Vacation Count-down

Yesterday(Wednesday) was day 48 of summer and my count-down to my week’s vacation in Maine began. We leave Saturday morning, bright and early. Preparations are underway. It seems there are always never-ending errands in the days before a vacation, doesn’t it? I did some of them yesterday. I also recently learned that our suitcases were in pretty poor condition, so a new set was purchased.

I did have some time to relax in the afternoon. I started reading The Wrong Right Man by Pamela Wight of Roughwighting, as I sat outside on the deck.

The hummingbirds were active at the feeder again, but a close-up shot was not to be. This little one zipped over to the small trees along the side of my yard and I was able to get this photo of him at rest.

I imagine today will be a day much like yesterday- errands and checking things off my list as I get them done.
What are all of you getting done these days?

Just hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting-tingling too…

Can you believe Christmas is only 2 weeks away?  The past few days have been a flurry of activity in preparation for the upcoming holiday.  Many miles have been logged by hubby and me as we’ve gift shopped, Christmas tree hunted and made multiple trips to get  what we needed for decorating.  Had there been snow on the ground, a sleigh ride probably would’ve been more efficient!  As we got busy putting up the tree, I put my iPod on Pandora and chose Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” as my “station”. That’s one of my favorite Christmas songs.  Want to see a clip of one of the cutest dances ever to that song? Okay:

Yes, that’s my Meghan, about 5 years ago.  I wish I had video available to post of the whole dance – it was adorable.

Okay, ahem, sorry about that little diversion. I still have “Sleigh Ride” stuck in my as I heard it in many variations throughout the weekend, hence the title of my post tonight.

In the process of putting up the tree, we discovered that my favorite strings of red, white and green lights – alternating on single strings- were burning out and we wouldn’t be able to use them.  This saddened me a bit because I have never been able to find exact  replacements for them.  We bought individual strands of red, white and green to help fill  in a few years ago, but those weren’t working this year.  I don’t know if it was the tree or us, but nothing we tried seemed to make it look right.  Then Meghan offered to pop out  lights from the 3 different colored strands and pop them back together to make 3 new strands of the type that I like.  I sat down to help and got a lot popped out pretty quickly.  Upon attempting put the lights back in, we discovered the different bulbs would not go on the other strings of lights!  ARGH.  We gave up and went and bought different lights.  But not before Teddy had a chance to try out the decorations:

After much more work than it should have been – there were issues with the stand too **SIGH** – the tree was finally done:

That was yesterday.  Decorating continued today with putting up my Christmas village.  I told you about my village last year in this post.  The village changes a bit each year in the pieces I choose display and how I choose to display them.  I have two sections of village this year.  The first section is my downtown/suburbs area:

This year I added a quiet “countryside” area:

When I get around to pulling out the tri-pod, I’ll show you some of the neat close-up details on some of these pieces.

My back is aching, and Christmas tunes are still playing in my head, but I feel very accomplished at the close of this weekend.  My Christmas shopping is not done, but a large chunk has been taken care of, and the decorating is done.  Unless I decide it’s not.  I have another idea in my head, but time will tell whether I actually do it. We have a party to go to next weekend, and sometime in the next two weeks, this house needs some serious cleaning since we are the hosts of Christmas dinner.  OH, and I still need to get my 4 seasons assignment for Scott posted!

I was going to write several posts tonight and schedule them for later in the week, but I don’t think the back is going to allow.  Hopefully, I’ll get a couple more posts in than I did last week.  I hope your holiday preparations are coming along nicely for you!