More Christmas Decorations!

My Mantel So Far (Also Titled: I Swear This Is My LAST Post Today!)

This is what I did with my mantel. I wanted to do something different this year. I usually have two little trees on each end and lighted garland between them. I have a little collection of different kinds of Santas so I kinda just displayed them all together on the mantel. I picked up some red bell garland and just used a few candles that I already had. I have NO IDEA where that white, glittery Christmas tree candle came from, though! I was going through my candle cabinet last night trying to find ones I could use and I saw that one. I honestly have no clue where I got it, how long I've had it or nothin'. That is so crazy!!  But it was perfect for what I needed it for and I think it looks pretty up there.

Visit With Santa

This is me and my (sleepy-lookin') brother, Ricky, with Santa at Sears in 1971.  

The Super Fabulous Schneider Christmas Tree Of 2009!

I started calling our Christmas trees "The Super Fabulous Schneider Christmas Tree" two years ago when I was still blogging on MySpace. I thought it was cute and it's kinda stuck.

I have a seven-foot Douglas fir that, praise the Sweet Lord Baby Jesus, is PRE-LIT. I like the old-fashioned multi-colored lights and this one has 650 of 'em!

Here's a closer shot of some

of my orna-
ments.

I like orna-
ments better than glass balls. Ornaments tell stories, have sweet little person-alities and are just more interesting to me.

The two little red reindeer right in front are from my childhood Christmas trees. They were always on our tree when I was growing up and Mama let me have them last year. They'll always be right in front!

Second Thanksgiving

I'm calling today "second Thanksgiving" because I bet I have more food in my refrigerator than I ate all day long yesterday.  It's always like that.  We always fix waaaaaay too much and end up with a ton of leftovers.  My favorite thing to do with leftovers is a turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce sandwich on a hoagie.  Just pop it in the microwave for about 30 seconds and you're done.  It is sooooo yummy!!  

We had a great Thanksgiving!  We all met at Mama and Daddy's house just like we do every year and we wobbled home around 5:30, loaded down with food.  I have never gone to my mama and daddy's house without taking stuff home!  It's gotten to the point that Ami and I take our own containers now for leftovers.

I went with Daddy to visit Maw in the nursing home and it did me so much good to see her. She has good days and bad days but I guess that's to be expected.  One of the things I'm most thankful for this year is that I still have my 86-year-old grandma with me.  

I'm also thankful for my parents' love and devotion, their health (they've had a pretty good year!), my sweet sister and her husband, who I wouldn't love more as my brother if he'd been born to us (although that would have messed up Ami's future big time!! Ha!).  I'm thankful to have a husband who adores me.  I honestly cannot live without him.  I'm thankful that I have a home, a warm bed and plenty to eat.  I'm thankful to have a job that I enjoy and for the new friends I've made there.  This time last year, I was reading stuff on the internet about Citi closing and downsizing and I was fearing for my job. What a difference a year makes!  

I read this the other day and I was so touched by it that I thought I'd share it.  I think it's how we should observe Thanksgiving and every day.

Count your blessings instead of your crosses; Count your gains instead of your losses.

Count your joys instead of your woes; Count your friends instead of your foes.

Count your smiles instead of your tears; Count your courage instead of your fears.

Count your full years instead of your lean; Count your kind deeds instead of your mean.

Count your health instead of your wealth; Count on God instead of yourself.

Ran Head On Into A Hog

Bless her heart!!  She was such a good sport about it, though.  Said she "ran head on into a hog!"

ATLANTA -- Celebrity chef Paula Deen was hit in the face with a flying ham Monday while helping out Hosea Feed The Hungry & Homeless.

Deen and Smithfield Foods wanted to make sure the homeless had food for Thanksgiving so the Food Network star was on hand to donate and deliver 25,000 pounds of protein to Hosea Feed The Hungry & Homeless Monday morning. The donation is part of the Smithfield Foods' Helping Hungry Homes initiative, which was established to help ensure that American families in need do not go hungry.

Dore said Deen playfully threw one down the relay line like a football and someone said "Back at ya!" and threw it back. It hit her in the nose.

