20 days until Christmas!!!!

There has not been a lot going around these here parts other some some Christmas prep. While Ben was out of town Thanksgiving weekend, I did some much needed house cleaning and put up most of the Christmas decorations. Needless to say, our house was in worse shape this weekend than last, so we did some more cleaning and put up the (real) Christmas tree. I told Ben that if our new place allowed for it, I would really like to get a live Christmas tree this year. It took more convincing than I had hoped (really? who doesn't like real Christmas trees?), but we got a nice little 7 footer turned 6 footer because our ceiling is really low. Stanley, fortunately, doesn't really care for the tree, so he stays away from it for the most part. I can't tell if he doesn't like the smell, the needles, or the sap...or a little of all three. Either way, I don't have to worry about waking up to the tree on the ground (I hope). I'll post pictures on that once we are done decorating it.

We have yet to fix the outdoor lights. I attempted to put them up myself to surprise Ben when he got home, but it didn't go too well. I wanted to put up our newly purchased icicle lights along the front roof of the house. The little plastic doo dads that I bought at Walmart to hang the lights with didn't work. The fell off under the weight of the lights, so I just wrapped the strand around the porch railing. We have two porch railings and the light strand was too long for one, but would obviously block the doorway if I jumped them from one railing to the next, so I doubled them over. So there is an excessively large number of lights on one half of our porch. We hope to fix that soon, but the alternative would be to leave them and fit in more with the local rednecks.

Speaking of rednecks, we didn't have any Scotch tape, so I improvised...

One of the mice I caught last week

Stanley sleeping