Oh no. Insomnia.

I don't get this often, but this feels like one of those nights. So I thought I'd do a blog update.

We've been crazy busy through the beginning of the holiday season. Funny, I'd heard about that, but never really experienced it.

Greg's mom, step-dad and grandmother were here, and spent the night, for Thanksgiving. We also had a couple other guests as well, so that caused a flurry of finding places for everyone to sleep, and finding and washing blankets for everyone. We have blankets all over the house, but they haven't all been sorted and washed since moving. And though it's a big house, we only technically have one spare bedroom, so when there are multiple people, places still must be arranged.

Then we got busy hauling out the Christmas decorations, sorting out what we had and what we needed, and figuring out what we wanted to put where. It's not as cut and dried as one might think. This is (I've mentioned before) a big ass house, and there are far more areas to decorate than there were at the old house. We don't have nearly enough decorations, but we already spent a ton of money on outdoor lights, so gathering up the nice decorations for the rest of the house will have to be done a little at a time over the next few years.

We bought a ton of multi-colored lights to string in the shrubs out front. But we wanted LEDs because they are so easy on the electric bill. Well, the entire front shrubbery filled with multi-colored LEDs was horrendous. It looked like a carnival attraction. I couldn't stand it, and went out the next day and took them all down. Then we went out (again) and bought a bunch of plain white LEDs. Greg ended up putting the second batch up, and he creatively combined the white ones with just a few touches of the multi-color ones, and it looks much better. Those LEDs are still ungodly bright, which I suppose should be a good thing, but I don't know ... I'm used to the more muted shades of Christmas, the soft glow of Christmas lights - not a jittery glare that would induce seizures in an epileptic.

I would have returned all the multi-colored lights, except that I knew I'd never get them back in their stupid boxes, and I'd ripped up the little packages of spare bulbs that were attached to each string, so I couldn't return them in "as bought" condition ... had it only been one or two boxes I'd have probably tried, but we had six boxes of them. We decided to keep them and use them in other places around the house. Some landed up in the Imaginarium, some in the pub. Next year we'll probably put them on the downstairs tree.

Oh, yeah - we wanted two trees, one in the pub, and one in the living room / parlor. But we only had one tree from the old house. Fortunately, the former owners left a very, very large Christmas tree here when they cleaned the place out. I was grateful, as it's a very nice tree, and looks fantastic in the parlor. They also very kindly left the lights that went on it - one giant string the geniuses had spliced together, so that all the lights for this one tree are all there on one string - ergo, only one plug! Well, I say genius now, because they all still work. When sections of them stop working, then I won't be so thrilled, but for this year, kudos.

I've even managed to get some Christmas shopping done, and not just online. Yes, I actually went into stores and bought things for people. I haven't done that in so many years, I forgot what it was like. But it was kind of fun. I'm not done yet, but I'm probably about half done, which is a miracle for me this early. In the past few years I've been ordering all my Christmas presents online, but unfortunately my procrastination genes have kept me from starting until about December 18th, causing me to have to pay exorbitant shipping to get the stuff by Christmas. So far I've placed two orders with standard shipping, and should be fine.

And the holiday rush is far from over ... we have Greg's birthday party this weekend, and then we'll probably have a free weekend, and then Christmas, and then something for New Year's. Yep, it's going to be a busy month.

I've been doing some more work on the Imaginarium too! I'm way psyched. I'll have to post pictures when it's finally done, which it almost is. I did some more painting, and got a new bookcase.

Now that I'm actually starting to make real progress up here, I am totally loving it, and can't wait to do more. I'm really excited about working on the bathroom, partly because it's such a small room so I can do a lot for little expense, meaning I can let my creativity go wild; and partly because it's probably the most outdated and relatively kind of ugly room up here, so will benefit so much more from even a little attention.

I'm also psyched about starting to work in the kitchen area, which is kind of the guts of the whole Imaginarium. It's the area where all my crafty stuff is stored, and my work area. I have some preliminary ideas ... swapping out the ceiling light fixture with some track lighting; painting the cabinet doors; and replacing the knobs.

That's a start. Eventually I'd like to paint the countertop. I've been reading up on that, and looking at pictures online, and apparently, if you're careful and do it right, you can make a crappy old countertop look pretty astounding. I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to do that, so I'll work on other things I'm more sure about first. Having a crappy old countertop isn't really such a bad thing, anyway, because I don't worry so much about messing it up or damaging it when I'm working on a project.

Hopefully one day soon I'll have things organized enough to actually use the space for something crafty. It's been forever since I made anything, or did any knitting (as of right now I think I forgot how, but I'm hopeful that when I try again, it'll come back to me). I miss it, and want to finally get back to that side of things, as well.

Okay, I guess that's enough rambling from me. I'd better go try to get some sleep.