I'm Back!!

Well, here I am again!  Just a quickie note though.  I finished our puzzle up last night.  I'm so glad to have it done!  Now Stephen and Kodi want to leave it on the table a few more days just to look at it and admire our hard work.  It was a VERY hard puzzle.  I call it a nightmare puzzle.  Everything was so swirly and the colors were all so mixed up in it.  Very difficult to put together.   Here it is:

Close up so you can see the detail of the swirling colors, but the flash kind of messed up that one part.  Click on the photo so you can see it even bigger.

Further away so you can see the overall picture better.

And here is our beautiful Christmas tree!  I love how it turned out this year.  There is no gold on it.  The ornaments are blue and silver and the lights are blue and clear twinkle lights.  But I love the golden glow this photo caught.

Close up of the ornaments.

We got a little bit of rain this evening.  We didn't even know it was raining!  But it did.  Just enough to get things wet and let us know it had happened.

Take care, Everyone!!

Cold, Rainy Sunday!

Hi, Everybody!  It's a cold, rainy Sunday here in my neighborhood!  And I'm loving every minute of it!!  The sky is all gloomy and the wind comes and goes.  A perfect wintery day!  Except for no snow.  I do so wish it would snow here.  We NEED SNOW!!  And icicles hanging from all the eaves of the houses.  A pond to go ice skating on.  Sleigh rides.  Christmas caroling.  And fires in fireplaces.  And hot chocolate.  And Christmas music playing while we read good books...... You know....one of those perfect picture postcard Christmases!!  The kind that are ONLY on postcards, in stories, in movies and on greeting cards.  I've heard those kinds of Christmases aren't real life though.  But I think if a person tried, it could be very real!  And I'd like to have one of them.  

Well, Christmas is only a few more days away.  I'm already feeling a little sad that it's almost over again.  At least it didn't rush by and leave me in the dust this year!!  We baked up a big batch of chocolate chip cookies yesterday.  I still need to make sweet rolls and fudge.  I'll make more banana bread, too.  And I have three more presents to wrap and a stocking to stuff and then that's all done.  Then it will just be Christmas Eve dinner to make on Saturday and the traditions that go along with that.  We are having Christmas Eve at our house this year.

One of our traditions is to put a puzzle together as a family during the month of December.  One of those 1,000 piece kind.  This year Kodi picked the puzzle out - a fairy blowing bubbles and several of the bubbles have scenes in them.  Her wings are multicolored/patterned and very different.  It's one of the hardest puzzles I've ever done!  We have a big board we put the puzzle together on because the only place we have to do it is on the dining room table.  Having it on a board allows us to easily move it when we need the table.  Anyway, we started it right after Thanksgiving and we are still painstakingly working on it!!  But we are slowly getting there.  

Kodi got straight A's for her final grades this semester!  Yay, Kodi!!!  Not an easy thing when one of those classes is Latin.  Her other class was beginner graphics.  We are proud of her.

And that's about it for this time.  I hope all my readers have a wonderful Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!  In case I don't get to write again before then.  

And that brings up another thing...Do I have any readers here?????  If I do, will you please stop in at the comments right below here and say a quick hi?  I'm just curious as to whether I'm sharing things with anyone out there or if I'm just talking to myself!  It would be pretty sad if I'm just talking to myself.  Thanks!

  

Okay.  Writing two days in a row here!!  Shock-ed and amaze-ed!!  But what can I say?  I downloaded all the photos from my camera this evening and had to share these of our Teddi Bear going for a ride down to MCC with Kodi and I the other morning.  She LOVES going for rides with us!  And she especially loves having the windows down just enough to get some good air going on her little face.  She goes from one side of the car to the other looking out the windows and pit stops between the front seats to look out the windshield.  It's so fun.  In these photos we have that back window down just three or four inches.  And she is loving it.

Notice the fur plastered back on her face!  So funny and sooooo cute!!

And.....we went to see the lights at the Temple this evening.  They are always soooo beautiful!  This year they have put the stage out in front of the Visitor's Center and have chairs set up on the front lawn for the evening performances.  I really like that!  They should have done that years ago.  Now the main pool area is free for just walking around and enjoying the main part of the gardens.  It's so much nicer this way.  Anyway, here are some of the pictures I took with my little camera.  Hope you enjoy them.  This first one is of the main pool area in the garden.

I loved how all the palm trees looked against the dark sky tonight.  

I didn't realize there were autumn colored leaves on this plant until my camera flash lit it up.

Soooooo pretty!!

This area was just glowing with green, purple, blue and a few whitish colored lights.  The color combination was so pretty.  The flash from the camera kind of took the glow away.  But I still love the colors here.

And yes, those are oranges on that tree!  

The Wise Men and their camels on the front lawn of the Temple Grounds.

The star above the Nativity Scene on the east side of the garden area.  White lights this year and so pretty.

And that's it for tonight!  Everyone take care.

Wow!  I can't believe it has been over a year since I last wrote.  Now here it is Christmas 2011!  Didn't we just have Christmas a few weeks ago??????  I think time flies faster when you get older.  Sure seems that way.

I have mixed emotions as we get ready to say goodbye to 2011.  There have been exciting things happening in our family.  But there have also been some pretty tough things, too.  Like saying goodbye to a new little Grandbaby who would have joined our family in time for this Christmas but didn't quite make it.  We love him though, and know that a loving Heavenly Father took him back home because for some reason he just couldn't have survived and been healthy and strong at this time.  And we are looking forward to another new Grandbaby due to arrive around June sometime.  I call that "joy to temper the sorrow".

We also had to make the difficult decision to put our Frankie to sleep in July.  The decision to do so still haunts my heart.  But he had cancer in his leg and we managed his pain until the medications quit helping and then we let him go.  We miss him.     

Among the good things:  Kodi has finished her first semester of college.  She has loved her graphics class and was chosen to be a participant in the 2012 Art Show this coming spring.  It is quite an honor to be able to do this as only a few are chosen from each teacher's classes.  She was one of four chosen by her teacher and will be entering as an emerging artist.  We need to get her art piece professionally printed up and matted but we have until April to do that.  We are excited and very proud of her.  She also LOVED her Latin class and has done very well in it.  She takes her finals for that this next week and then she will be out of school until January.  YAY!!

It has been nice and COLD here the past couple weeks or so.  We've had some rain.  And snow in the north end of the Valley and on the mountains.  More rain is coming next week.  I just hope we really get it.

We are pretty much ready for Christmas.  Kodi and I decorated our tree with blue and silver ornaments and it looks beautiful.  We've never done a blue theme.  We used blue and white twinkle lights and I'm loving it.

And on that happy note I will end this entry.  I hope you all have a wonderful Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!