"He threw the ham back and I was unexpecting the pig and it just hit me full on," said Deen. "'Bout knocked me for a loop!" Dore said Deen laughed after she got an ice pack for her face and made jokes about a swollen nose.

"It just got hit with a hog, so what can I expect," she sniffed. "Ran head on into a hog."

Deen said her nose wasn't broken and the ice helped keep the swelling to a minimum.

Deen, known for her Southern cuisine, is a celebrity spokeswoman for Smithfield foods.

Countin' Down To The Turkey!

AND my mama's dressing.  OHMYGOD.  If y'all ain't eatin' my mama's dressing, you are missing out.  I just realized the other day that I have NEVER even made a turkey.  I've never had to.  Mama does that.  And the dressing.  And we do the sides and desserts.  That's how we roll.  

Oh, yeaaaaah, the rolls.  Nom.

This year, I'm making Cracker Barrel's amazing hashbrown casserole, green beans and red potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce and a pumpkin pie that I'm making from scratch.  As in I'm using the pumpkin that was on my front porch at Halloween!  First time I've ever done that. It's prolly gonna be the last time, too.  That is a lot of work!

New Moon straight showed OUT, didn't it??  $140 million.  Jessi and I went to see it Saturday. We drove by the theater Friday night and could not believe the parking lot!  It was like that Saturday and again Sunday.  I knew that movie was going to be huge but $140 million? That's incredible!  I thought the movie was great.  Those kids are going to be superstars.

Yeah. I'm One Of Those People.

I admit openly and without shame that I love me some Twilight. I read all four of the books last year (mostly at work when we were so slow!) and I just fell in love with Edward and Bella. I even got Larry to read them! Ami and Brian, too! And while the actual writing may be a little juvenile, the story is awesome and so, sooooo romantic.

I saw Twilight twice at the theater, once with Jessi, and then she and I stood in line in March at midnight to get the DVD when it came out. I don't even remember how many times we watched it that weekend!

I stood in line again today to get tickets to see New Moon Saturday afternoon.  I'd have to go all Volturi on some teenagers at the theater if I tried to see it tomorrow. 

Couldn't Stand It No More

I've been wanting to Christmas-up my blog for over a week!!  Ami made me such a beautiful header that I could not wait another second.  (That's Little Me and Little Larry with the snowman we built.  Awwwww.)

Sooooooo....

Let us commence to Christmasing!!

Fall In The 'Hood

We have had an absolutely gorgeous weekend and I got out yesterday and took some pictures of some of the fall that's remaining in my neighborhood. The leaves are turning brown SO FAST that I thought I'd better snap a few pictures before all of that beautiful color is gone.

The red orange and evergreen against that blue sky was just so pretty to me.  I love how this one turned out! 

This little feller just sat there and posed for me.  The squirrels around here are so used to us feeding them that they are not scared of nothin'! Probably not very smart for them. I love how he's wearing his Southern boy camo britches for this picture!  You almost can't see him.          

This is that huge oak tree in our backyard.  I was just telling Larry yesterday morning how bright yellow the leaves were. When I took this picture just a few hours later, some of them were already turning brown. Winter is coming fast!   

This pretty thing is next door.  I'm not sure what kind of tree it is but I love it, too.  It'll be completely bare in about two weeks.  Of all of our trees around here, it's always the prettiest and always the first to go.  

Dome Day!

I'm reading Stephen King's new book, Under The Dome. I got it yesterday at Books-A-Million. It is HUGE!! I almost can't hold it. It's over 1,000 pages and so far, so very good. I love SK's crazy ass anyway, though.

This is what USA Today had to say about it:

When the dome comes down on Chester's Mill, Maine, in Stephen King's propulsively intriguing Under the Dome, we are slammed up against the wall of one of his mightiest epics.

On a sunny autumn day, a woman reaching for a garden squash loses her hand and a grazing deer his head when an invisible and impenetrable bubble clamps down around this rural town. Helicopters, planes, trucks and cars slam into the dome with deadly results.

