Ah, Heat!

Last night at this time, I was sitting here, writing to you, thinking my fingers just might break off from the cold at any minute. I had noticed, at around 11:30 p.m. or so, that cold air was blowing out of our heater vents. I went to bed wearing a sweatshirt-type nightgown, stretchy pants, and socks. I put an extra quilt on the bed. Now I know some of you will laugh your heads off when I tell you that it was 62 degrees in my house and I was freezing to death, but for California, indoors, that's mighty chilly!

Of course, things like this only seem to happen on weekends, don't they? I thought for sure we'd have to make a run to Home Depot for space heaters so we wouldn't turn into popsicles by Monday when the heating repair guys opened their doors. You see, we couldn't just call any heating repair guy because our system's only a couple years old and, depending on the problem, was under warranty with a specific heating company. Luckily, though, my husband telephoned them this morning and found that they were, in fact, open on Saturday. By early afternoon, I had what sounded like Santa and all his reindeer up on my roof and soon thereafter, blessed warmth was flowing out those vents once again. Why can't we have a nice hot flash when we need one?

Today (Saturday), I puttered around the house, putting some final touches on my Christmas decorating. I pinned the It's a Wrap/Holly Jolly quilt and started quilting it. And I made stuffing and roasted a chicken. You might think that having just made a turkey less than two weeks ago, I wouldn't be doing the same thing to a chicken, but we like chicken and I had sort of accidentally bought a second package of stuffing, so what the heck?! Stuffed chicken it was!

I've talked before about how many meals we get out of one poor chicken so I won't bore you again, but I've just finished making a pot of chicken soup. Tomorrow I'm putting some of that 9 (or 10) can soup/chili in the crockpot. Between one thing and another, I figure I really won't have to do much cooking for about a week--plenty of time to start getting Christmas gifts planned and started.

I've "sprinkled" some Christmas photos here and there through my post tonight. I really DO wish you could see the decorations up close and personal--they're always so much prettier when you see the soft glow of white Christmas lights reflecting off of shiny glass ornaments and smell the scented candles burning around the house. The photo below was taken looking into the Sweat Shop from the doorway.

Today's mail brought some green balls from a good friend, Sharon. The decorations in "that" color green have been placed on the tree in the kitchen--you can get a little peek at it in the first photo at the top of this post, but I'll hold off on showing you the tree in all it's Technicolor glory until after I get the It's a Wrap quilt up on the wall behind it--hopefully in the next couple days. Once I get that quilt finished, I will probably move on to the Hometown Christmas section that I'm planning to applique--which I'm already LATE on!

Time for me to get that soup packaged up and put away, turn out the lights in the Sweat Shop, and head to bed, where I can sleep comfortably tonight without the fear that I'll wake up encased in ice in the morning!