What Christmas means to me

There's a lot to not like about Christmas.  The rushing around buying presents.  The expensive travel plans.  The worry of how to make up time lost at your job (if you aren't paid for holidays...and some people aren't).  Planning the perfect menu.  TRAFFIC.

However, there's a lot to like about Christmas.  Most jobs are closed for the holiday.  You get to see friends and family you haven't seen in awhile.  The food.  (<---See what I did there?  I just dropped the verb all together to make the food the only part of the sentence.  It's poor sentence structure, but a very accurate portrayal of my feelings for food.)  Seeing the face of someone as they open the present you picked out for them.  All of these are really great, but none of these is my favorite part of Christmas. 

This may sound crazy, but my favorite part is the silence.  The silence after the hustle and bustle of the holiday activities.  The part where you get home and just sit in front of your Christmas tree and realize what all God has given you.  This majestic part of Christmas is pretty much why I set our tree up.  I can't believe all that has been given to me this year. 

Upon my Christmas tree, there are some ornate, some dignified, and some tacky ornaments from years past...and I remember them all.  Well, not my husband's, but I can imagine how elegant the 1983 train must have looked on the Christmas tree every year.  I can imagine his mother's joy upon seeing the toy horse adorning the tree each year as Jon's toys got more and more complex and the "toy horses" of his childhood were now abandoned.  How can I imagine this?  Well, I have one heck of an imagination, but also, I have my block-elf that I made in 3rd grade on the tree.  There's also the ornament that my aunt made and wrote my name and year on it in 1989.  Also up there are faded ornaments that I don't remember not being on our Christmas tree every year, but I imagine they began on Christmas trees decades ago when my mom was a child.  The angel at the top took me 30 minutes to pick out 4 years ago and I had to super glue the wings back on after I couldn't find my hot glue gun this year.  There are 3 presents under the tree.  Two are not real.  Our Christmas tree is only up because Jon and I have a house now.

I ungracefully taped all of the cards we received this year up on the wall in the den so I could visually see everyone that took the time to give us one.  One is from a parent at work who decided to give a card and small gift to the lessons coordinator.  One has a stick pony drawn in, as I requested a pony for Christmas.  One is so peculiar that it reminds me of its sender's craziness.  And many are from family and friends that include pictures that remind me of how much everyone has grown over the years.  Any other decorations are ideas from Pinterest, bought this year, or a gift to me.

After taking in all of this, it dawns on me that all of these are gifts from God.  Any gifts you received this year - they came because God created someone that loves you.  Or at least someone that loves Him enough that they want to materialistally show you His love for you.  He was born on this day specifically to die for your sins - just because HE LOVES YOU.

I was originally planning to close this out more elegantly, but the truth of the matter is that another day of fun and craziness awaits us, so I must go.  But when I say the old stand by, please understand where I am coming from on it and know that I wish the deepest joy for everyone:

Merry Christmas.



Fiscal Responsibility

Sounds like a fun post, right?!?!  YEAH!  This one isn't going to go too deep, so don't freak on me.  Jon and I are in debt.  You know, like about 90% of the other people we know.  We have "use anywhere" credit cards, store credit cards, and everybody's favorite: student loans.  Over the past few months we have been a little tight, so I have been making a whole lot of "minimum payments."  These help chisel away at the debt, but it's a very slow, painful process.  I have been watching my credit score nose dive as we had to put other things on these cards, even though I always (and I do mean always) pay them on time and at least the minimum amount.  --I use Credit Karma to track only one of my scores (of the 3), but it seems to have all of my activity on it.--  Jon did a side job recently that paid him in one lump sum and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with part of it.  So we actually completely paid off one "use anywhere" card (Even though it wasn't a huge amount) and you will not believe what this did to my credit score...it went up FIFTY-TWO POINTS.  52.  It went from "fair" to "good."  Whoa.  I was not expecting that much of a jump, but I was ecstatic!  Jon was pretty impressed, too. 

For the record, Credit Karma said it liked the fact that our total credit card utilization went down by 6%.  I didn't realize what a huge factor that was.  We also learned that they don't like maxed our credit cards, either.  I don't remember if that is technically 90 or 95% of your credit limit, but it's one of those...just a heads up.  They also don't like multiple "hard" inquiries (unlike the "soft" inquiries they use to obtain your score) in a small time span.

Anyway, I wanted to remind everybody about the boring side of Christmas and life and let you know what a simple action can do for you in the long run.  If you get any Christmas bonuses, you might think about taking a bigger bite out of that mountain of debt to help you out in the long run.  Merry early Christmas!

Kids. Of the Bus Stop Variety.

Our house is the neighborhood bus stop.  Well, that changes soon thanks to one particular darling on the 8-9am bus.  Imagine, if you will, waking up to the sounds of children laughing and playing.  That sounds almost nice, right?  I bet you were thinking of children in the 4-7 year old range, weren't you?  Now, imagine waking up to near teenagers screeching and running around on your front porch as they are no doubt somehow flirting amongst themselves.  Now you're at my bus stop.

Let me start by saying how torn I am about feeling so bitter towards this situation.  I greatly do not want to become "cranky old hag lady" yelling at the neighbors' kids for being on my lawn.  However, I really DO NOT like the idea of my poor malnurished (there are lots of trees in the yard, so sunlight is very scarce to the grass) lawn being further trampled by older kids emo-ing on it.  And, no, that's not a real word, but I bet you get the picture -walking through the yard itself, dragging their feet, planting in one spot (next to my tree) and listening to music until another kid arrives.  Smaller children might be cute, playing tag or something, but these hormone-driven tweens/teens just make me want to hose them off.  I silently decided to say nothing about them being in our yard - littering, yelling, and trampling, but one kid went too far. 

