busy busy busy, is mostly all i have to say. except that kevin is STILL SICK, and he needs to GET BETTER SOON. he might be taking a nap in the bedroom right now. i hope he is.
chester was very cozy in the sink after kevin cleaned it out last week.
i volunteered at bingo again and loved the snow globe. i think i want to put a bunch of them in my house. we saw one of those “crazy obsessives christmas” shows on TV, and this couple had about a million blow up things like that all over their vast yard. crazy crazy crazy…basically, they spend the entire month of december out directing traffic in front of their property after blowing up all the globes. craaazy.
the other day i took mollie for a nice walk in the park. we saw a swan.
when we were leaving the park i saw this ENORMOUS blowup thing in somebody’s yard and pulled over to take a photo…but the tree blocks your view. if i wasn’t so darn lazy, i would have gotten out of the car to take a picture.
last wednesday i went to my friend linda’s 12-12-12 party; they have remodeled their kitchen so it’s now big and SO BEAUTIFUL. i asked randy to take a photo, but he thought i should be in it. plus lots of people were standing around so you can’t see just how fabulous it is. that woman blocking your view on the right is my old neighbor from many many years ago.
bev and i are thusly attired because we were next headed to an ugly xmas sweater party. this is in front of bill and linda’s new fireplace. beautiful. randy didn’t wear his ugly sweater to the first party, for some reason.
he won FIRST PRIZE at the ugly sweater party! i was one of the four runners-up, although i wasn’t even wearing a sweater. by the time i finally made it to goodwill to buy one, they were COMPLETELY SOLD OUT. so i bought a large kids size t-shirt that i thought was fabulously awful. i added my cool light up xmas bulb necklace and my hat that i bought to wear in the parade, plus my big red slipper boots that randy bought me last xmas. i also found a pair of wonderful fleece pajama bottoms to complete my ensemble.
randy’s costume was good, but this guy craig mcfarland shoulda won, in my opinion. unfortunately, i can’t find a photo of him on facebook, but he has made a hat out of a wreath with red balls hanging off it, and a big angel on top, and lights encircling his green sweater, but the clincher for me was the red xmas tree skirt. i thought it quite wonderful plus he had to go to all the trouble of creating it.
it’s hard to see randy’s jacket so well, but it has reindeers in grass skirts on it, among other things. that’s why he’s wearing a grass skirt. and his hat is pretty fabulous, an xmas tree, but you can’t tell so well here.
and then, saturday…the christmas parade. it was all randy’s idea…he said that we should be in it to promote my upcoming show, and i said sure, why not. we went to the party center place to look for outfits and he talked me into getting this.
the parade started at 5 p.m. on saturday and we were supposed to be there by 4. randy didn’t get to my house til late, and then he had to stop for gas, but we got there a little after four and then it was a mad flurry of activity trying to decorate the car. there in the back on the right is either bev or janice, getting into an elf costume. i think that’s before janice arrive, so it must be bev. randy insisted that she wear the elf shoes but they were flimsy felt shoes with thin fake leather soles, and the pavement was very wet so poor bev’s feet must have been FREEZING.
luckily, janice and garrick arrived pretty quickly and garrick attached the cover for the top to the car. randy had never used the cover, and it didn’t look like it had ever been used, but garrick fixed it all up. plus he wore randy’s xmas tree hat, very dashing. mom is standing there in the background.
janice, mom and bev, looking so cute! bev and janice looked even funnier when they put on the giant green and red sunglasses we bought them.
you can’t see it so well, but garrick had to change hats. this one is a long red and white striped number.
and there is everybody…we were right next to the cinda edwards for coroner truck, and we coerced frank edwards into take a photo. he wasn’t very thrilled to do it, but at least he managed it ok. that’s bev, randy in his snowman hat, me, samantha, meg (jim’s sister), garrick, janice, mom.
i think this was before we were actually going, because once we started i took the jacket off. i didn’t even get cold because it was crazy warm – in the 50s.
randy had done a great job of cleaning and polishing his car, and with the lights it looked really cool.
here’s bev and janice as the parade started.
it was funny to be in the parade, sitting there waving all the time. the problem is that i kept trying to direct things – i felt that mom wasn’t passing out enough cards about my show, and i kept telling her to pass them out, and then we were quickly running out of candy so i kept reaching down and foraging around in the huge mess that we’d strewn all over the seat and floor. later that night i thought about how stupid i must have looked, instead of waving and smiling like the queen, instead burrowing down in the car. but i did do a lot of waving…when it was over, my arm was very tired.
unfortunately, we completely ran out of candy a little over halfway. and i thought we had so much candy that it’d run out. but there were many, many kids, and they were all pretty serious about getting candy, as any kid would be. the did seem well-behaved, though – i don’t remember any of them rushing the car, except towards the end when some crazy little kid darted RIGHT IN FRONT of us. luckily randy didn’t run him over.
bev tells a funny story about giving out candy at a state fair parade and how the kids were MONSTERS, grabbing for the candy. that’s why she said when she volunteered to help me that she WOULD ABSOLUTELY NOT pass out candy. maybe kids are more hopped up in the summer because it’s so hot out? it seems that most of the kids at the xmas parade were little bitty ones, very cute.
after the parade we went to our friend gil’s party. the parade last less than an hour, and we went back to randy’s house to change. i had brought pants and a completely normal top, but randy said that i should wear my costume. “People will want to take your picture by the tree,” he kept saying.
well, when we got there, randy took my picture by the tree, but i had no other requests. i only felt slightly embarrassed, and was much helped by many glasses of wine.
i kept posing like this.
as we were about to leave tom pickett arrived, and here’s me and tom and debi iams, wearing a funny santa hat that plays music and moves around.
fortunately we didn’t leave before santa got there. somebody asked me, “do you know santa, grace?” and i said “only in the biblical sense.”
i feel that i have so many things to do in the upcoming days that i shouldn’t have spent such a long time here sitting in my comfy typing away at the computer. but i worked out a lot then gave blood yesterday, so i do think i deserve a few minutes of sitting before rushing around again. i don’t want to pass out or anything.
ok then, i hope you are getting through the holiday times,
mrs. santa hughes.