Yay For Hallmark!

I bought my first Hallmark ornament of the season today!

Bethany and I were out wandering a little bit since she wanted to get out of the house after being cooped up all week recovering from surgery and we discovered that Hallmark was having its holiday open house. Naturally, we had to check it out. Not only did I get a new Snoopy ornament to adorn my tree, but we also picked up two boxes of Christmas cards that were on sale.

Snoopy always seemed to be in a class of his own and fits in nicely with the type of ornaments and decorations I like. He is undoubtedly one of the coolest comic strip characters ever. And I even found a collection of jazz Christmas carols that were right up my alley for the type of music I like to listen to. I'll have to convince Bethany of how great they are, but all good things come in time.

Granted, it was 75 degrees out today. Not exactly the snow covered scene I'm showing above, but hey, I'm in the Christmas mood and it should snow during Christmas. It's been a bit hot these last couple of days and tomorrow is going to be more of the same, but things are going to cool down after that.

I took this picture two years ago during the heaviest snow storm we had that year. We can't exactly do any kind of work during precipitating winter weather, so I stayed home. Alone. I was bored out of my mind. I read books, took pictures...even hiked down the road and back. I was so bored I even took a picture of my shower to see what a long exposure of it running would look like.

So today marked one year of wedded bliss and we celebrated with Bethany's first challenging meal since her surgery, a nice steak dinner. Now that we have all the major remodeling behind us and the two surgeries within the family, things look to be calming down a bit for us. We still have some pictures to process and, in fact, we have another wedding lined up for Saturday, but all in all we hope to be able to cruise into the holidays starting with two really good Thanksgiving meals.

For now, though, I'm going to wind up the day between the covers of The Coffee Trader by David Liss. He's really shown himself to be a quality writer and has happily filled my fall reading list. With the discovery of Thriftbooks.com I've been able to fill that last pretty economically and I'll be looking to purchase the last two of his novels I haven't read pretty soon.