Happy New Year!

 

A little late but anyway, Happy New Year to you all! 

Our New Years Eve was pretty low key as it usually is. 

Earlier in the day Shauna and the boys came over for a visit. Levi loves to do directed drawing videos on YouTube and he drew me this Elf on the Shelf. 

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The good news is we managed to stay up until midnight! Our celebration consisted of watching the ball drop on our bedroom TV and then falling asleep by 12:05! LOL! I would call that pretty low key!

I did work on New Years Day from 2-8. It was so quiet in there and I was actually bored most of the time! But for $31 an hour, I'll happily be bored for a while! 

Then we had the boys spend the night on Tuesday. It was the only chance we had because I work the rest of the week and they go back to school on the 8th. 

Speaking of the 8th, it's Maxwells birthday and he will be 7! Time sure does fly by! I remember when it felt like I waited forever to have a grandchild and now it's almost 7 years! Here's the post I did when he was born.

We had a little family birthday party for him on Saturday. I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, and he told me "A and X", meaning the light up letters to go with the M he got for Christmas. 

They are pretty cool and light up all different ways. They all connect, and he can control them with his iPad! Modern technology at its most fun!

On the 20th he's going to have a big party at a bowling alley where all his friends and schoolmates are invited! 

That's about it for now. Things are quieting down now as we are in my two least favorite months of the year! At least we had a few birthdays to celebrate this month and I'm gearing up to do the February Photo A Day posts. That usually makes the months more bearable! 

The forecast is saying we should have a mild winter, but if I recall last year we had a mild winter and then got most of our snow in March and April! UGH! No thanks! 

See you the next time and thanks for stopping by! 

Christmas 2023

 

For those of you who did not find Frank the cat in my last post, here he is!

Chris sent this with the caption, "He thinks he hiding!" LOL! I think I looked everywhere but there and didn't actually find him until Rich pointed him out to me! 

Christmas was nice if not a little low-key. 

On Christmas Eve I had to work until 8:00 and then we went to my older brother's house for their annual Christmas Eve party. It was extremely foggy out all day and night, so the drive took us a little longer than expected and we didn't get there until about 9:30. But it was fun! 

Usually, it's the only time I see some of my nieces and nephews! It's a total food fest with the homemade Italian sausage my youngest brother makes and deep-dish Sicilian pizza my other younger brother makes. I am 100% Italian, with my mom's family coming from Northern Italy and my dad's family coming from Sicily. Both sides are represented during our feast! 

On Christmas Day we went to Shauna's. They were not hosting Brad's family this year so it was just us and Brad's mom and dad. 

We had fun watching the boys play with their gifts. 

That was pretty much the extent of our holiday this year! 

One more week of 2023. I can't believe how time flies! 

January is a busy birthday month for us. Rich on the 4th, Maxwell on the 8th and me on the 12th. 

Chris will be in town on the 10th. We haven't seen him since October so I'm looking forward to it! 

In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! 

See you the next time!

Memory Ornament

Back in January of 2021 I did a post on my wedding dress. It was in pretty bad shape, and I was about to throw it away so I took a bunch of pictures for the post and removed the 100 or so pearls on it.  

At the time I thought I had already thrown away the veil but in going through some stuff in the closet I found it stuffed at the bottom of a random garment bag. 

Here it is. 

Before I threw it in the garbage, I took all of the pearls off and cut a piece off of it. 

I had planned to make a necklace with them but decided it would be too much trouble and possibly breaking and losing them all. 

So I had an empty glass ornament and decided to just put them all in there. 

I put the piece of veil on the top to sort of look like a veil and put a label on it. 

I like it although now that I think of it, I should have taken a piece of the veil with one of the little flowers on it! Darn it! Oh well, too late now! Ugh! 

Anyway, it's a good way to preserve a little bit of my dress and veil!

In other news, 

Chris sent me this picture and it took me forever to find his cat! See how fast you can find him! 

Last week we went to Downtown Plymouth to look at the trees in the park. 

New this year is a light tunnel. Kids were having fun running through it. 

Finally, Shauna, Brad and the boys had a wonderful time in Orlando. They went to Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom and the boys favorite part:

Swimming in the pool at the hotel! Good thing they didn't pay for the tickets to the parks! 

That's it for now. Thanks for stopping by! 

Thanksgiving and Other Stuff

Thanksgiving was nice. I didn't take many pictures as usual because I was in the moment. I did take this one though

Along with their personalized Christmas ornaments I gave the boys kits to make their own light up ceramic Christmas trees! They both started painting them as soon as they got them! 

These are their ornaments for this year. 

My job is going great. It's an adventure that's for sure. The first day I worked one of the concierges came in for her shift and promptly quit!  Then a few days later we find out the company has been sold and the name will be changing in the middle of December! 

On Sunday while I was working one of the residents in the memory Care wing pulled the fire alarm thinking it would open the door and they could escape! It took the fire department an hour to turn it off! All the residents were coming up to the desk wondering what was going on! 

