Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I wish all to have a wonderful day with family and friends. Feast and be merry. I'll be making my own feast later on - filet mignon, scalloped potatoes (from a box mix - easy peasy), baby green peas, being careful to leave room enough in my tummy for at least one mini chocolate eclair!
Are any of you a Three Stooges fan? As a babyboomer, I'm very familiar with them, grew up watching their old clips and series on black and white television back in the day. Now they're on Youtube. Every year, I send a clip to my siblings for Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas. This year for T-day, it was Curly "stuffing" a turkey. I'm sitting here laughing just thinking about it - CLASSIC!
Yesterday Mr. Next Store Neighbor (the husband part of a sweet young couple with a 2 year old girl and another little girl born a few weeks ago) invited me to join him in a visit to a highly styled wine and spirits store - Total Wine (Spirits, Beer & More). It's just a little too far for me to walk there from my house and no easy way to get there by bus from where I'm located, so since they opened a few years ago, I haven't been there. It's pretty overwhelming! And from what I saw, at least in the wine section, they have better prices than buying wine at the Metro Mart and a gigantic selection, it's a superstore for all beverages and things related to alcoholic beverages.
The place was PACKED! I shouldn't have been surprised; people will do last minute shopping the day before major holidays, that's just par for the course. But I was still shocked at how crowded the entire shopping center was - hardly any parking spaces available. Inside the wine and spirts store itself - a very large space - it was crowded with shoppers in all aisles, even the ones I thought would be the most obscure. So much for the mainstream media's constant whining about "inflation, inflation" and it's impact on "average" American families. I live in a very "average American families' neighborhood and saw no signs of people having any problem spending oodles of money on cart loads of goodies in the jazzy liquor store.
I was dazzled by the displays, in the wine section (the area where I spent the most time browsing and oogling) some of the wine bottles were just gorgeous, dressed in glittery gold, silver, or jewel tones applied directly to the bottles in lieu of paper labels. I picked up a few items I normally wouldn't have bought (dark chocolate and red wine blend, anyone? OOOO LA LA!) I may be sampling the dark chocolate and red wine blend this evening.
Fittingly, it is snowing right now in southeast Wisconsin - the first snowfall of the season that has lasted more than five seconds, occurring on Thanksgiving Day. Further north it snows much earlier in the season, but it's rather late for the first snowfall here in Milwaukee. It won't stick around long though, unless we get a foot or more (I'd better check the forecast), because the ground here isn't frozen yet. The snow is melting upon contact with the ground, and the ambient air temperature is 36 degrees F.
But seeing the large wet white flakes cascading down from the grey sky is firing me up to get the Christmas tree decorated. I unboxed the new tree I'd ordered yesterday. I should have followed my own advice to others and put down a sheet before ever attempting to assemble it. DUH - Jan, the Dummy, did not do what she told others to do. Now I've got a mess on my hands after several hours spent first assembling and then fluffing out 928 tips over parts of 2 days! Holy Hathor, it seemed to take forever, but probably something like 4 hours total ( A LOT OF TIME FLUFFING), spent on touching each and every one of those branches to fluff the tree to, well - not perfection, but I'm not fussing with one more branch! (And, of course, right after I typed that I found myself staring at what appeared to be a particularly obnoxious hole in the bottom area of the tree that demanded I try and remediate it immediately! And I've been puttering around moving inner branches here and there pretty much every 15 seconds since I started typing this).
Anyway, here is the new tree in her naked (EEK!) state below after what is turning out to be Round One of fluffing - taken before Round Two: fluffing the fluffing (does that make sense?):
I won't lie - I am thoroughly in love with this monster of a tree and already wondering how I will EVER get it lugged downstairs to the basement once the season is over, but to quote Scarlett O'Hara, "I'll think about that tomorrow." Perhaps I should have shopped for a slimmer version of a frosted tree, but when you fall in love - well, what can I say? I'll deal with it by moving the wing chairs a bit further from the tree once it is fully decorated than in previous seasons. Right now they're shoved pretty much to the sides of the room so I have space to bring in my step ladder if I need it in order to string the lights, design the "tree topper" and then decorate the tree with ribbon, ornaments, floral picks and probably a miniature kitchen sink somewhere, just because.
I take back what I said yesterday about the branches not appearing to be as "frosted" as I thought they should/would be when I first saw the tree online in all its glory. These photos show that the tree IS frosted, and I am loving the way the pine cones are really showing up as "stars" of the Christmas Tree Show! You'd think at 70 I'd know better by now than to judge a tree all scrunched up and sad looking in a box, begging me to take it out and make it beautiful like it's supposed to be.
After my break, I'll vacuum up the needles and little bits of pine cones that came off the tree as I was unbundling it from the box and then fluffing out each "trunk" with those 928 smaller branches.
The longer I've been sitting here in the living room (where the laptop will now be located until the Christmas tree comes down some time in January) looking at the new Christmas tree parked in front of my picture window, the more I'm falling in LOVE with it!
