Happy New Year! Happy Birthday!

Happy New Year, Happy Birthday!
This is what I say every New Years Eve when the ball drops. This is because I live with the first baby born in Waynesboro, PA in a year I'd be best not to mention. Butch is a baby new year.

We had a quiet new year this year. Met up with V & R, and Bucky & Jacq for a laid back dinner nearby. V&R came back and we drank more Margaritas and played cards til midnight. We turned the TV on just before midnight, and I'm sure Dick Clark has made tremendous improvement since his stroke, but they really should just retire him now. Course, new years eve might be something that helps him work on his health improvement as an incentive. But it was still kinda sad.
Well, I'm off to get ready to watch the Penn State game. My Maryland won their little bowl game the other day. Gotta root for the Nittany Lions, since I'm around too many people that would kick my Terp butt.
My your New Year be safe and healthy and prosperous!

LYK!

Yo-Ho-Ho-Ho

We started out Christmas with the Christmas eve dinner for butch's immediate family. This is what our kitchen looks like when the blessing is done and 25 loving family members all take turns elbowing each other away from the food!

We all found a spot to stand or sit or plopped down for a good meal. Another appearance by my buddy Alex, who found a good spot to himself.

Afterward, there was much wrapping paper shredding, followed all the ooooh's and aaaaah's, followed by the annual hunt for batteries. Good time was had by all and we even had a surprise appearance by Bucky and Jack! (I must admit, it must have been a little scary for them, as the noise level begins the evening really loud, and by the time they got there half had already left, but the noise was only increasing)

Christmas day we head down to Lydia's for the day. More paper shredding followed by more ohhh's and aaaah's, followed by a whole lot of "LILY-NO"'s. They've released a movie called Marley and me.....that dog can have nothing on the other blonde lab...Lily!

Below the girls are all hard at work on dinner and look who's in the middle looking for anyone to accidentally drop something......that's right-Lily.

Okay, I know she's going to kill me when she finally reads this, but that's what you get when I say smile and you make a face like that.

ho-freakin-ho

You know, it's always a bitch getting ready for Christmas. If it was at our house today, it was either cleaned or wrapped. The wrapping will have to be finished tomorrow, cause stick a fork in my butt, I'm done. I also need to bake an apple pie tomorrow night, to take to my moms on Thursday. I'm going to try soaking the raisins overnight in the rum and add them to the pie, that way, maybe the bottom crust won't be quite so drunk. Can't do it Tuesday, cause that's when we're baking the bird and something else that I'm just to fried to remember what it was. Everyone is coming here for Christmas eve and we'll have a house full of family and friends. It will be noisy and laughing and fun, and hopefully, everyone will go home happy with full bellys.

Christmas Lunch

Last Sunday was butch's annual family Christmas gathering. There was about 65 people in attendance, with lots of food stopping by for a short visit. butch was one of the organizers this year, which meant we had to get gobs of presents for the "now you have it, now you don't" which I always called a Pollyanna-same game, different titles, same outcome. Do you know how hard it is to buy a gazillion gifts under $2? Pretty hard is the answer. Thank goodness for 5 below, and the dollar store.

Here are the real stars of the show. Butch has/had 10 uncles, 9 of them served in the military in some form or the other. The gentleman in red in the middle is sporting something that he doesn't show very often. It's the Purple Heart he was awarded at Normandy. Lucky for the family, it's the only one all those brothers acquired.

9 Feet

9 feet is what you get when your 7 foot Christmas tree is not tall enough.

