Yes, this is my munchkin with Santa. The REAL Santa. Didn’t you know? He has a house here in the south where he visits just before Christmas. It is such a sweet little house. All decorated for the holidays. And he lets the kids come visit and sit on his lap and go through their lists. He spent about 5 minutes with Quentin Saturday night talking about his list and whether or not he has been a good boy this year. I had some great pictures of the conversation along with pictures of Mrs. Claus in the kitchen and her canned veggies in the pantry and the red uniforms hanging in the closet, but the little camera I was using isn’t nearly as user friendly as I had hoped. I haven’t figured out how to save pictures to the SD card. So all the fantastic pictures are gone. All I have is the one above that Santa was gracious enough to pose for as they were shooing every one out for the night. {sigh} Quentin was so much more grown up about than I was. He said it was fine, all he wanted to do was give his list to Santa and talk to him. Of course I was so upset because I’m thinking he is growing out of his Santa phase and I won’t have a chance for this ever again. But we’ll see.

Isn’t he a great Santa?!?!

I decided I didn’t like the parchment piece under the post headers. I took the flower from the unicorn mane and have that next to the post header. I like it much better. I also made my swirl footer a lot smaller. I want to make a horizontal rule image and would like to have a button for WordPress. It’s getting there, slowly but surely.

The holidays seem to now be in full swing. I don’t have time to breathe anymore, much less do all the projects I’m trying to accomplish. I think I need about a weeks worth of sleepless nights to get everything done.

1. I did finally finish the holiday cards. I just need to print them all and sign and send them. By the end of the week they should be out.
2. The images for the actual gifts I’m giving are the next huge project I must get to.
3. And I can’t forget the Chef Sizzle site. The magazine starts out at the end of this week and Ron wants the site all ready to go.
4. Then there’s the TKD site I’ve been meaning to get new images on as well as redesign.
5. And work parties galore. There are 3 in the next two weeks.

Holy frijoles. Once I write it all down, it’s worse than I thought.

And don’t get me started on presents and decorating. We got our tree today. It’s a beautiful Douglas fir. I got the lights on and should be able to get it decorated with a little help. I’m hoping an elf or two (or maybe just hubby and munchkin) will swing by to put up other decor as they see fit.

It took me a couple of nights, but here are the pictures from the parade and the chorus mini-concert. Tomorrow night (tonight???) is the actual concert. I hope my camcorder is working correctly by then. I’d like to videotape it!

I am trying to get into the holiday spirit. I’ve been listening to the XM radio holiday channels, but it just isn’t working. Yesterday was the holiday parade in our town. Q’s chorus rode the Cagle’s float with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Then the chorus sang for about 15 minutes. It was nice, and I think I am starting to feel a little like it’s almost time for presents.

I started working on our holiday cards. They should be ready by the end of the week. This year will be postcards. I found a great image and scanned it in. It was uncolored, so I am “colorizing” it. After I send them out and am fairly certain most everyone receives, I will post it here.

I have a horrible headache. I thought it was just a headache, but I’m thinking migraine as now I am about 5 hours into it and suddenly feel nauseous. I will post pictures tomorrow night.

I am slowly getting there with my design. I took away the entire page background tile and have made it a nice neutral, easy to read color. I made the background parchment tile into a torn piece of paper and have it behind each post title. Took a couple of days to get it to look right, but the whole image, not just the part under the letters, seems to be working, finally. I think it will look better with a staple “holding” the torn parchment to the background. Another item to create. EEP!

I’m actually falling asleep while writing this one. It took a couple of times re-reading and fixing to make the above paragraph make any sense.

To BED!

Today is hubby’s birthday. I have been working on his present since last night. I downloaded two CD’s he’s been wanting and tonight have been trying to sneak around getting them burned onto CD’s with pretty labels and put into his MP3 player (piece of junk Mobiblu Cube, don’t ever get one!).

Anyway, it is now way past time for me to sleep, but here I am, still working on it. The only part I won’t get done tonight is taping them. Yes, I said tape. His Isuzu only has a tape player and I thought it would be nice to listen to his new music on the way to work. Oh, well. A project for another day. (As if I needed more projects!)

So, I took advantage of the holiday break to work on my blog. I didn’t completely give up. I found some “blank” themes done by Will at Tomorrow’s Laundry, and have been plugging away at designing my look. As you can see, it is not there yet, but it is getting there.

I found the unicorn image in a journal a friend gave me ages ago. The sketch was done by Michael Green in The Unicorn Notebook. I scanned in the image, removed the part I didn’t need, and colored it in Photoshop. I created the background parchment and the text and put it all together for my header. Then I tiled the header background parchment through the entire page. Now I just need to finish styling the page and come up with a footer and I’m all set.

I may do away with the background parchment on the whole page. I have learned (never tried it before now) that I can not put a drop shadow on an image that will have transparency. It has to have the background color already added. Matching up tiles of parchment is impossible, so maybe I’ll go to a more neutral background to work with. We’ll see.

Next project… fixing up Ron’s site and blog, and redoing Claddagh Web Design with accompanying blog.

Before I run off to dream strange dreams… I just wanted to share the types of trees I am interested in right now. We were supposed to go to the mountains last weekend to see the changing leaves, but hubby wasn’t quite up for it. We hope to go this weekend. When we do, I hope there are still pretty leaves to take pictures of. I took a couple in our front yard that I haven’t gotten off the camera yet, but last week, before I left work, I snapped this in our parking lot:

I still want to see these. I’m not ready for the evergreens just yet.

I stopped by the grocery store today and was astonished to see cut Christmas trees already lining the sidewalk outside the store. The earliest I have seen trees for sale in the past (with the exception of fake trees) has been the day after Thanksgiving. We have two more days before the “official” start of the Christmas holiday.

And though I may be outraged the cut trees are starting to show up, when I took Da to the hospital on November 2nd, this was on the roof:

I absolutely couldn’t believe it. I know they have to get these up earlier than the lighting schedule (probably Thanksgiving night, or so) but still, on the 2nd?

I think the problem is more that I don’t feel it’s the holiday season. It just doesn’t feel like time to make/buy gifts or decorate. Usually I’m on it well before now, but I just don’t feel it. Maybe inundating myself with XM radio holiday stations will do it…