It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Here is our Christmas tree. Matt and Marissa came over and Meg was here, so they got it decorated. I doubt Marissa has ever seen such an eclectic tree - we have eveything from fish to angels, Shrek, Donkey, sharks, you name it, it's probably on this tree. They all mean something to us! We even have "Our First Christmas" from 1987!

This is Joseph from our Christmas pagent at Church. We didn't stay for the entire show since we wanted to get home and do our tree. The Peterson kids are sorely missed this year!

These are the sheep from the pagent. They were "bleating" pretty good when I was in the room taking pictures! I'm sure they put on a fine performance!

This is Mary for this year. Isn't she beautiful? There are a lot of new kids in the Primary this year that I didn't recognize - and the ones I did recognize have sure grown in the year since I was in the primary presidency!

Loi J. me, and Meghan! Don't we look happy!? It was a great dinner this year, so many people came we actually ran out of food and had to set up extra tables! Yay!

I don't know who this little boy was, but Jay Osmond is in danger of being replaced! LOL! He was playing right along with the Christmas songs we were singing.

These are the little trees we got this year to put outside. Maybe I'll be able to find some great outdoor stuff at the after Christmas sales so next year our display will be a little bit larger! I think they look really cute though.

I've got some pictures from the Christmas luncheon at work today too, but I'm too tired to wait for them all to load. Maybe tomorrow?

PS

Dear God,

I love the snow, but hate the cold. Could you please figure out how we can have one without the other? Thank you.

Love - TF

The Day After

I have to say, I think my anxiety level is a little bit high today. Imagine that! Other than that, I think life is pretty much back to normal for me at least. I had a really hard time sleeping last night though, all kind of stupid things just kept running through my head. My biggest thought was that I just wish my kids were little again. I want to protect them from the boogy monster I guess. I suppose if they had shown up last night I would have made them both sleep with me again like they were younger! LOL! Family bed! Seriously, I feel like that whenever some sort of crisis arises in the world, I just want my family all together and safe, and that always makes me wish they were little and I could just call them in from the yard or the other room and know there were safe beside me. Talk about a mother hen! I bet my mom never had such nurturing feelings, she was too busy wanting to get rid of all of us. Too bad, it would be nice to feel protected and safe again. Maybe it's not so much protected and safe as it is feeling innocent. Not believing bad things happen if you're good and you can always run to your dad for protection. Oh well, no sense in ruminating over that any longer!

Mom has to have a cardiac cath next week on Tuesday. I can't remember if I mentioned that she had had a cardiac stress test a couple weeks ago and it showed some ischemia, so they're going to do the cath and see if they can't fix her up with an angioplasty or a stent. I hope they can!

I took my dad to the doctor yesterday and we got his medications adjusted a little. His blood pressure is looking really good, so they decreased his BP medication and cut his medication to help him sleep too. The antidepressant seems to have done him a world of good. Yay! He's going to call the VA and have an MRI of his left knee. This doctor seems to think it might be a cruciate ligament tear or something that's causing him so many problems. Hopefully, we can get that taken care of and he won't have to worry about falling down or being so unsteady on his feet. His vertigo might be from a combination of low blood pressure and low sodium, since the blood pressure medicine he was on was a diuretic, so they did blood work to see how his sodium was and they'll take that from there. I think maybe decreasing the medication will help with that. Whew! I feel a lot better after that. I really like dad's doctor, Dr. Mantz, too. He's very much aware of what's going on with my dad's health and that made me feel a lot better. That's one thing I can rest easy about!

We had about 3 inches of snow today and we're due for more on Saturday - maybe we'll have a white Christmas this year. With my luck we have a week of 60 degree temperatures before then! Matt and Marissa (and maybe Meg, if I can get in touch with her) are coming over to decorate the tree tomorrow. I haven't got one Christmas decoration unpacked yet this year. I don't feel like I have the energy to do it - and the cleaning that's involved with packing the regular day-to-day stuff away. I'm off tomorrow, but we have a meeting and Christmas get together at work tomorrow, so I don't get to sleep in and be sluggish. Thank goodness I'm off for the weekend. I've worked without a day off since last Monday and I'm getting tired!

I got all the Christmas presents wrapped that we have so far. Yippee! I hate wrapping presents. I love to make them look all pretty and I love the way they look under the tree, but the actual wrapping is a pain in the rear IMHO. I should just do them as I buy them, which was my intention this year, but then I didn't have any wrapping paper, so that didn't work as I planned. I'm going to try and remember next year to buy all my wrapping paper from Current. I love their paper! It's thick and easy to cut, and it doesn't tear while you're wrapping. I love it! Well, I still have work to do tonight, so...

God Bless Us, every one!

