Last Half 2022 – December

I thought this morning that we would go back in time, to this day which happened to also be a Friday, December 23 but it is the year 2011.

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Good Friday Morning …… Happy December 23rd, 2011.

Well this is it ….. only one more day till Christmas Eve, and then the big day.

I want to wish to each and everyone the most glorious Christmas.

May your days be filled with perfect health, great joy, much love and laughter, wealth and abundance.

This is my last blog until after Christmas.

My wish is that Santa brings you that special item but most of all I wish that your Christmas is filled with overflowing and abundant  “LOVE.”

That is the most important thing of all ….. to love yourself, to give love and be loved….

Merry Christmas my friends.

Special Hello:  to you ALL …. Merry Christmas….

Always, Carol and Alvin, too…….

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My thoughts and wishes are the same as these, many years ago, that your Christmas is filled with love.

Another brisk morning but it is warming up.

Countdown to Christmas: ONE sleep till Christmas EVE and Alvin comes home with Aspen, Milo, Amanda and Steven. I am over the moon excited. We will once again all be under the same roof.

I will be posting tomorrow on Christmas EVE.

So grateful for second day working from home this week. We are finished work at noon and that is great. I have laundry to do, Mincemeat tarts to bake, bit of cleaning to do and then it will be Christmas.

YAY.

Continuing to live this life with kindness, respect, compassion, patience, love, laughter, understanding, gratitude, focus, possibilities and coffee.

Always, Carol & Alvin

Last Half 2022 – December

Good Morning ALL! How are you this morning? We are well. Perhaps a bit sleep deprived but otherwise ready to get this day going. I was surprised when I started this new post that the words “What are your favourite things to wear?” come up under my header of this post. I did not type them. Not sure what is going on? But definitely creepy. Does that mean that I was hacked? Yikes. Anyway, moving on and I am not going to worry about that. I will take it as a fluke, perhaps I accidentally had something to be pasted, not that I remember saying “what are your favourite things to wear.” Never a dull moment.

I am excited because my daughter, Alvin’s sister is coming for a sleepover tonight. She said that she would stay tomorrow and help me with the baking. That would be great. I do not often have help with the Christmas baking so I would appreciate her assistance. Amanda also mentioned about perhaps taking Alvin home with her tomorrow to Alberta Beach. That would be basically three weeks away from home. I am not sure. I know that I will miss him terribly and I think that he may think that I am not coming back. He has been very clingy as of my three day each week return to the office. But maybe it would be good for him. I worry about him with him approaching 14 years and do not wish to cause him additional anxiety. He knows them and the pups very well so that is not it but it is not home. I guess we will see what tomorrow brings. I will speak to my daughter and see what she thinks.

One of our friends lost their pup this week, he was 14 years old, I believe. Always incredibly sad when a doggie passes on. Truly they are family and the hole they leave in your heart stays forever. We just learn to live without them.

I will need to shovel the driveway as there was a slight skiff of snow a day ago and I did not go back out to clean it up. My daughter will park her car in the garage. It is very cold outside this morning. I decided to remake the dish that I came up with two nights ago and then apple crisp for dessert.

We are down to 23 sleeps till Christmas EVE!!

Have a great day.

Continuing to live this life with kindness, respect, compassion, patience, love, laughter, understanding, gratitude, focus, possibilities and coffee.

Always, Carol & Alvin

PS: even was texting with two friends from Regina last night individually at the same time. Great to have friends near and far. I am so blessed.

Last Half 2022 – November

Good Morning ALL! How are you this morning? I am well, confused, scared and wishing that I had not seen something. I found something on the kitchen floor this morning at 3:30 a.m. – something that was not there, I am sure when we went to bed. Something dark, hard, round but not round but reminds me of something that I absolutely do not like. I was not going to mention this but I cannot get it out of my head. That does not help anything. Why, me. Why, my house? I hope that I am wrong and it was just some piece of something that I did not see. I guess time will tell. I have not slept since 3:30 a.m. I am tired.

This morning’s post will be short. It is cold outside and snowing. I am tired. Working from home today which is good, I suppose. I sure hope that only Alvin and I are the only live creatures in my house now and forever. People and pups and cats can come to visit but nothing else. Stay away from my house.