Life under this impenetrable big top isn't just the weirdest show on Earth, it's the only show as the media, the military and the loved ones of the dome's trapped population converge on its impermeable borders.

"It's some kind of force field, like in a Star Trick movie," surmises one of the local yokels. But who or what is to blame? The military-industrial complex? Mad scientists? Extraterrestrials? Or according to Big Jim Rennie, one of the book's most evil and compelling characters, "the work of God's righteous hand."

Selectman Rennie, a used-car salesman with delusions of grandeur, sees the dome as his chance to become king of this newly created principality – maybe even make the cover ofTime.

Under his lumbering, maniacal reign, "legal is whatever we decide" becomes the mantra of Chester's Mill's police force.

But Rennie has a formidable opponent in Col. Dale "Barbie" Barbara, a decorated Iraq war veteran among the thousand or so stuck under the dome. Barbie is tapped by the U.S. president – Rennie refers to him as "the one who has three names including the terrorist one in the middle" – to govern the dome's populace. But Rennie is having none of it.

Readers will find the ensuing battle between good and evil staggeringly addictive. It's bloody and heated, and just when you think things can't get any worse for Barbie and his band of freedom fighters, they do.

Readers can wallow in this glorious novel's metaphoric and oh-so au courant messages about U.S. domination, freedom of the press, torture and environmental abuse, but they also can come to this novel just for the story.

King dishes up a fantastic you'll-never-see-it-coming culprit behind this domesday scenario. But it's the story of the people – the human zoo – trapped inside the dome that's most gripping.

In these days of text messages and Twitter novels, King grips us in a chokehold of un-put-downable fascination for more than 1,000 pages.

It's Veterans Day!

I'm spending the day lovin' on my most favorite veteran in the whole world. Take some time today to thank one for his (or her) sacrifice and service!

Ida Had To Rake Leaves Tomorrow...

...but thanks to this girl here, I don't have to.

Hurricane Ida has dumped so much rain on us today!

I had planned to clean my yards tomorrow afternoon but that's completely out now. You ever tried to use a leaf blower on wet leaves? Um. Yeah. They don't move.

I'm just devastated about it. :)

The Sky Is Falling!

Well, actually, it's acorns. A hundred thousand acorns waking me up at 3:00 in the morning when they fall from my backyard oak tree, ping off the roof and then roll down and hit the patio. Pow! It sounds like a driving range around here.

And we don't even want to talk about what they do to bare feet. Ow!

They were like this last year, too. I did a little research and found out that every seven years or so, acorns reproduce like little pink bunnies and absolutely cover the earth with their round cuteness.

I also read that tons of acorns means a very cold winter ahead. Don't like that. If that's the case, Warner Robins better buy up all the bread and milk NOW.

I Give Up. Merry Christmas!

Few things brought me as much joy when I was a little girl as the Sears Christmas Wish Book. I got one in the mail today and all those old memories just came flooding back! Memories of me and my brother laying on our bellies on the living room floor, circling toys and dog-earing the pages of that wonderful, magical book.

I've been trying really hard to savor fall, Halloween and Thanksgiving but Sears sho' makin' it hard for me to not think about Christmas! I found some pictures online of some things that were fantasies in the Wish Books of my childhood and then became realities on Christmas morning. Santa Claus at my house ROCKED!

The Sunshine Family!! Oh, how I loved these dolls!! Steve, Steffie and Baby Sweets. 1973-74? Cute little hippie family who were green and ate granola and probably smoked pot when I wasn't looking. No wonder I loved 'em so much. They also gardened and made crafts and recycled. Oh yeah, and I remember their eyes used to pop out a lot.

My Easy Bake Oven! I remember me and Ricky baking Jesus a birthday cake that Christmas morning. Awwww.

And I was ALL about the babies! I got so many dolls, a new one every Christmas. I had all of the Tender Love Dolls as well as Baby Alive, Baby That-A-Way, Rub-A-Dub Dolly and Baby Drowsy. I still have most of my babies but they're still living with their grandparents.

I'm such a bad mama.