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My fantasy football team decided that it was a bye week and so I've decided not to look at my scores until Tuesday. Of course, that has given me a bit more time to get things done around the house, including making buckeyes.
I was going to make homemade twix bars, but they need about 20 minutes in the oven and 2 hours for the caramel to set. I think I will save that for the party!
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Last November we had insulation installed right before it got cold (and to take advantage of the federal rebate). Because of our siding, we needed it blown in from the inside. All of those holes have been there all year. Today the second coat of prime went up this morning, and around 2 p.m. I will be able to paint. We are using a low VOC paint from Sherwin Williams (I love the color picker tool) in the color Flyway, a light to medium blue. Hopefully I will be able to finish the room Sunday with any second coat and the trim.
We still have all of the upstairs rooms to do, but they can wait until spring when it will be nice enough to keep the windows open the entire time.
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My husband has a super power. As far as super powers go, this one sucks pretty bad. Whenever he has a delivery via UPS he has to either be home for it or pick it up from the nearest pick up location in Norwood. Those little slips of paper that they stick to the door? Doesn't matter if he fills them out correctly, they always check the wrong box and then we have to sign.
So, today I'm home, waiting a delivery and priming the dining room before painting it a beautiful shade of blue. There will be dog walking and coffee drinking and nursing my head cold. I will find some time for knitting in there while the paint dries and hopefully I will finish my holiday shopping via the magical powers of the Internet!
So, it's Victor walking time!
Yup, Victor wants a walk!
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I'll admit that I don't watch much in the way of movies or television shows, and when I do I have this strange guilt about it. I know that any time spent watching television could be more profitably spent reading a book or doing the chores around the house.
So, laying my guilt aside, here are the movies and shows I think of for the holidays:
1. Nightmare Before Christmas. Someone else mentioned it and it reminded me that I really like that movie a lot. Turn on the French language and listen to Jack's songs. They are so much more satisfying in French.
2. Miracle on 34th Street. I grew up watching this one, but I haven't seen it in a really long time. Maybe Netflix has it on the instant queue.
Ballet and Musicals:
3. Nutcracker. I got to see it in Boston once when someone I know in the SCA won tickets on the radio. I'd never been to a ballet, but was very interested and enjoyed the show immensely.
4. Rent. Hey! It takes place in the holiday season, so it totally counts!
5. Adams Family Values. It has a Thanksgiving play, so it, too, totally counts! (Eat me, sauteed or barbecued. Eat me! We once were pets but now are food.)
6. Sweeney Todd. It is totally about food and cooking and good times. I mean, look at all the pies! See totally counts.
7. Hogfather. Yup, last year we were flipping around and saw the Terry Pratchett novel done as a movie. Now I am finally getting around to reading the book. Per normal, the book is way more satisfying.
8. Valentine. I went to see this with one of my friends in the theater when we were both single and bitter about it. It was a great time avoiding all of the gushy romantic trappings of the chocolatiest holiday.
9. Dear God. Yup. It is cheesy and it involves letters to Santa.
Yeah, I have nothing. Now if it had been favorite holiday songs, I might have had a bit more to work with!
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I've spent the last hour playing word games and reading web comics.
While I don't play games like the uber-popular Angry Birds, I do play a lot of short games. My top games are word games and puzzle games, making the Facebook games, Scramble and Bejeweled, the top of my play list.
Love Word Games. I really cannot say this enough.
In real word games, here are my favorites! (A list and it isn't even 10 for Tuesday.)
1. Scrabble. I have to admit that I get kind of scary competitive with this one. My husband beat me the last time we played and I was more than a bit ticked off. Whoops. I usually score pretty high, but I have never managed to use all 7 tiles at once. My family plays anything goes as long as it doesn't use a foreign character or accent mark, which makes my polyglot tendencies pretty useful. We also use a double set of tiles. It might be simple, but quizzes is just too much fun on a triple word score.
2. Boggle. I used to have keychain boggle and I would play it on the way to work all the time until the plastic casing got so scratched up and there was too much condensation to read the tiles. I should get another one. It was a good way to spend a few minutes every day. When I lived downstairs from my friends, T&E, we would play Boggle a lot. We're fairly evenly matched, so it was always fun without being a constant blow out win for any one person.
3. Quick Word. Quick Word is like a word game for everybody. There are different categories: Blue, Green, Pink and Grey, and within those categories there are different tasks. Blue is anything associated with a certain category such as Names of Banks or Anything Found in a Sea Port. We were pretty flexible with that, because one of us (yes, I'm looking at you) is the queen of adding men/women/children and wood/glass/metal/fiberglass to everything. It's true, because they are there. Green is one item for each category matching the letter indicated by the spinner. Pink and Grey are more traditional word games like making words from a word or phrase or starting with or containing certain letters.
4. Quiddler. This game is great for both people who have extensive vocabulary and those who don't, because it rewards you for coming up with either the longest word or the most words. It is a card-based word game, where you get a different number of cards each round and you make words using 2 or more cards. The cards have different point values based on their difficulty to use. The Q, for example, is worth more points than the QU card. This game also has a rule that we've mostly adopted for all word games of you can use a dictionary, but only when it is NOT your turn. It keeps the game moving really well.
If you have any word games to recommend, feel free to pipe up! I'd love to find a new favorite!
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This week is the last week of yard waste pick up here in Quincy. I am completely thrilled, because we don't need to put all of the leaves on the compost pile. By next Saturday, hopefully our yard will be mostly leaf free and we will be ready for the winter.
There are easily a half dozen piles left from our attempts to clean up our leaves for the last yard waste pickup last week, so the extension could not have come at a better time!
My husband has friends coming over later today to help put together a nice rink. While that is happening I will be moving leaves and painting rooms and Victor will be in super doggie heaven. I'm hoping to have enough done today that I can go over to a friend's place tomorrow in good conscience, though I will also have tomorrow morning to get things done. Almost no one wants their morning person friend to show up on their doorstep at 6 am, so there are hours of getting stuff done I can do tomorrow as well.
So, for all of the people living in apartments and condos, here is what you are missing! I've got a date with a rake to make more of this happen.
(This makes my composter look tiny!)
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This week I've been getting home from work in a funk. It's the only way to describe it. Too tired to want to do anything more than stare off into space and to grumpy and bloody minded to bag it all up and go to bed. Heck, I left work early on Tuesday just to sleep, and while it was great (that was 2.5 hours of napping followed by a mostly normal 6 hours of sleep) it just wasn't enough to keep me out of the grumpy zone.
Tonight I was gently prodded into getting back to work on the painting around the house. We have 2 downstairs rooms that we'd like to fix up a bit. However, trim takes forever. Really forever.
So, I'm covered with paint, and just about ready to go to bed only to either wake up tomorrow at arse o'clock and do some more or to put in a full day on Saturday around the house. At this rate I will never get any knitting done...
(ignore the video game that is my companion for the very crowded train home)
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