Honeydew for Thanksgiving

Last week Justin took the week off at which point I handed him a honey-do list that rivaled some military operations. We spent the week taking care of all the "small" projects that had been bothering me.

Last week Justin:

De-greased and re-greased the garage doors (did you know that you're supposed to grease your doors every year? PSA-go grease your doors!)
Replaced some of the rollers on the door (my door now no longer announces to the neighbourhood when I leave and arrive
Installed new garage door openers (and saved us $700!) which means that my garage door will close all the way instead of having a 2 inch gap at the bottom letting in mice, creepy crawlies and freezing cold air.
Cleaned out the garage bay so he can park in the garage too, yay!
Put up 8 sets of drapery, living room, dining room and the kids's room. Hopefully their rooms will no longer be 15 degrees colder than the rest of the house.
Helped me move the living furniture to put the rug pad down, re-roll out the carpet and move the furniture back. Hopefully, the rug will stay in place now and stop trying to trip people up.

Last week, I:

Roasted a turkey (I love turkey for leftovers)
Made duchesse potatoes, mashed potatoes, dressing, rolls, gravy, pumpkin pie, and a raspberry tart
With the above leftovers made 3 turkey lasagnas, turkey stock and then turkey noodle soup, and shepherd's pie, most of which I froze.
Scrubbed down the kids's bathroom including cobwebs (seriously, the spiders are out of control here)and mold
Took all lights off a prelit tree and restrung it with led lights. It took me over 8 hours and I was feeling less than Christmas cheerful when I was done.

So the story behind the tree is this: The 6 ft Christmas tree that I bought at a clearance sale 6 years ago that I planned on doing Festival of Trees with felt small and pathetic. It wasn't a tree I'd intended to keep anyway. I was also worried that the lights I bought at All-a-Dollar 10 years ago were a fire hazard and probably using a ton of energy, so I'd only leave the tree lit for a couple hours a day. I wanted an led 7.5 ft tree so I started to scour craigslist. After missing out on a couple of the ones I wanted, I finally tracked down a woman in West Seattle who claimed that her tree was a GE led tree. We went out and got it last Friday after our binge at Pike Place Market. When we got home, I realized that it was 1) not a led tree and 2) one of the strands was not working. I later found that the strand wasn't working because 1 bulb was missing, so it was actually okay. And to be fair, it looks like the woman in W. Seattle had just looked on the Home Depot website and tried to find the tree she had bought last year and had mistaken it for an led one (both said they had the "constant-on" feature). Since we hadn't spent that much on the tree, I figured even if we bought the led lights, we'd still come out ahead, spending about half the amount of a new led tree, even on sale.

I found some lights that matched the ones I'd bought last year at Fred Meyer and bought them. I then hung on to them to see if they went on sale for Black Friday. They did for about half the price I'd paid for them, so I sent poor Justin back over to the store to buy them and I returned the previous set later in the day. And then I stripped the lights off the tree and started to string on the led ones. And got about 2/3rds of the way up and ran out of lights. Damn. So back to the store I went to get more lights (should have kept the first batch). Several hours later, I emerged victorious. We now have a 7.5 ft led Christmas tree with over 800 lights for the grand total of less than $150. And since it uses 1/10th of the energy of new lights, and probably even less than that of my previous ghetto lights, I can leave the tree on all evening. Yay. And I also have microcuts over my hand. Ow. The added bonus is now all three of the Christmas trees have the same brand of lights on them. The kids were very excited to decorate their own trees this year and I'm hoping that it keeps them out of the big one.

Today I:

Got up at five to take Justin to the airport so he could go to Utah (and probably get away from my never ending list of chores)
Took the kids to speech therapy.
Grocery store

Alana deciding she was done for the afternoon. She fell asleep in the 1 mile journey to the speech therapist's office where I dumped her in a butterfly chair, thinking she'd wake up. She slept through all of Liam's appointment, then I carried her back to the car, drove home and laid her on the couch where she continued to nap for another hour and a half. 

Christmas decorations and Christmas trees and drapery! The big tree will remain un-decorated until I can get to Ikea and buy more ornaments-more trees plus larger tree means I ran out of ornaments. Ignore my sewing machine and serger.