Housing Developments

Today was all about housing, and we'll start out with some of the good and delicious housing first, as you can see above.  Maddie and I created our yearly Christmas gingerbread house, this one a gift from Jingle and Snowflake a few weeks ago.  We finally had a few hours to get to work on it, adding all kinds of colorful sugary sweets.  We're pretty happy with the end product!  We always talk about planning ahead and creating designs beforehand, but never actually do that, instead opting to just wing it, looking at our blank canvas and just adding icing and candy, making it up as we go along.  Anyway, it came out well.  We were watching all of these Christmas specials, from Rudolph to Madagascar to the live version of "A Christmas Story" a few years ago.

The other housing we took care of today was the addition of five more birdhouses to our backyard community.  I have them arranged throughout the back yard area on various trees, and they look pretty good out there.  We've had a few different ones, and there's a special occasion coming where we thought these would be helpful for our neighborhood birds.  Tomorrow, the temperature is going to plunge into historic territory for much of the country, with our area reaching temperatures around twelve or so, and that's before the windchill.  The wind tonight was so bad that our windmill blew over, as did other things like an outdoor tree.  A street sign actually blew off in our neighborhood - that's how windy it is.  It was a long and loud night!  The birdhouses all stayed attached to the trees where they were just posted, and hopefully they'll offer a place of shelter for some of our avian visitors.  

One more bit of housing news:  Nana took a tour of some housing areas in Braselton and Flowery Branch today, checking out options for places that she could possibly move to if she wants to.  Many times she wants to just get out of this house, but then again, while down there taking the tour she was wondering why Mom was kicking her out.  Which of course is not the case - it's just that Nana's memory is fleeting.  She asks the same questions over and over and over and over again, the new ones related to the visit of a social worker who takes her out to eat lunch and tours various places to see if there's any place interesting she'd like to live at.  There are times Nana feels like she could live on her own without any assistance, and then other times where she understands the truth.  It's a tough situation, as it has been for two and a half years now.  But it's certainly wearing Mom down.  And the rest of us too, of course.  We were tired of it long before Mom was, as she has a lot more patience than we do.  

Anyway, today was the first time that the three of us have been alone together in two and a half years.  It was the first time it was just the three of us in two and a half years.  We sat there looking at each other, and just soaked it in for a moment, and then wondered what to do.  First item on the list was a board game!  We can't do that with Nana around, so yep, we got straight to it! 

We've been listening to all our Christmas vinyl records and just having a nice afternoon together.  And yes, we escaped the Headless Horseman, doing so with a lot more ease than the last time we played this game.  There wasn't really any of that fun tension to the game this time, although at the very end, we failed to match cards four consecutive times, resulting in the Horseman getting to advance twenty-five squares!  Yes, he caught up with us, but that was only the second scare of the game and we were pretty close to making it to the covered bridge by that point.  We escaped just in time, as Nana came back with her new friends.  She had a decent time, with ups and downs.  I was glad to hear about the "downs" part, as usually people only see the "ups" side of things.  Anyway, the end result was that she'll go off again next week some time for another tour, and of course the rest of the day was filled with the same exact questions over and over and over and over again.  Back to normal.

Oh, look!  A piñata party!  Jingle has been fantastic fun this month, keeping things rolling with some entertaining greetings each morning.  Of course the advent calendars are keeping us going too.  Maddie got Rocket Raccoon this morning with the Marvel calendar, and the LEGO Star Wars calendar is almost done too.  We're nearly finished opening all twenty-five hot sauces, one for each day.  At the end of it, some time next week, we'll have a hot sauce party of sorts, sampling as many as we can, including the Carolina Reaper one we opened up.

Tonight we read some more, and after that we said our prayers and tried to get to sleep.  It was so loud tonight though.  A "Bomb Cyclone" is arriving, and the winds howled all night long, knocking things over and causing power outages here or there.  We had a fire in the fireplace all day, and that felt nice, but we're saving our wood somewhat, conserving it for the weekend just in case.  It's going to be super cold the next few days!  Winter is here, and in a big way.