Merry Christmas!

Metaphorically snowbound

We drove to Rochester on Monday afternoon and made it home without any major snags. Since then though, I have been playing whack-a-mole with duties and deadlines, smacking each one down only to see 2 more pop up in its place.

Christmas is kicking my rear end this year. Remember the cards I started working on back in mid-November? I am just now getting around to mailing them. I think my shopping is finally done, but there's still wrapping to be done and food to be bought, cooked, and consumed. I think I would enjoy Christmas more if it weren't an annual event.

Sometimes it startles me when I see myself in a Cathy cartoon, but this captures the essence of my Tuesday and Wednesday so perfectly:



I am going to have some non-holiday fun tonight though! My friend Angie and I have tickets to see the new "Sweeney Todd" film up in Louisville. On Halloween night, when Annabelle came running home to announce that one of the neighbors actually knew she was Mrs. Lovett without needing to be told--Angie is that neighbor. Should be fun!

A-door-able

Every year at the holidays, Fred's unit has a door-decorating contest. This year Fred's office went for the sentimental vote. They decorated the wall around the door with pictures of deployed soldiers:



Adam, the son of Fred's deputy, played the part of a young boy dreaming of Daddy coming home from the war:



The office won the prize for Most Traditional:

The Christmas card saga continues

Remember how I said on Sunday that I had gotten the cards ordered and how happy I was? Well, ha! Fred picked them up last night, and I was Not Happy when I saw them.

How many trips had I made to Walmart to make certain that what I was seeing on my monitor was what would come shooting out of the big printer at the store? At least 5 or 6. Maybe 7. When I picked up the Saturday sample, I knew that this was (FINALLY) The Picture, and so I ordered the cards.

The kids on the cards, however, were not the kids in The Picture. As pale and pasty as Boo Radley, they were so light as to appear almost transparent.

So this morning I marched into Walmart and got my money refunded with a minimum of fuss and bother. Tomorrow I get to go back, upload my picture from the kiosk in the photo department, order a single test card, evaluate, lather rinse repeat until I have a card worthy of ordering by the gross. Or maybe I'll just go to Walgreens instead. I don't know--I feel like Walmart and I have been through so much together at this point that I kind of hate to walk away. Maybe I'm just in an abusive retail relationship though.

And in other news, the particularly observant among you might notice that I have spruced up a little bit around here. I finally added some links in my BlogRoll that I've been meaning to add for some time. I'm not done yet though!
I also went back and did a little catch-up blogging from our summer vacation. If you are so inclined, you can read about:

• our dinner at the Lake Beresford Yacht Club


• our lunch at 3 Bananas Cafe


• our trips to DeLeon Springs


• our meet-up with Wendy and Rory


• Mike's birthday and the Harry Potter book premiere


• the Pearson family reunion in Alabama

My next order of business is to get caught up (and stay caught up) responding to my comments. Baby steps, baby steps . . .

A holiday craft for you

We spent this afternoon setting up the tree and decking the halls. I also got the cards ordered, and they'll be ready tomorrow, which is a huge relief.

I thought tonight I would share a neat holiday craft that we did back in Hawaii and that we have enjoyed each year since then. The kids even made them as gifts for their teachers at Waimalu Elementary. Behold the amazing clothespin wreath (as seen with last year's cards on it):



Basically, you take a clotheshanger and stretch it into a circle. Open it at the top and string it with red beads and clothespins that you have painted in 2 different shades of green. Close up the top again, slap on a bow, and voila! Your wreath is ready to hang on a wall and make a cheery display of your holiday cards.

Am I Martha Stewart, or what?

Picture this

I'm so sorry. I promised a recipe, didn't I? I just couldn't get it together for today though. I sent in my indexing project late last night, and I spent today working on our Christmas card photo, going to the commissary, and going to Walmart (twice--as part of working on our photo). I need to finish shopping for Thanksgiving and get this filthy house clean before Fred's parents arrive on Wednesday, plus I've still got a few weeks of school left this semester, and I really should get cranking on that last paper.

As I've been editing our holiday photo, I've been thinking a lot about a book I'm reading called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. Booklist says:

Who woulda thunk it? Here we are, in the early years of the twenty-first century, being driven bonkers by the staggering array of consumer goods from which we must choose. Choosing something as (seemingly) simple as shampoo can force us to wade through dozens, even hundreds, of brands. We are, the author suggests, overwhelmed by choice, and that's not such a good thing. Schwartz tells us that constantly being asked to make choices, even about the simplest things, forces us to "invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, and dread." There comes a point, he contends, at which choice becomes debilitating rather than liberating. Did I make the right choice? Can I ever make the right choice? It would be easy to write off this book as merely an extended riff on that well-worn phrase "too much of a good thing," but that would be a mistake. Despite a tendency toward highfalutin language ("the counterfactuals we construct can be tilted upward"), Schwartz has plenty of insightful things to say here about the perils of everyday life.

I'm in the middle of a section about 2 types of people: maximizers and satisficers. The quick and dirty is that maximizers agonize over making the best possible choice every time, while satisficers aim for the "good enough." Can you guess which group is happier overall with their choices? It's not the maximizers, and I'm afraid that's me, especially when it comes to my photos.

When I started planning this picture, I was determined to be a satisficer this time. This was not going to be a repeat of the time that I had a friend bury us to our necks on the North Shore of Oahu, stick Santa hats on our heads, and take our picture, only to not use the picture because it just wasn't as good as what I had in mind.



Instead, I wound up sewing a dress for Annabelle and a shirt for Mike, both out of the same Hawaiian print, and dragging them back up to the North Shore. I don't remember which of the photos on the 2 rolls of film that I shot made it as The Picture, but here is a representative sampling:







They look pretty happy considering they each cried at least once that day. Of course, they were probably scared of me. I vaguely recall throwing a hissy fit of my own and saying something about "If YOU don't care if your grandparents have a nice picture to look at on Christmas morning . . . " but it's all fuzzy after that. So I wasn't going to do that! I was gonna be a satisficer if it killed us all.

I started off so well. On the way home from Saturday's swim meet, I told the kids to shower and change into reasonably coordinating clothes when we got home so we could go take the picture and I could get an early start on the cards this year. I already had a location scouted out, just down the street at the credit union, in front of a pretty bush. We tossed a couple barstools in the van and took off for our photoshoot. Not even an hour later, we were back at home with some 50-odd photos to choose from.

And that is where I began the long, lonely slide from satisficer to maximizer. First I had to decide which picture (or pictures, because now some card formats allow for more than one shot) had the best chance of making the grade. I solicited opinions from some friends and family members who are privvy to a sneak preview and wound up even more confused than I had been, as there was no clear winner. Since then, I've spent quite a few hours performing light cosmetic surgery on images of my children, blurring backgrounds, messing with colors and lighting levels, consulting with my aunt the Photoshop goddess, etc., etc., etc. And then, because what you see on the monitor isn't necessarily what is going to come out of that nice, big printer at the store, I've made a total of 3 trips to Walmart (and I loathe going to Walmart!) to pick up trial prints.

I think I have finally narrowed it down to just a couple of pictures and expect to make the final decision any day now. Then I just have to choose the best card format from the bazillion-and-one formats that are available. My inner satisficer is quietly weeping in the darkest corner of my soul, but the maximizer in me is hoping to have these cards out by Easter.