Quick weekend

The weekend flew by. On Saturday, Ali was hosting a Pampered Chef thing at our house. While she was cooking Saturday morning I was a whirlwind cleaning machine, getting the house ship-shape since some of the guests would be people I work with. I didn’t want them to think I lived in a pigpen. The plan originally was once the people showed up, I would hole up in the bedroom with Nicki to keep her from making a loud barking, growling scene. However after a few minutes of carrying on, Nicki settled down so I hung out with all the women and drank beer and ate the food Ali made. It was cool.

Later Saturday after the party I told Ali we should have next to nothing to do on Sunday and should be able to have a laid back day. Well Sunday morning I got the bug to go get the christmas tree. We planned to do it next weekend but then I realized that doing so would first, be the day after Ali had a race and I had a volleyball tournament and second, it would only give us a tree for 2 weeks prior to the event, too short of a time period. So after we did our run, we headed out to get 2 trees, one for us and one for my mom. We decided to hit Lowe’s this year for the tree instead of Home Dept. Last year there was a mix up at HD that almost resulted in our tree leaving on the roof of someone else’s vehicle. However, Lowe’s was worse. Evidently they had been swamped with people because the tree selection was very small. Plus Lowe’s only had trees outside, no accessories and no register in the tent, meaning you had to go inside and wait in long lines to buy the tree. I was also annoyed to find that they had no tree stands for sale except 2 or 3 of those old style ones from the 60’s. We picked a nice little spruce for my mom and then I picked up another one that was pretty fat and looked cool at first. However when I picked it up I noticed the top of it was broken off and had a spot with a bit of a hole, I was bout to drop it back to the ground but Ali said she liked it. It instantly stuck with her as the Charlie Brown christmas tree that noone else would take so she wanted to take it home. Ok whatever, but it looks more like a bush. The person they had manning the tent had as much Christmas spirit as a terrorist, using short 1 or 2 word responses to any questions asked, ho, ho, ho. Then we had to go into the madness of Home Depot after all to get a stand. I bought the exact same model stand that I threw out the year before, I figured I just had a defective model. It is the swivel-straight type of stand. We stopped at my mom’s and put her tree in her stand and watered it for her to decorate when she got home from work.

I had to cut a bunch of the lower branches from our Christmas bush to get it to fit in the stand. After trimming the branches, it was still tooo fat so I had to get out the chainsaw and hack off some diameter of the trunk. Cutting all the those branches, further shortened the appearance of the tree, making it even more bush-like. We loaded the tree up with lights and ornaments, the tree topping star which normally sits high above the tree, instead was nestled among other branches so it would stay in place. Our tree definitely won’t be on the cover of any magazines but it’s our tree all the same and at least it didn’t wind up going to the island of misfit Christmas trees. You can see pictures of the tree/bush, our outside Xmas lights and the new furniture we got last month here. I realized that the stand I threw out last year actually probably worked just fine. After reading the directions for the new one I purchased, I found out you had to pull out the little lever to swivel the tree. Last year I cursed as I would press and press on the button but it wouldn’t swivel. Dumb me.

Again this year, my Christmas spirit is not up to par. I didn’t even feel like putting the train under the tree. Maybe I will reconsider and get it out later but I just wasn’t feeling it on Sunday. Ali and I usually do our Christmas lists on Amazon and people just buy off of that. However this year it has been a bit of a downer. Amazon has a ton of other businesses that sell under their site. Many of these things on our list are actually products these vendors sell instead of Amazon. When Amazon sends you something that is a gift, it is in generic box so you can’t tell what is inside, keeping the gift surprise intact. However these other vendors do not do this so we are getting boxes that have the product identified and we wind up knowing exactly what we are getting. I like the surprise element of the holiday so having that mostly sucked out is disappointing. We plan to wrap the stuff anyway and act like we didn’t know we were getting.

Tonight would be the night we would be going to dance class. However we are not going this month per my desires. I have to admit I feel a bit guilty about missing it but I don’t think it is because of a desire to dance as much as the feeling I am disappointing Ali and the dance teacher. I remind myself that I commited to a month and I did what I said I would do. I told Ali we can do more after the holidays, which we will, but I just don’t want it to be an every week of every month sort of thing. I still practice the steps we learned with Ali.

I am still angry that ESPN classic stopped showing the Jack LaLanne show. I wrote to them to complain. My evenings feel a whole less motivating now.

After starting 0-6 in my FF league I have roared back to win 5 of 6 and this week’s game could actually get me into the playoffs which was a pipe dream weeks ago. However I am not in a good spot. My team is up 8 points but my opponent has Matt Hasselback yet to play. I can only pray the Eagles beat the hell out of him tonight. Eli Manning basically f’d it up for me. He has consistently been good for 15-25 points for most of the season, yesterday he put up stinkin ZERO points, what terrible timing.