Life Through My Eyes

Early Jump On Those Holiday Decorations

It is that time of year when a person has a lot of commitments along with cooking, baking and all kinds of other tasks coming at them...enough to need to get an early jump on some other things that need to be done during the holiday season.
I decided to get a real early jump digging our decorations out and putting them up, including our Christmas tree.
I usually don't tackle this job until the day after Thanksgiving but each year it feels that we go through hours of work to get everything located up set up, only to have to take it down and put it away after only being up for what seems like a rather short period of time.
This year I decided to do things a little differently.
I decided that because I have a few other commitments on the board and because I wanted to feel like all of the work to put everything up, wasn't going to feel like it usually does...decorations up one day and down the next.
This year our decorations will be up twice as long as usual. This year the holiday decorations will be up for about 5 1/2 weeks.
I know...there is still a week to go before Thanksgiving.
Hey...the way I figure it...if it is good enough for the tv stations to start on Christmas sales, the internet to start on Christmas sales and the retail stores to start on Christmas sales....then it is good enough for me.
Below are some photos that I took of our holiday season decorations:

I put together a little North Pole on top of our new freezer

Various Santa's lining the stairs

Below is one of the souvenirs we brought back from our cruise this last Summer. We got this at the Brown Thomas store in Dublin, Ireland. If you turn the right side knob, the interior of the tv lights up, the train goes go around and around and the people move around. The tv also plays holiday songs. The store had a huge one of these for sale but it was being sold for several thousands of dollars. This miniature version suits our needs just fine.

Our holiday wreath we put together...kind of a log cabin, camping and fishing sort of theme

And here is our tree...love the fiber optic trees

Veronica has been under the weather lately, so I got her a dozen roses hoping that they would make her feel a little better.

This was originally a photo that I took while we were in Edinburgh, Scotland. I sent it in and had a canvas made from the photo. It really came out nice...this photo does no do it justice.

Anything New Going On

It has been at least a couple of weeks since almost having to have surgery due to my kidney stone issues.
Since then any residual pain that I have had in the area of my right kidney has gone away.
This last Tuesday I had to start a 24 hour urine collection. This collection gets turned over to a lab with the hopes of finding out what is causing my kidney stones to develop.
I won't find out the results for another 5 weeks, which is when I am scheduled for my next Urologist visit.
Last week I also made lasagna for all of the workers at Veronica's place of employment.
I ended up cooking 8 boxes of lasagna noodles, frying up 10 pounds of hamburger, frying up approximately 6 pounds of sausage and then putting together 2 huge batches of lasagna in those really large aluminum foil turkey pans...the ones that have the handles on each side.
Each one of these pans weighed approximately 15 pounds.
It seemed like it took forever to prepare the food, assemble the lasagna and then cook it up.
Once it was all finished I placed both pans in our fridge and Veronica took the finished product with her to work on the following morning.
From what I have heard the lasagna was a big hit and it last them for 2 days.
I also made a pan of lasagna for our neighbors and 3 pans for us. We ate one pan over the course of several days and the other two pans were frozen so that we could have them when it gets real cold out.
Next up will be that soup that you get at the Olive Garden... Pasta E Fagioli. Going to have to get a couple of really big stock pots to cook this soup in. This won't be made for a couple of weeks yet.
Veronica and I were thinking about going somewhere in Feb or March of next year. We tossed around ideas and finally kind of settled on the idea of going back to Las Vegas or maybe the Pigeon Forge area.
After giving it more thought, ewe decided that we will probably just stick around here and save our money up, especially since we are already going fishing up in Canada for a week and then we have our big 14 day NCL Cruise that includes but is not limited to Italy and the Greek Isles.
We will still need to load up on Euros for this cruise.
I finally have been able to get back into my workouts over the last 3 days. Going for walks is still a challenge for me. More so right now because the temps are dropping and I don't really enjoy walking outside as a form of exercise during the cold weather months. Give me the heat of Summer anytime for my walks.
I am glad to be active again. Between the cruise and my kidney stone adventure, I have been inactive for at least 4 weeks possibly 5.
I have found myself rather sore from my starting back up with the weight lifting. But this will go away as I get into it more and more.
At least I feel as if I am moving forward and forward is a great place to be heading.