Welcome to Winter

 Thanks for the kind words on my last post.  

I am feeling a little more productive.  I found some Christmas storage containers on Amazon with 60% off coupons and a discount on top of that. I also discovered I could use the coupon multiple times if I chose a different color.  I received the first box today, a cube with dividers for 3 rows of ornaments and I am pretty excited about the whole project. So perhaps Christmas will disappear by the end of the month. 

This will start a much larger project since the ornaments used to live under the bed in the guest room. The cubes will be moving to the closet in the room where the door remains closed. Items will be need to be removed from that closet (which is kind of scary because I am not sure what all is in that closet) and hopefully fewer of those items will move under the bed. 

This will all be dependent on weather. We took my youngest son's three children on Sunday because we had a winter storm warning for Monday. Mom teaches at a different school that never, ever closes, but they attend a rural school with country roads, hills and bridges that freeze over.  So dad brought them at dinner time while he was on his way to work. The next morning my two grandsons who board the school bus arrived at my house and had a snow day, too! So I got to organize activities for five very active little boys all day Monday. 

By evening we had received a few more inches, along with some drizzle and icy rain and the roads out of our county were under a "only travel if necessary" warning. We decided not to risk the trip to a neighboring county where the three live and kept them a second night. 

When we got up this morning, our roads were still snow and ice covered so the two local bus riders had another day off. And the three overnight guests did have school in their county who was spared the snow and ice, but we couldn't drive all that way to their school. So we had all five again all day today. 

Right now we are home alone, resting up for tomorrow when we will only have a two year old (who has been home with his mom, a teacher in a town next door that has been closed, too). Tomorrow night his three year old cousin will arrive and stay through Friday as usual and then, speaking of Friday - it is a teacher in-service day so I will have my bus riders all day on Friday, too! 

Got all that? I'm not sure I do. All I know is that it will be Saturday before I can begin to think about dragging stuff out of that closet and getting this project started. Unless there is a storm and I have a houseful of children snowed in with me. 

Stay safe and warm everyone! 

Word of the Month

 I am not willing to concede to a word or theme for all of 2022. But I have been considering several ideas.  I believe that January has progressed far enough along that my word is Procrastination. 

I did finish my New Year's Eve garage sale puzzle. Then I got out the Tea Cup puzzle my friend gifted me when I broke my arm. I could not sit close enough to the puzzle board to really work on it and my eyes were fuzzy with pain killers. Then after the world pause ended, my tiny grandkids were playing in the pieces. 

The Tea Cup puzzle is complete, except for 5 missing pieces from the border which were there at one point. I use large bulletin boards for inexpensive puzzle boards and store them on a dresser in my spare room. I am now cleaning behind everything in the spare room to see if I can locate them. And by that, I mean I finished the puzzle on January 4th and just started cleaning in there this afternoon. 

I have procrastinated on Christmas decorations. We did take the outdoor ones down one day last week. The tree is still up. I had big plans for the past two days as my school aged grandchildren had MLK day and today off for a teacher in-service. But we got five inches of snow so they spent most of their time shoveling and building tunnels and castles. I do have the empty boxes for ornaments in the living room now. 

I have decided to leave the bathroom and bedroom Christmas until February. 

I have been very moody and depressed about the state of the world and family matters and then wrote a few posts that, luckily for you, I did not hit publish. I think we will just let them be. 

I guess I will procrastinate until the end of the month and try to do better, be better and have a better outlook in February.