Friday, December 17, 2004

I might be a little bit lit up.

The inside of my house looked so twinkly and bright that I decided to try and find the outside lights and put them up.

It took some digging but I found them.

And I draped them all over the shrubs and bushes in front of the house.

The only outdoor-safe extension cord I could find is, unfortunately bright orange. But it can't be seen from the road, in the dark.

In the daylight it looks like a pile of pumpkin intestines but I won't go into any more detail than that.

Can anyone explain to me why the middle section of my strings of lights always goes dark? Both ends twinkle and the middle is dead.

I know how to change the fuse for the two ends, but what do you do about the middle? I mean, besides hide it in the bushes?

It didn't take as long as I thought, draping those lights. I was finished in about a half hour.

Up close and personal with the shrubberies, I did notice that we did not weed or trim any time recently. Hub thinks that once the wild raspberry and poison ivy freeze and die, they'll just disintegrate and the problem will disappear. He assured me that dead poison ivy has lost its power to kill.

I hope he's right, because our evergreen shrubs are very soft so I anchored those lights on the dried poison ivy interspersed with the shrubs. I'm VERY allergic to poison ivy. I hope I don't have a rash for Christmas.

He IS right, isn't he? Please tell me he's right. I took a shower immediately afterwards but the power of suggestion is strong and already I'm scratching my, um, self.

We always trim our holly the week before Christmas; this year we're going to have a LOT of fresh holly. If you'd like to have some, come on over and help yourself. It's lush and beautiful.

Mom came over tonight and we watched "Moonstruck." One of my favorite movies.

My printer insists it's out of paper but it's lying. I can SEE the paper and there's lots.

Our old mortgage company doesn't want to lose us, and apparently it thinks it can keep us by refusing to acknowledge our payoff and our new mortgage company, even though the old company has already admitted getting the payoff check and going crazy at the mall with it. We know they're refusing to acknowledge our payoff because they're having a collection agency phone us with the news that we're delinquent with our mortgage payment, even though we no longer have a mortgage with them. (bad sentence. BAD sentence.)

News flash: we're not coming back to you, CitiMortgage, because you charge too much and you keep bad records. And phoning Hub at school about a delinquent payment on a loan we no longer have with you was the last straw. You left me no choice.

I told Janice, the Menopausal Loan Officer, about it.

She had it taken care of within hours. She's AWESOME.

Our friendship is as glowing and wonderful as my glowing and wonderful Christmas lights. But unlike the glowing and wonderful Christmas lights, our friendship will never burn out.

Now I'm off to the kitchen. Mom and I did some baking tonight and it's cool enough to bag up.

My entire front itches. That's a massively large area to scratch. I hope it's just nerves. Breaking out in itchy pustules over Christmas was NOT on my to-do list.