The shop has a yearly sale at the end of January and Ginny told me that small things, like ornaments are what customers stock up on. She asked me to crank out as many as I could by the sale. So, all those designs I had wanted to do before Christmas but ran out of time…I’m painting them now.
I’m also going to do two new stockings to make a series for one of the most popular designs I’ve been doing the last few years.
It’s great to be able to make some money, especially while being creative at the same time. Right now, I’ve got six ornaments drawn up on my board. I’ve painted five new ones today and these six will bring me up to all the ones I wanted to do. I had to take a break. Two and a half hours at my board has made my back ache. I’m also hungry.
Jay’s got a roast in the oven that smells wonderful.
I’ve been working on taking down Christmas decorations for the last few days. It took me days to get them up, I can take days to get them down.
The house always looks so bare when the tree is down. I had three trees up this year, so it will really look bare. Two of them were little but still…
Of course, the house will look better when all the boxes full of decorations are back down in the basement where they belong. I did take the opportunity to sweep the floor once I got the tree taken apart. Hard to believe how much dust and stuff accumulates in a month.
Hard to believe it was a month since I put it all up.
But now it’s over and we all know what that means: Spring is Coming!
It’s true; the days have been getting longer for nearly three weeks. Soon, I’ll look out my window some evening and see the sun setting to the right of the sidewalk that runs through the park.
In the meantime, this El Nino winter didn’t seem serious at all. We had very little snow and nearly no freezing weather. We finally got some snow after Christmas. It came down the other day in big, fat, Hollywood snow flakes. The kind Bing Crosby sang about. It has snowed several times now but the accumulation is still minor. I think we have about three inches. I’ve only had to shovel off the roof once.
Today, it finally got cold, too. The temps have been bouncing between mid 20s and mid 30s for quite a while. Here in Minnesota, anything with two digits is a heat wave this time of year. This morning it was -5. Now, that’s a Minnesota January temperature.
I was going to get some plastic to cover the windows on my porch today. Wow; last year, I covered them weeks before Christmas. It was cold and I left one window unshrink wrapped so that we could open it on Christmas Eve to let out smoke if Jay wanted a cigar on the porch. This year, it wasn’t an issue. I thought I’d be able to get through the whole winter without wrapping the windows but at negative 5, it’s rather cool out there.
Anyway, I didn’t get the plastic today because its Sunday and I hate shopping on weekends. I really hate it. I like having the world to myself. Besides, I’m not going to use the porch tonight, so I don’t care that its cold.
I also have to get another humidifier. I’ve been meaning to go fish ours out of the basement all month but I’ve been so busy I never did. When I finally took the time to go get it I discovered that Zack has been using it. Well, he needs it as much as I do. So, since I have to go to Menards anyway…
I finally finished watching Mad Men.
My overall critique of the show?
Meh.
I always enjoyed it while I was watching it but never gave it a thought when I wasn’t. The seventh and final season didn’t seem to add anything new to the narratives of the characters. The final episode kind of tied up the lines of a few of the characters but the rest just sort of fizzled off into space.
There’s no reason in the world to believe that Roger’s marriage to Marie will be any more successful than his (or her) other marriages.
I give Pete and Trudy six months in Wichita.
I liked the Peggy and Stan denouement but it seemed tacked on.
Don’t care that Betty is dying. Don’t believe it, either. They should have actually killed her.
Good for Joan, starting her own production company. I was disappointed with how meekly she caved in to the slobs at McCann. If she couldn’t punch those pigs in the nose for their sexual harassment, what makes anyone think she’ll do any better in the film production bidness? Are we supposed to believe there’s nothing but respect for women in that field? HA.
As for Don, he’s the biggest mope of a character I’ve ever watched. It’s hard to believe a successful show was built around a character who was such a frickin’ bore. Was I supposed to believe that his hippy dippy experiences on the coast inspired the most annoyingly catchy ditty in advertising history, or that the ad game missed Don Draper so little that no sooner did he retire, than Coca Cola tried to teach the world to sing?
Oh, don’t bother answering; I don’t care.