Definitely needing coffee this morning.

Okay, pull up my big girls pants and go back downstairs. Everything will be okay. It will be okay.

Continuing to live this life with kindness, respect, compassion, patience, love, laughter, understanding, gratitude, focus, possibilities and coffee.

Always, Carol & Alvin

PS: I wished it was a piece of a coffee bean on the floor. Oh, how I wish.

2021

Good Morning ALL! How are you this morning? Well it is pretty chilly out there. I haven’t dared check out the temperature but I could see my breath for sure. The sun is starting to rise slowly as it becomes light outside. Yesterday was a productive Saturday. I did several loads of laundry, chipped and cleaned all of the ice from the public sidewalk out front of our house, washed all of the containers for Christmas baking, made three batches of fudge, watched a Fifth Avenue Jewelry LIVE, had a nice chat with a friend on the phone, did some cleaning and feels like I am missing something as I was busy from the time that I got up until bedtime. Anyway, lots to do at this time of year. What were you doing yesterday?

I am going to pop into the shower to get refreshed after this post and then put on the coffee and pull out all of the baking supplies to make the SUGAR COOKIES. I have already put away all of the laundry that was drying in the basement and brought up the towels out of the dryer. I made the bed. Do you make your bed everyday? That always seems to be something that people differ on along with the toilet paper roll up or down. But if we agreed on everything it would be a pretty boring world. I plan to bake all of the sugar cookies today and then ice them tomorrow. Likely make 3 or 4 batches which translates to about 216 – 288 cookies. If time allows, I may make more. I have decided this year to make individual packages for the people on my baking distribution list. Oh, that sounds pretty formal. I mean the folks that I give Christmas baking to each year. I usually add people to the list. I have some of the food wrap you know the cello stuff, and ribbon so just have to figure out how large the square has to be. That will likely be the hardest part, lol. I will wrap as I give them away. Not sure if it is feasible to do them all at once. Will see how time allows.

The Fifth Avenue Jewelry LIVES on FB have been fun. Who would have thought two years ago that we would not be having home parties and that everything could be more easily done on the computer on FACEBOOK, of all places. You never know where life is going to take us!

Oh, we had some snow sometime between bed and 3:00 a.m. – just enough to give things a nice little blanket and help cover any ice that was left. Grateful for that bit of snow.

Well time to fly and get some things done. Sometimes I am very good at procrastinating. Very good at it. When it is cold outside – I like to snuggle with Mr. Alvin under our favourite red blanket on the sofa sipping on a mug of coffee and watching “our” favourite Christmas show or movie. Maybe tonight, if I get those cookies all baked in time. We have the last Fifth Avenue Jewelry Live this afternoon at 4 p.m. Mountain time or 5 p.m. for you my sister in Saskatchewan.

Continuing to live this life with kindness, respect, compassion, patience, love, laughter, understanding and gratitude. So much gratitude for this life and each and every day of it.

Always, Carol & Alvin

P.S. last night we were or rather I was waiting for the LIVE to begin when I heard a crash. I was temporarily frozen on the sofa. Finally after a few seconds, I got up to investigate. Guess what I found? The broom and dustpan had fallen over onto the floor from his spot in between the pantry and wall by the back door. OMG, scared the hair right off my head. It did. Even Alvin jumped.

Welcome to December 2020

Good Morning ALL. How are you this Monday morning. Wow, it is December 14, 2020. Almost there. Officially it is “10 sleeps/days” until Christmas Eve Day. Yesterday was an exciting day in our household. First thing in the morning my friend Amber dropped off my Fifth Avenue Collection (FAC) party order which included the orders from my friends and my daughter and mine of course. I love, love my new ELEPHANT necklace so pretty. We chatted masked and distancing for a few minutes before they were on their way to COSTCO for groceries. I almost forgot to send with her the boxes of Christmas treats (baking) that I had prepared on Saturday. Luckily she had said something unrelated about baking and it tweaked my memory banks. Thank goodness. That would have been incredibly sad.

