On Friday I was up at 5AM and got the post up. Then I set about changing my desktop and home page from Thanksgiving scenes to winter. I have a program that I use to make home pages for my browser. Usually the two aren’t the same. But I particularly like this scene so for now they are similar. The home page has the words to the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year” and a quote.
I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen. I finished the milk order just before my helper friend arrived at 8AM. I sent him out on errands while I got ready for the day and started getting boxes organized to put away.
It’s much easier doing the take down in January if all the wrappings are flat and sorted by size. Plus last year we labeled all the boxes well, so I had to make sure what belonged in them was there.
I managed to get all but 2 boxes done while my helper friend was here.
The old washer had sat in the cellar for over 3 years and was pretty dirty, inside and out. So I asked my helper friend to clean it up while I worked on boxes. I thought it had a lot of scratches on it, but there were only 2 once the grime was off.
Once he’d finished that and taking the boxes I’d finished upstairs, he had an hour left. So we were trying to think of a meal he could make out of the mushrooms that should have been used a while back. He decided minestrone would be a good soup to make.
So we collected a lot of vegetables and he found the ham cubes we’d put in the freezer last week. He had it done by the time he had to go.
While he was doing that, I’d made it to the decorations boxes and started putting them up. But it was nearly noon and I’d been standing most of the morning. I had to stop even though there were a lot of decorations left to do.
The angel garland is one my grandmother made. There are 3 other very old scraps of garland from the family. There are also a lot of old ornaments. The angel in the oval is one.
The two fish are 2 of the 3 that were my husband’s. The other is a wooden armadillo.
I have a lot of unbreakable children’s ornaments. Some I made as a child, some my son made, some family members made for us. Some were premiums gas stations used to offer in the 60’s if you filled up. The Santa jumping jack was given to me last year by a friend who was downsizing to move away. It’s part of a set with a snowman and an elf. And a lot came from tag sales.
I spent the afternoon dozing in my chair watching a movie with my eyes shut. I had a bowl of the soup for supper and the last persimmon pudding.
I got 6 pints for the freezer of the soup.
At 7:45PM when I went to turn off the candles and pull the shades, I saw these huge snowflakes drifting by the windows. The ground was already white. The new camera has a setting so I can take snowflake pictures without the long streak by each one.
Saturday I plan to pay bills/do budget and hopefully finish the decorating. It’s to be a cold sunny day, so the 1” of snow we got might last.