Day #1 of inappropriateness: Jon and I are in bed for a few more minutes before we have to get up and get moving for our day.  The dogs are laying down on the floor.  Suddenly, a child is heard talking into our bedroom window (the child must be on our front porch to do this), which causes our dogs to start barking.  Upon hearing the dogs reply, the child decides to yell more into the window to stir them up more.  The bus shows up and the child escapes without Jon nor I being able to get appropriately dressed to go yell at children.  Drats.  So, I called in a complaint.  They'll talk to people, blah blah blah.  Whatever.  I figured this would continue to happen, so I decided to let it escalate naturally.  This was somewhere between a week and a month ago.

Day #2: Jon and I are in bed, dogs on floor and we suddenly hear music playing into our window.  Luckily, the dogs must be used to us messing with our phones because it didn't even phase them.  I jumped up and began to get appropriately dressed for child yelling and had a moment of guilt that maybe a kid wasn't on our porch and it was just a loud stereo going down the street.  Then Jon informed me that he heard the iPod/phone actually rub the window screen when I had left the room to get my coat.  Oh, okay -guilt gone.  This time, the bus doesn't come so quickly.  Jon goes outside to smoke on the front porch and notices one kid in particular is about in the middle of the street trying to be as far away as possible from our porch.  Right as the bus pulls up, I step outside and consider talking to the bus driver.  Before I fully decided against it, the driver shuts the door and takes off.  I call the school again.  This time, she mentions something about getting the bus stop moved.  ........Ummm....YES PLEASE.  Didn't even know that was an option!  She swears up and down that that will happen, but it won't happen right away, blah blah blah.  Okay, cool.  This was somewhere in the past week.

Day #3:  The kids seemed louder than usual, but everytime I looked out the window, I didn't see anyone.  The dogs barked a few times, so I put them in the laundry room to really focus on what was going on.  I got completely dressed and in the process heard very loud talking that must have been coming from my porch.  Jon had gotten in the shower by this point.  I looked out the window and saw precious darling boy at the other end of my porch, but on my porch none-the-less.  So, in my fully dressed glory, I stomped to my front door, threw it open and told the kid to get off my porch.  No please, no other words, just straight to the point.  This kid had no coat on, so his arms were tucked into his t-shirt and he was on his phone somehow.  He looked at me like I kicked his puppy, slowly gathered his things, and stumbled on a plastic planter getting off the porch.  I stared at him until he was all the way off, then went back inside and called the school once again.  The bus stop will be different (Although they don't know where yet...boo hoo...I should feel really badly about that, shouldn't I?) beginning next year.  And this was today.

And I keep thinking about what I will do if this happens again.  Or what I should have done.  I think other groups of kids use this bus stop at earlier times in the day, but we haven't really heard them or had any problems with them.  But this stop - this terror child is obviously a problem and then a girl always stands and walks in the middle of our yard.  By walks, I mean all the way through our yard, instead of using the street close to the curb.  Or even the grass close to the curb.  I figured I was just being crazy "doesn't have kids" lady, but I had a mom of 3 tell me how horrible that all sounded and that she would call the police if it were her.  My main thing is that I don't like the potential for an accident on my property.  What if this dumb kid had tripped on my planter and cracked his head open?  Would I be seeing a lawsuit?  And would they win????  That's the main thing running through my head.  What a crazy world nowadays.

Good riddance, annoying bus stop.

Mailbox, part 2

This is going to sound strange, but I think the guy that hit our mailbox came back and made it upright while we weren't home probably sometime Monday before I got off work.  Otherwise, it fixed itself.  Which seems weirder to me.

Some strange things

Now for a regular post, it seems...about strange things....but of course...

Phone
After lamenting my woes on FB about my phone being broken, a friend commented on it asking if it was under a year old because it would still be under warranty.  Hmmm...well, yes, yes it was (is). Long story short, I got a new Captivate after AT&T verified that the old one was indeed a paperweight now.  !!  It was a really big pain to get it back to even CLOSE to the way I had it (and I'm still trying to get it all correct), but it reminded me (or maybe taught me) how useful my little handy dandy gadget is and how important it is to keep it running smoothly.

Mailbox
This past Saturday, Jon and I were laying in bed, trying to pretend that we should get out of it when all of a sudden there was a crash outside.  Some Middle-Eastern man hopped our curb and ran over our mailbox.  In his Corolla.  Not much damage to the mailbox...mucho damage to the car.  He said he was either trying to help his wife with something or trying to keep her from doing something.  Pictures:

Creepin' a pic through a window.  Jon has already straightened the pole as much as possible and is now checking for damage on the car.

White paint

Very strange stuff.  The guy offered to come back and fix it, to which Jon replied, "No thanks."

Winter decor
I had to do some shopping the other night for household items and I wound up in the Christmas section.  I have been feeling like our front door is awfully bare, but I don't like wreaths.  I don't really know why.  Maybe because I'm not really keen on circles.  Either way, I stumbled upon this and decided to spruce up our front door:

I think it's cute.  And very festive how it says "No soliciting" above it.  ;^)