Here's my wood-burning fireplace, turned big screen tv, turned wood-burning fireplace! Ha! Go figure. This DVD plays a continuous loop of lovely piano Christmas classics, too. (Around 10 bucks at Wal-Mart.)
Overall, the new house is fairly large, over 2000 square feet, but the rooms, nooks & crannies are mostly smallish. Which is nice. It give this house-for-two a cottage-y, cozy feel. However, the living room has been a constant challenge to keep "an open feel" (as in an uncrowded feel) about it. I think that's the reason I was shying away from a tv in there initially. Once I decided to put the tv on the fireplace though, everything worked out. Well, sort of, hee-hee. I mean, I do have a tv sitting on my hearth now. Ah, well. We had absolutely no intention of using the fireplace, anyway. Just weren't interested in carrying firewood and ashes back and forth across our pale carpeting. And installing gas logs in that firebox would have meant some major overhauling (it's a special ultra-low air pollution firebox) and thus the decision to put a gas log stove in the dining room. I enjoyed my gas log stove in the dining room in the farmhouse and in this house, you can easily see the stove from the living room. And the kitchen!
Nothing went as planned yesterday. (Does it ever?) As I mentioned earlier, my old e-mail has been down and Ed and I haven't had time to call tech-support at Wildblue to find out "what's up" and get it going again. As a result, the one remaining present that hadn't come in was from a company that had been trying to reach me for 4 days for order verification (it was a biggish present). When I went to their site and checked my order status, I found it had actually been canceled on Friday because I hadn't e-mailed back. Egad! So...we bundled up and headed south (not far enough south, hee-hee, it was very COLD out there) and went to Best Buy to purchase a replacement. I'm not one to typically enjoy last minute Christmas shopping crowds, but we had a great day yesterday. Truly, truly. We had nice lunch at Panera Bread and also stopped in at Lowe's and Wal-Mart while were out.
Now, I'm home, buried under in wrapping-to-do. I bought myself a couple of Christmas movies to watch while I "Edward Scissorhands" (yeah, right) the packages. I got "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Polar Express" to help keep me in the spirit.
Looks like the Christmas dinner grocery shopping will have to be worked into the day tomorrow. Hopefully. I have a morning salon appointment in Grove and an afternoon viewing appointment at the studio, so...it's sort of anyone's guess. At the moment I feel like we've been over-eating so much, maybe we should just have a nice salad and a cold lemon water for Christmas dinner. I haven't got on the scales this morning, but I can "feel" a few extra pounds. Ugh. Once they go on, they're hard to get off, so I'm trying to stay aware. (I read somewhere that we eat an additional 690 calories per day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I believe it too. Sugar, sugar. Evil, sugar.)
Anyhoo...I'm off now for a hot wake-up bath, a day of wrapping.
Love and Sharp Scissors, L
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