We moved into the house on New Years eve. So we missed Christmas here, and the next year, we had a ball buying all new Christmas decorations. We had to, since we seemed to have lost all the stuff each of us had on our own. I have no idea where it went, we just manage to lose it all in the kabillion moves that each of us made. So we bought a 7' tree. Butch immediately said it wasn't big enough with the cathedral ceiling and went and built a box to sit it on and make it taller. Still not tall enough. But do you have any idea how much a 9' tree costs??? No way Jose. Well, last year, towards the end of January one of the guys he works with told us about the sale Wally's was having on all their left overs and that he had seen 9 footers there. Needless to say, he had me packed up and busting up the road. We got a $300 tree for $50 bucks. Happy Butch. Until we tried to move the damn thing. But we got it down in the basement (no way it was fitting up in the attic), and forgot about it until now. This tree is in 5 separate heavy pieces. It has like, I don't even know how many points on it, but I had to separate all of them. Took me most of the stupid Steeler vs Patriots game. OH, and one armed too as my damn shoulder is still hurt enough that I'm doing most everything one handed. Jeez, I'm an idiot-just call me Dr Kimble!

No decorations on it yet, but that will be for tomorrow night. I've got some running around to do tomorrow and I can't get the boxes down from the attic. Gotta wait on Butch for that....and he has to work tomorrow. Unlike me, I'm forced to take the first two days of deer season, instead of time between Christmas and New Year. Whoops, wandering just slightly off subject.
So here is the naked tree~as you can see, the 9 feet comes to the low section of the ceiling and really does look much better. I'm telling everyone coming to our house over the holiday to bring an ornament, since it's going to take a lot more than what we have at this point. Just a minor point, and we even bought a bunch more when we bought the tree.

Orchard

Last Saturday, I needed to go buy some honey at one of the orchards nearby. It's always best when it comes right from the bee. This honey always has a wonderful apple flavor to it, (d'oh, I wonder why it tastes like that) and is really tasty. I only went for honey, but ended up spending 50 bucks. Since we didn't get to the apple harvest festival this year, I needed some baking apples, so I got a 1/2 bushel of Staymans. They also have homemade pie fillings there too. Hey, when I say it is homemade, it doesn't necessarily mean the homemade was in my kitchen! I've been buying quarts of honey and the price went from $9.oo to $12.oo the last time I got a bottle. I've been thinking about it, and I decided to take the plunge and buy a gallon. Which actually is a better bargain, cause it is only $25.00, so really I got it at half the price. Honey doesn't go bad and I know that sooner more so than later, it will all be used up. The best part was butch trying to pour out of a gallon jar with a wide mouth on it. I just wish someone I knew-who loved honey in his tea way more than I do, would let me buy him a queen bee, so he could start his hives again!

So, this is some of what I came home with, and below is the RUM/apple pie some of it became. yum.

Zippers

Last summer, butch told me I had a big freckle on my back, I didn't think anything of it. It was between my shoulder blades and I couldn't really see what it was. Not long after that, Connie from PC was up staying with us and saw it. She recommended that I have it checked out asap. I actually listened went to the gp. He biopsied it, and it was what he thought, which was basal cell carcinoma. Skin cancer. I know that pretty much everyone there on told me how lucky I was that if you had to have this happen, this was the best that you could hope to have. So I schedule the appointment with the plastic surgeon. That takes 2.5 months and he looks at it and says yep, that's what it looks like, we'll schedule you for some in house surgery (a month later).

He also bitched to me about staying out of the sun. I told him that I had been a water rat as a kid, and a swim coach, and a lifeguard for 11 years. This was all before the invention of sunscreen. I am now careful not to get burned like I used to do. I'm the one with the spf 30 fussing over everyone. I love the beach, butch and I are sandcrabs. It used to be when I went to the beach only old people and babies sat under umbrellas, and that I guess I'm one of them now, cause for years, I've always carried one down to the sand. (umbrella that is, not babies or an old person) When I told the Dr this his suggestion was that maybe I just needed to wear more clothes at the beach. riiiight.

So I went in last Thursday and he cut up my back to the tune of half a dozen or so stitches inside and 19 staples outside. Butch laughed and said it looked like I had a zipper right up the middle of my back, and it did. The Dr even made the same comment last night when they started taking some of them out. He left 6 in still and I have to go back on Tuesday to get them out.

Here's a picture, black and white to help with the ewwwww factor.