well. And the other best part of it is that it’s at Mike’s parents’ house so I don’t have to deal with all the prep of hosting. I’m sure at some point down the line the kids will take over the hosting duties, but for now, it’s there.

In the meantime, there are cookies to bake and decorate, gifts to wrap, and a child to feed, bathe and nap, so a lot to do and not nearly enough time to do it in. Oh and did I mention Mike had to work for a few hours this morning? Yay.

If you’re looking for something a little more interesting to read, scroll down a post or two and hopefully you’ll see something more exciting! lol!