I got my house decorated for Christmas. As much as I'm going to do, anyway. I put up the snowmen and my big and miniature trees.  

This is my newest snowman for this year. 

It's actually an accessory to the Dickins village they have at Bronner's. It's only about an inch or so tall but I thought it was so cute! It's called "sorry...NOT" 

Here's the bow wreath I started to make last February, ran out of bows and finished in May when I bought some more at an estate sale! 

I think it looks pretty against the blue door. 

All the trees including the miniature one. That white thing in the front right is a diffuser. I just decorated it to make it fit in! 

Here's my newest miniature ornament. 

A little cake with a slice out of it! 

Shauna and Brad and the boys are leaving for Florida on Saturday. Brad knows someone that works for Disney and they got free tickets to 2 of the parks. I'll miss them but they will have a blast! 

That's it for me for now.

Take care and thanks for stopping by! 

Random Stuff

The new job is going well as can be expected. I'm a little overwhelmed with all the things I've had to learn but I'm feeling a little more comfortable every day. Everyone is helpful. Several people gave me their phone numbers and told me to call anytime if I need anything. 

I already love some of the resident's I've met! They are all so sweet! I think they are going to be the best part of my job! 

Tomorrow I will be on my own for the first time. 

We did get the bedroom painted. I'm not going to post any pictures yet because I want to finish decorating the room. It came out very nice though! 

A while back I posted about my son Chris having feral chickens in his backyard. Someone asked what he is going to do if they are still around when winter hits. I said knowing him I didn't think he would just leave them out to the elements, and I was right. 

He bought this chicken coop kit off Am@zon and put it together for them! It's outside now and he says they're warming up to it. Their still free to come and go but now they have somewhere to go when it gets cold and snowy! 

Shauna and Brad got passports for the boys. These are their pictures. 

Even those are so cute! 

I got my Christmas tree put up over the weekend. This is another one of my miniatures that I turned into a Christmas ornament. 

The whole thing is less than 4" tall and each little cup is 1/2 inch tall. I remember being so excited to find cups with mine and Shauna's names on them because it's rare to find our names on anything! 

My Thanksgiving cactus is blooming right on time. 

It's smaller and doesn't have as many blooms this year because I cut it back and transplanted it to a new pot over the summer. I'm just glad to see it bloomed at all! 

Well, that's it for now. I'm having about 10 people for Thanksgiving this year so I'm looking forward to a quiet one. Then I work for the next 4 days! 

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with family, love and good food! 

See you the next time and thanks for stopping by! 

Unexpected But Good

Well, after deciding that I would not look for a job until after the holidays, I actually got a job at the last place I applied to! 

My new job is at Anthology of Northville, a senior living facility about two miles from my house. It a beautiful place that has been there for 4 years. 

I'll be a Concierge and work the 2-8 shift, 3-4 days a week with alternating weekends.  When I first went to the interview, I really liked all the people I met and the person who would be my supervisor. The hours were great, it took me 6 minutes to drive there and the pay was really good. The only problem was, because it's a 365-day facility I would have to work some holidays. I told her that was probably a deal breaker as I don't want to work any holidays. I left there really torn and said I would think about it. 

Later that day while talking it over with Rich he said, and I agreed that it would be a shame to give up an almost perfect job like that for a few days a year. There is always a way to work around a holiday, especially because we don't really have big family gatherings anymore. 

I emailed the supervisor and within a few hours she emailed me back and offered me the job. So this past week has been spent filling out paperwork, getting a physical, a TB test, background check and fingerprinted! 

I'm good to go now and will start on Monday! Plus, when I do have to work a holiday it's double time and that's a lot of money! 

I'm looking forward to it because this is a whole new experience for me! 

In other news, I bought the paint for our bedroom and will be spending the rest of this weekend painting! I want to be done by Monday and especially done by Thanksgiving! 

See you the next time and thanks for stopping by! 

Bathroom #2

With all this free time on my hands I figured it was finally time to paint the bathroom off our master bedroom. We still had half a gallon of blue-green paint left from the small guest bathroom we painted earlier this year so, instead of spending money on another gallon of paint (have you seen the price of paint these days?) we just used it for this bathroom too. 

Here are some before pictures: 

Rich standing on the toilet to paint the edges of the ceiling. 

It wasn't as hard to paint this bathroom as we had a lot more room. But still, the only way to paint over the toilet and sink is to stand on them! 

It turned out nice though! 

It's amazing how much bluer this bathroom looks compared to the other bathroom! The natural light has something to do with it, I think! 

We thought about changing the light fixtures but decided not to right now. I think it's fine with the ones that are there. 

Next up is the bedroom. 

I think were going to go with this color called French Silver. It's grey with a little tint of blue which will go good with the bathroom color!

In other news, Halloween with the boys was fun. 

It was cold, though. Luckily the boys were tired from all the activities at school that day and didn't want to stay out for too long! 

That white stuff was coming down off and on all night, too! Ugh! I'm not ready for winter yet! 

That's it for now. Stay warm and thanks for stopping by!