My daughter came for a visit, we had chocolate gingerbread pancakes ( I am always experimenting and most times they turned out, they were good but different texture), she brought us their 58 inch television and most of groceries required for Christmas Dinner/ Supper. When she arrived I helped her bring the television into the house as well as the groceries and after putting the food away we sat down to enjoy the pancakes. Alvin was happy to have “banana” again as we had run out a few days ago. After our breakfast we started the process of taking down the old television (which required me to go to the garage and bring in some tools), down came the old one but putting up the new one required further assistance. We called on our masked friend to come and help as we needed another tool (SHE came with a full on handy dandy tool kit) and in a few minutes we had the new television up. My friend left and we then realized when plugging in the cords that there was no room to plug in one of the cords on the back of the t.v. (honestly I am not very technical so I just don’t remember the name) due to the wall frame thingy BUT my intelligent daughter figured it out and then we had this glorious picture on the screen. It felt as though I was watching a movie on the big screen. Now I had planned to bake another batch of sugar cookies and wrap Christmas presents but somehow my get and go got up and left. My daughter left shortly after the television was up and running. I decided that we needed to just veg and watch CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS complete with a bowl of popcorn. Felt like I was in someone else’s house with this huge television. I think Alvin even took notice. Well we snuggled and enjoyed the movie. Once over I started wrapping Christmas presents. Starting with my son-in-law. I had brought the wrapping paper and bags up from the basement and the gifts down from upstairs. Tape was in a kitchen drawer. I had all Steven’s gifts wrapped and then placed under the tree when I decided why not fill his stocking. There was nothing edible in it so I wrapped his stocking stuffers and placed the stocking carefully under the tree and back to the kitchen and back to wrapping all Alvin’s friends gifts and he has lots of friends. While I was wrapping Alvin was “laying on the sofa” or so I thought when I heard this odd sound followed by what sounded like “tissue paper being torn” so I RAN to the living room and found that Mr. Alvin had dragged the stocking across the floor and had carefully removed the first gift out of the stocking and was just in the process of opening it up. OMG, I quickly rescued the stocking and Steven’s gift from the mouth of his four-legged brother-in-law. I guess that I should have thought something was up when I placed the gifts under the tree and he had gone over and was sniffing at them but then again, he is always curious but this is the first time he has actually tried to open something. Needless to say the stocking has been placed elsewhere and all of the gifts that have anything “puppy wise” whether a toy and or treats are sitting wrapped on my the kitchen counter. I had an open space and it is out of the way of food preparation and stuff. I should have checked to see if I could upload my photos and forgot again. Most of the gifts are wrapped except for some of my daughter’s so I am good to go. All of the gifts that have to go elsewhere are wrapped. Thankfully.

I was done wrapping, had supper and had taken a couple of sweet treats from one of the many containers in the fridge when I decided to see if I could downsize some of the containers. One beings EGGS. I had two dozen in regular cartons and part of a flat carton so I thought I would move a dozen to the flat carton. Well I had forgot just how flimsy the carton bed was and before you know it I had several eggs on the floor, all over the fridge. Mr. Alvin was coming to investigate and I warned him “not to” and he actually kept his distance. I lost several eggs and some had fallen on the ledge and had not broken. YAY, I thought for a quick minute before the door closed and I heard egg shells crushing. I did manage to retrieve three eggs that the shell was broken only and were still on the fridge ledge so I made eggs for breakfast today. ARGH. It was sad, funny and frustrating. Mostly funny. I ended up steam mopping the floor – just in case.

What a day. I also forgot that one of my best pals dropped off my Christmas present and Christmas baking. We are not able to get together for our annual Christmas dinner and party so we are dropping off the gifts and baking and then we will be zooming on Saturday. My fridge has officially exploded with baking some of which is waiting to be delivered tonight and others that are ALL MINE to ENJOY.

Well it looks like it is time to get this show on the road. What a Sunday we had. Mostly great. I still cannot believe that I have this gigantic beautiful television in my living room and in fact, I had to adjust my eyes this morning to ensure that I was not dreaming.

Living this life with kindness, respect and compassion for all – is what we all need to do.

Always, Carol & Alvin