Confessions of a Grandma

I went shopping yesterday--on line and in the stores.  Since I also make handmade gifts throughout the year, I am in good shape for the holidays.  I have to admit that I absolutely and completely love gift giving--except for people who are really, really hard (Mike).  I love thinking of an appropriate and kind of novel gift.  I love the hunt to find it or the effort to make it.  I love the wrapping and the presentation.  If I had unlimited funds and less of an aversion to crowds, I would go out shopping for random gifts every day. Tomorrow, Kristen and Dane will open the first of their Advent gifts.  My son delivered them for me, for which i was most grateful.  These are really quite small things that I put together, but I so enjoy doing it and I think they look forward to each day's surprise.  Today I got a  thank-you card in the mail:  "Giving is just your style...and you do it so well!  Thanks for ...

Hello?? Is this working at all??  I wrote a whole piece and it disappeared,  Testing...testing...

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I went to the Cabot Factory sock sale, then out to lunch, with my sister.  On Sunday, I took the grand kids out to lunch.  Wednesday was an unexpected lunch because of trapping ourselves in the basement.  Thursday, of course, was a full day of feasting and nibbling.  On Friday, we made our annual pilgrimage to Giant Grinder and Modern Bakery on Franklin Street in downtown Hartford.  Then we went out for a soup and sandwich supper on Friday night.  In between all this eating was either work on sanding/finishing stair treads or driving.  Healthy food choices?  Exercise schedule?  This is how I can gain five pounds over the holiday season, and I just decided not to do that. So yesterday and today, it's out for brisk walks and pull out the vegetarian recipes and the exercise bands.  This morning, I made a big pot of oatmeal.  I used to eat a lot of oatmeal breakfasts but then I got out of the...

I am being totally frustrated with computers today.  It seems that everything I have tried to do has not worked out.  I tried to copy some files from our home computer to transfer to the laptop that we use in Florida.  No luck with that.  I tried to print from the laptop--that didn't work.  I wanted to download some music, but the sound is turned off again.  All these things can be fixed with a little fiddling and changing of settings, but I have to bother Mike to do that because I always forget how--and that's the most frustrating thing of all. I just want to sit down and do what ever it is I have planned to do.  I have no patience for the quirky needs of machines.  For instance, we keep getting a message on the laptop that new Apple software is available for download.  We don't have an Apple computer.  Why do we get that message?   Also, if I  download music on the laptop, it tells me it is being saved in i-something, w...

Talk about painting yourself into a corner...I was working on laundry this morning in the basement of our raised ranch house while Mike was putting on the final coat of floor polyurethane.  When he finished he went out to the garage to clean up and I went up the deck to go upstairs through the back door...only to discover that we had not unlocked the back door before starting our chores.  Ha!  We could sit in the basement den waiting for the stairs to dry in five to eight hours and watch TV.  We decided to go out.  Mike's wallet and license were upstairs and so were my glasses.  Fortunately my purse was downstairs and I had a pair of glasses in the car so we went out for a nice long lunch, made a trip to Costco (coffee, wine and craisins) and then to a shopping center where I bought two new tee-shirts that I badly needed.  By the time we got home, the stairs were dry.  So tomorrow morning we will head for Connecticut to spend the weekend wi...

We have ripped out carpet, sanded, stained, sealed, and are now putting a floor finish on the stairs.  They are looking pretty good.  In the meantime, I have been taking down pictures and putting away knickknacks in preparation for the painter and trying to keep after the sanding dust.  I am going through a whole lotta vacuum bags and tacky cloths.  Can't wait for this project to be done--just in time for a MAJOR cleanup for the holidays. Saturday night and Sunday, I spent with my grand children--a welcome break.  I am almost finished with putting together the Advent calendars I make for them.  I collect stickers, trinkets, coins, activity books, treats, ornaments and such so they have 24 little surprises while counting down the days til Christmas. My kids had the kind of Advent calendar that showed a picture for each day, but I started this little gift tradition and now it IS a tradition.  It is fun to be a grandma! I have to d...

In the paper this morning there was an article about a Wisconsin man (Vermont, Wisconsin, oddly enough) who shot his televsion because Bristol Palin has not yet been eliminated from "Dancing with the Stars."  Oh, that struck me as incredibly sad...that someone would care enough abut that TV show to engage in violence against an innocent piece of electronics. And I think it is kind of sad that, if the ads can be believed, that "Dancing with the Stars" is America's most watched program.  Surely, surely, this nation could do better than that. Well, it is for certain that we can produce worse shows--much worse.  Anything that involves wife swapping, for instance.  Where is the moral outrage on that one?  Or anything involving "real" housewives.  Especially if those housewives are from New Jersey.  Come to think of it, it really seems like a bad idea to have any kind of program that features the denizens of New Jersey at all.  Those hair dressers?...