Merry Christmas!

Mrs. Claus is enjoying a glass of eggnog before turning in. 

Merry Christmas!

Bathroom Ceiling

My neighbor (Cathy) has her brother staying at her house for a few weeks.  He's a handyman and while we're out of town this week, he's going to paint our ceiling white and hang the mirrors and lights.  Yay!  What a treat it'll be to come home to a finished bath!

Bathroom Update

The contractor asked me twice if I wanted the bathroom all the same color.  We had just removed wall paper, a lighter color in one area of the bathroom, and a darker color in the rest.  Yes, all one color.

We got home from Robin's party at about midnight and took a peek in the bathroom.  Looked good!  The next morning with the sun streaming in revealed that our bathroom was, in fact, all one color.  A tan/brown color, very nice, EXCEPT the ceiling is also this color.  Yep, he asked me "All one color?" and I thought he was talking about walls, not ceiling!  Gee...

Mark will get some Killz and add a new base coat, then ceiling white will be rolled on.  I hope those two coats of paint will be enough to cover a mud-brown ceiling.  It looks like a cave!  I do like the textured walls and all the work the man did.  Not calling him out to do the repaint, as I did agree to one color. 

Robin's Party

My niece Robin hosted our annual family Christmas get together at her Jacksonville home, and it was so nice.  Here's a picture of me with my two sisters.

Before and After Soffit Removal

The horrid drop ceiling/florescent light fixture.  Oh how I have hated it, and now it's gone!
Looking up in the hole at the pipe that has water dripping down the outside of it.  (Just a small amount, nothing scary.)  It's a good thing it's raining outside, as the builder wouldn't have noticed the water dripping down the exhaust tube that goes up and through the roof.  I'll call the roofing company that replaced our roof a couple of years ago.

Bathroom Renovation

Just in time for Christmas! A mess!!


Here are the "before" pictures of the walls, with wallpaper torn off. We will have textured walls, painted a taupe/beige/tan color to match our bedroom. The towel bar and toilet paper roll will be removed and new ones added. Lots of them! We have had a shortage of towel hanging places for 22 years!!
 
Picture #1 - standing in the doorway, the mirror is down, and the drop light thing is being knocked down.  We have double sinks, but they aren't centered right (to me) and individual mirrors will look strange, so the old giant mirror goes back up after the work is completed.

Picture #2 -Inaccessable towel bar will be removed.  A mirror (from the boy's bathroom) will be recycled to that wall.

Picture #3 - Standing in the shower (all tile), looking again at the bathtub and that useless towel bar and the wall that gets the mirror.  Imagine standing in our shower, a giant open space, much like a gym shower...No shower curtain or glass doors needed.  Then OMG, there's a mirror!  Well, maybe we'll lose weight...

Cookies!

It's Christmas baking time!  I baked 4 dozen peanut butter cookies (bottom of pic), NINETY snickerdoodles (some are cooling, more are ready for oven, and even more are in the oven), three dozen large M&M cookies, but Mark got into them, so who knows how many are left!  I made a tin of pecan toffee with chocolate on top too.  In addition to these, I have made four of the ten sour cream pound cakes that I plan to bake.

Today I am tired.  I have done next to nothing and my sister is coming in town.  Oh, she'll have a look at my mess and run for the hills!  My cleaning lady comes tomorrow, but so does the guy that's going to refinish the walls in our bathroom.  I'll be sure to take before and after pics.

Christmas

Mark and I bought a ceiling sweeper Christmas Tree from Home Depot.  Crazy that Homer would sell Christmas trees, isn't it?  Well, the tree has some gaps, but I like it.  It's tall and slender and you wouldn't believe how garishly decorated it is!  I just stuck every ornament we had on it after Mark put the lights on (badly).  There are a whole bunch of lights at the top and the bottom.  It turns out that Christmas trees give me a horrible headache, so next year we will have an artificial tree.

Less than two weeks before Christmas and we are almost finished shopping.  Mark and I (well, mostly me) decided to be very conservative with spending this year. This is the first time we have been successful with a Christmas budget.  Yay!

I will begin baking this week.  I always make sour cream pound cakes for my favorite neighbors, plus I promised a cake for my niece Robin's party she's having at her Jacksonville home for our whole family on Saturday.  We are supposed to bring wrapped board games, then we'll have a Chinese gift exchange.

You Tube Uploads

Because my sister Patty's birthday is December 18th, I found a song about Birthdays and Christmas ages ago, lost it, then wrote to the band that recorded it (for themselves, not on a CD).  One of the band members sent me a nice note and attached the song, which took forever to upload. 

Well my friends, I am officially dangerous!  I learned how to save videos and music in Windows Movie Maker and upload it to YouTube.  Once you put a song on YouTube, it opens immediately and there's not a four minute wait to download.  I took a wintery picture while we were in NC in October, wrote (very badly, sorry) the name of the song and band's name on the picture, and attached that to the song too.

So for all my friends whose birthdays are near Christmas and get those "combination gifts" for twenty bucks...  Here it is:

Video of Juliet

14-month old  Juliet does tricks and plays with her Buster Food Cube. 
She even knows how to use her "inside voice".