I couldn't even think of a title for this post. I just feel sick inside tonight. There was a shooting at a local mall today and 9 people died, including the "shooter". I know things like this happen everywhere. I know that our society (in my opinion) has grown more violent and you read about these things in the paper or on the internet all the time, but violence like this has never been this close to me. It scares me. As far as I know, I don't know any of the people directly involved, but the police haven't released the names of any of the victims, only the gunman. However, my niece called me tonight and told me that one of the victims goes to her church and she had been a friend of my nephew-in-law's family for years. This woman has worked at Von Maur for years in the customer service department, doing gift wrapping, a very nice, God-fearing, friendly, woman who loved her husband and her family. She had children and grandchildren. And tonight she's dead because some idiot wanted to be infamous. I'm not even going to give his name. It's all over the news already and I'm not going to help with his quest to become infamous. Bastard. I didn't know what to tell my niece when she asked why this woman had to die this way. Why did somebody's grandmother who loved making presents look beautiful for special occasions have to die by taking a bullet to the head? What do I say? I don't know. I hope she never saw it coming. I hope the last minutes (seconds) of her life weren't spent being paralyzed in fear. I hope she never knew what hit her. I just feel sick. My heart feels sick that one human being could do this to another. I remember one time when I was about 20 or so and I read an article about how police officers doing traffic stops were more likely to be killed than than blah, blah, blah. I don't even remember the rest of the article because it scared the crap out of me. My dad was a cop (most of the time working on the interstate - making traffic stops) my entire life. I seriously had never thought until that day that my dad actually had a job where he might not come home every night. What an idiot I was. It was brought home to me again years later when I worked in narcotics and the officers I worked with executed a search warrant one night and when they came back they told me about the paraplegic man who had a sawed off shotgun in bed with him, and I realized how lucky I was to see everyone come back at the end of the shift. Who can imagine that you have a job gift wrapping presents and you leave for work one morning and don't come back because some jackass with an assault rifle is angry because he got fired from McDonald's and wants to be famous? You can go on and on about gun control, second amendment rights, concealed carry laws, God's plan, mall security, how bad things, happen to good people, why, why, why... but it doesn't change a darn thing. And my heart still hurts.

Winter's comin'

I think I'm about done with my Christmas shopping. I went out for a bit today and got some little things. We're having a Christmas lunch at work on Friday with a gift exchange. We have a $10 limit on the gift, ha ha. Try to buy something for less than 10 bucks! I think I managed, though it might be a little over. You can't even buy a calendar for 10 dollars! I also drew the name of one of the residents of the nursing home that's attached to our hospital. There was no limit on that. I got the name of a lady who's pretty well gone mentally, but that's okay. I got her a lap robe to keep her legs warm in her wheelchair, some body lotion, and a soft fluffy stuffed animal. I thought that might be nice for her to have something soft to hold on to. It's hard to buy gifts when you don't know the person you're buying for, at least for me it is. I'm not the kind of person who just grabs stuff willy nilly just so I can say I got so and so a present, I try to find something that reminds me of the recipient, or something I know they'll like. Makes shopping a little more challenging, but hopefully everyone likes what I get!

Mom got the results of her cardiac tests today, they show some ischemia in her heart, so she's waiting to hear back from the doctor on how they want to treat it. I guess there are some drugs that can be used, but the most common treatment is with stenting or angioplasty. I don't know how large of an area they're talking about, so we'll have to wait and see what the doctor says. Hopefully it's something that can be easily taken care of and she'll be back to feeling like her old self. I'm just glad she caught it before she had an MI or something.

Tomorrow Mel and I are going to take dad to the doctor. Just making sure everything is okay. It's kind of hard to watch your parents get old. Heck, it's hard to watch ME get old! Steve and I are both pretty lucky really, his mom and Bob are both pretty healthy, and my dad is relatively healthy, aside from his diabetes. I have to admit he gave me a scare this past summer when he had his anxiety problems, but I was really relieved to find out his heart is okay.

Augh! I just lost a whole paragraph! This darn keyboard!

Anyway, I was saying that we're supposed to have 3-5" of snow on Thursday. I'm glad because maybe we'll have a white Christmas, but I wish it wasn't the day before I have to drive to the hospital for the Christmas lunch. I'm grateful it's only a little snow though, compared to what Oregon and Washington are getting, a couple inches of snow is no big deal. How sad to be flooded out of your home - especially during the holiday season. Myheart goes out to those people. I read that some of the flooding is especially bad near Chehalis and Centralia, Washington. I spent a couple weeks there for 2 summers in a row when I was in high school - beautiful country! My great-uncle and aunt lived out there at the time so my grandmother took me out in 1973 and then she took Missy and I out in 1974. Wow! I didn't realize how long it had been until I wrote that. I better grab my cup of hot milk and toddle off to bed now... The bones are a creakin'... LOL!

Typingfool Revisited

Christmas Elf Name


My Christmas Elf Name is







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Sigh

I just got an e-mail from a very special friend who lives out of town. She totally dropped a bomb on me and I'm so upset. She was scheduled to go for simple run of the mill surgery tomorrow, but it seems that her simple surgery has turned into surgery for metastatic cancer for the third time. To say I'm upset is an understatement. Any prayers, chants, or whatever for her tomorrow would be appreciated. This woman is the one of the best, most caring people I know. It's times like this I have to wonder why bad things happen to good people. And yes, I've read the book, and I still have to wonder.