Author: The Jody

I have no idea how I’m going to catch up on all the television I have stored on the TiVo. It’s the time of year I love the most, and I’ve got buttloads of Xmas specials now, never mind my regular stuff. And my regular stuff I can’t watch when Junior is around so I guess I have to break my “no TV during the day” rule to catch up on the Osbournes and the Sopranos. Sopranos are done for the season so I can cancel HBO now. In fact, I’m going to go do it RIGHT now.

Uh-Oh. When I looked at my yahoo page for all today’s news and schtuff, there was a little red asterisk next to the word “Leominster” in the weather box. You know what that means. It means there’s some sort of weather crisis about to break. This is the “*severe weather alert” system. Ugh.

Let’s see what we can expect for severe weather this week. Says here: “…A mixture of freezing rain and snow is likely for much of southern New England late Wednesday into early Thursday…” Oh terrific, I just love freezing rain. I want to be just like North Carolina.

Soup = very very good. I did an excellent job, thank you. Had it tonight with carrots and elbow macaroni. I’m very full right now. Part of me can’t help but think that I could have just paid 99 cents and cracked open a can, but then I would have risked losing a finger.

The tree smell is now stronger than the soup smell, which makes me happy. See me smiling?

Yes, that is a big pot of chicken soup on the stove, who wants to know? In fact, I think it’s almost time to pull out the chicken and all the cooked veggies and get all the meat off the chicken. The smell of the soup is drowning out the smell of the Christmas tree, and while I enjoy the smell of chicken soup cooking, I wanna smell the tree, dammit!

Ze tree, she is up. The picture over on the right (the link to the streaming video) is of my current favorite ornament. We went for a “small” tree which means when you’re at the tree lot you look for something about exactly half the height and width of what you think you want/need. So we get this tree that looks like it will fit on the counter, and it’s not the one junior wanted, but it was only $18 and that had EVERYTHING to do with why I liked it.

Well, now it’s in the house and decorated and I think it looks absolutely perfect. It is exactly what I had hoped for, I’m glad I forced myself to go for the “too small” tree. The branches let down some inside and it looks fuller. Plus, this tree is very green. I have a feeling this will be the best tree, fallen needle-wise, we’ve had in years.

Mr. Dump came with us to buy it, and he and I were stuck trying to remove the bottom of the tree because we forgot to have them do it at the tree lot (which is actually the Lunenburg Fire Station). So we used (or tried to use) in order: hedge clippers, a branch pruner thingie, a chainsaw that wouldn’t start, a Ginsu steak knife, a Ginsu cleaver, and the pruner again. We broke both of the Ginsus in the attempt (no big whoop, actually, as I got the whole set for $2 and they seems very flimsy to me from day one). So that commercial where they show it sawing a branch? Not so much.

Anyway, the order we did it in seemed to have helped. And in all it only took Mr. Dump about 15 minutes to saw off the bottom. I swear, we bought a damned hack saw two years ago, but that puppy must be long gone. We couldn’t find it anywhere. I guess I’ll have to put that on my list of things I need to get eventually.

Oh, and I put two of my Department 56 houses on the mantel, and some lights around the two windows in the front of the living room. This room is freaking festive.