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Showing posts with the label mantle

This Year's Christmas Tree

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S ometime last night, I realized that I had not yet captured any photographs of our Christmas tree and ornaments this year.  I figured I should jump on that since I won't have any time between now and Christmas so, if I don't do it now, then Christmas will have passed by the time I can get to it again. We (mostly "I") feel like the tree is missing something and I actually feel the same way every year with every Christmas tree even after adding a little more to it each year but I've had difficulty figuring out what still might be missing.  I'm not a fan of most types of garland and I definitely hate tinsel so I know it is not missing these things.  It is possible it needs more ornaments in the way of more styles of decorative glass ornaments.  Our Christmas tree will most definitely never have items/characters from movies so that is out.  I'm not a fan of 'crafty' or 'country' type stuff either.  Maybe I'll figure out what is missing one

Another Christmas Eve Arrival

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I n addition to Sheila's doorstep colony of frogs arriving late, we had a new mantle clock arrive on Christmas Eve.  So, this was sort of a late Christmas gift to both of us from ourselves.   Most people simply use their cable set top box to display the time near the television.  Unfortunately, when Comcast installed their high end, high speed Xfinity set top box at our house, the first thing the technician pointed out was that this box has no display on it at all so there is no clock.  Actually, it is not even a "box"...   it is a big, monstrous tower that just barely fits in our shelves next to the fireplace and under the television.  I figured, "No problem...  our router can display the time" and that is what we used for a short while.   Our high speed router has a big colorful display on it which makes using the router abundantly easy.  It didn't take long before we noticed that the router was beginning to work intermittently.  I pinpointed the problem t

A Fairly Productive Week

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Overall, my health has been quite miserable and very unstable for the past few months.  What really pushed my health into this bad spell was the fireplace project during the few weeks in December. I was in a rush to get the fireplace to an operating condition before Christmas arrived. Systemic Mastocytosis causes extreme, overwhelming fatigue and this is especially so whenever I over do it and use more energy than my health allows. I'm still trying to recover from pushing myself to finish that project in time for Christmas...  but, the fireplace really is nice. Unfortunately, although "really nice", that fireplace is still not completely finished.  I managed to work on this project about an hour each day this past week.  It still wore me out each day... imagine just a quick hour of light, easy work requiring bedtime immediately... Despite the need for sleep everyday, over the course of the week I managed to fill some open edges, sand, fill some more, sand even more