December 2024 in Review

Christmas time is here! Music everywhere. Actually I don’t think that is how the song goes… Huh, I should try and figure out just what those lyrics are.

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Week 1

Okay, this is a very boring week of pictures. I put the pictures for the craft on last month I think, and I just didn’t take a lot of pictures.

Jeff got me an early Christmas present of Pureflix. He knows I like those cheesy Christmas movies and while both Netflix and Amazon have recently gotten into making them the content hasn’t always been that great. Either it’s been over the top formulaic, OR it’s not the PG or PG-13 rating I’m wanting, but is more sexual in nature. I’m interested in the relationship and how they got together.

So, the movies from Pureflix have been fun to watch, for the most part the storylines have been better, not always, some have definitely have been just as bad if not worse, but in general it hasn’t always been “Executive from big city goes home to small town and rediscovers her love of Christmas.” Instead we got a variety of storylines, including sometimes staying in the big town, or a love story with an older couple. That’s right, it wasn’t just attractive 20-somethings, sometimes it was someone in their 40s or 50s, and even a side-plot with someone in their 60s finding love again. Who knew?

So, we’ve been enjoying it. We figure we’ll keep it for one more month to watch some of the other stuff on the channel after Christmas, and the switch off of that and maybe pick up something else.

As we’ve been watching all of that I’ve been working on fixing all of my Christmas LEGO sets. I still don’t have all of them fixed. It’s been an interesting challenge.

Then that final picture of the cups is the set of coffee mugs from our registry. They’re very pretty stoneware, it’s a lovely set of blue, but it has been sitting in our cabinet and completely unused for years. It’s just not our style, so I talked it over with Jeff and we decided to give it away.

Books read:

• Memoria– I loved how this trilogy ended, and now I need to go back and reread it to find the hints for some of the twists revealed in the book
• The Burning Tree– this was last month’s Book Quest in Lorehaven and I enjoyed it, but like many others in the quest sometimes wanted to shake the main character and say, “Hey, maybe stop being so silly and talk to people.”
• Hall of Blood and Mercy– I randomly decided to reread this, I don’t remember why, so I started on this series

Week 2

For our craft we made the start of a nativity set with peg dolls. It was highly amusing to me because I requested: peg dolls, egg carton so we can make the nativity (at which point I learned you can order egg trays and a whole new world of crafting is now available). I brought in some fabric scraps thinking the kids would use them to make a blanket for baby Jesus and instead the kids happily made clothes for their peg dolls. It was quite fun to see them making their projects.

Then in the bottom left corner, I’m working on making a dress, and that’s me attempting to fit the dress. I’ve since drastically changed that back with removing all sorts of things.

The kids got home on Thursday, and The Artist had her Stars and Stripes Court of Award on Saturday.

That is what the remainder of the pictures are. The three girls in that top picture grew up together in AHG, and there are two poses that we have many pictures of them in throughout the years. The one I included, them choking each other is the most common in this age. When they were younger there was this big dramatic pose they would do.

But that big picture is me sewing on all of the patches and badges I was WAY behind in sewing on. Way behind, I probably sewed on two years of them, and I hadn’t realized how far behind I was. But it was pretty cool to see it all sewn on. There is no room for anything else on that sash.

Okay. That was that week.

Books read:

• Rest of the Magiford series

Week 3

This was a bit of a traumatic week, in case you can’t tell.

So, the kids got back from college, and we got me a new car, and passed my old car down to The Artist, the very next day she was driving a friend home and someone hit her. That picture is of the the person’s car who hit her, her car flipped onto its side. At first we thought our car didn’t have that much damage, it drove away fine. Then a few days later we went to drive the car and there was obviously some major damage. We took it to the dealer and discovered the rear axel was broken, and as of yesterday the car was officially totalled, so now we have to figure out what we want to do about a car… It’s been a fair amount of drama.

Funny story about this. A few hours after this happened, The Artist came downstairs and asked if I had shared about her accident anywhere. She had gotten a phone call from a friend on vacation in Hawaii. We spent a good five minutes brainstorming how this friend had found out, eventually we found out the friend was texted by the other friend in the accident (using the word friend only to be as anonymous as possible).

On to the less dramatic pictures. The giant picture is a recreation of a memory when the boys were toddlers and I was pregnant with The Artist, and their Nana would walk endlessly with the not really walking twins over and over again so they could practice walking. They were greatly amused to do this.

The bottom right picture is the photo of Jeff proudly carrying the box of presents up to his parents’ house, which slowly collapsed the bottom of the box. SHOCKER! I know! It was pretty hilarious.

I’ve been slowly working on a dress vaguely inspired by a couple of different ideas, and trying different things, so that’s one of my attempts at it you can see there.

The picture of The Artist on the stepstool is her attempt to escape the dog trying to step on her feet/lick her feet as she is cooking, which I thought was pretty amusing to me.

Books Read:

• I don’t have my notebook with me
• Technically I finished the other three books in the Magiford series now

Games Played:

• Hadraian’s Wall
• Clank Legacy (generic Clank review)
• Cthulhu Death May Die (review of game)

Week 4

Most of my pictures are from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Driving back from Dallas we stopped at Buccee’s and got a Buccee’s onesies for the entire family and we all went to the Christmas Eve service in the onesies and then had our annual family fight, this year it was silly string. Which everyone had a lot of fun with, and we had fun getting pictures together.

Actually, I think I have a fun before and after, let me find that…

It is truly difficult to get pictures of everyone together all looking at the camera and smiling with great smiles. These are the best pictures with everyone for these pictures.

The next day we had a fire and enjoyed sitting around it and talking, and of course, roasting marshmallows after we cooked our dinner.

Then the big picture at the top, after Christmas we took down the playscape. It was a bit emotional, and it’s probably good I was not successful in giving it away because the wood as not in particularly good shape, but I got several pictures of the kids doing all sorts of ridiculous things to try and take it apart.

We ended the year with our New Year’s marathon where we each picked three TV shows, which led to some truly amusing things to watch.

Books read:

• Christmas in the Castle Library– I’ve been hearing all these people raving about it for the last two months and it was okay, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t heard so many people raving about this book
• A Groom of One’s Own– This was a cute rom-com that I picked up on sale, which worked well as a fun read as I wasn’t feeling super great
• Lady Avely’s Guide to Lies and Charms– I enjoyed this, but feel like this book isn’t as much about the adventure and more of the romance, and it’s a lot of miscommunication and other things which makes it rather tiresome, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book in the series

Games we played:

• Clank Catacombs– I got this for Christmas, and it was fun to play
• Level 20– we ended up deciding to give this away because we don’t like this as much as other games we would rather play more. So, it’s not that it’s a bad game, it’s just we have games we like more
• Touch of Evil– Batman loves this game so much
• I feel like there may be others, but it’s hard to remember, I had the worst migraine on New Year’s Day which is part of why this is published today