Miscellaneous

I've been meaning to update you on the Christmas porn front. Remember I was talking about my blog stats and looking at what kind of searches brought people to my blog? Well, Christmas porn has been a popular search. Seventeen hits this week. People are odd, aren't they? As an experiment, I Yahoo'd and Googled "Christmas porn" and didn't see my blog come up at all on the first couple search pages, but that's as far as I got--I was sidetracked looking at all the rest of the Christmas porn. Mrs. Claus has been particularly naughty this year. (Okay, I didn't really look. I didn't want to chase away those visions of sugar plums dancing in my head.)

Someone left a comment asking about the pattern for the Garden Club quilt. (I'm too lazy to go back into my emails to see who it was, but I DO know they were "no-reply" because I attempted to reply on my new Kindle, and it was kind of a pain.) The quilt is the main project in a book entitled [drum roll, please] Garden Club Quilts. If you're interested in making the quilt, you can find the book used through Amazon by clicking HERE. I love Amazon's used books--I buy used to buy a lot of my books there. And did you know you can become a seller too? I turned over a bunch of my unwanted quilt books to the Wild Child and she's listed them--I told her if she makes any money, she can keep it for her move to New York. I'd insert a shameless plug with a link to her book listings here except I have no idea what her seller name is.

Someone else left a comment a week or so ago asking me how I get comments in my e-mailbox and move them into folders for my giveaways. There's a setting in Blogger under the "comments" tab that asks for an email address for comment notification. I have my email address listed there, and all of my comments come into my mailbox. And because I have a Yahoo mailbox which allows me to make subfolders, I can set up folders for the giveaways I do. After I read a comment, if the person wants to be included in the drawing, I move their email into the appropriate folder--that way I don't have to re-read comments from people who don't want to participate, and I don't have to print out all of the comments. I just pick a number (either through a random number generator or a random family member) and count up to the winning comment. Easy peasy!

I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I dislike mornings. I don't think people--except maybe farmers and ranchers--were meant to get out of bed before the sun is fully risen. Had my garbage man ascribed to that belief, Tuesday morning would have been better for me.

I woke up about ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off, and knowing I wanted a bit more sleep than THAT, I reset the alarm. Just as my head touched the pillow and my eyes were nearly closed, I heard the sound of the garbage truck grinding down a nearby street. Because we were a bit discombobulated over the days of the week due to Christmas and then the holiday on Monday, I wasn't sure the Wild Child would have remembered to wheel the cans down to the street. So, of course, I jumped out of bed, pausing only to turn off the alarm, and high tailed it out to the side yard where I found the cans HAD been moved for pick up.

Nothing to get too excited about there, right? Well, when I got back into the kitchen, I wasn't quite in full possession of my faculties--not like I would have been had I begun the morning in a more leisurely, civilized manner--and when I went to pull out the coffee maker's water reservoir to make a fresh pot of coffee, imagine my surprise to find the reservoir already FULL of water. Not expecting the added weight, as soon as the reservoir was free of the holder, my wrist flopped over, and water poured all over the countertop, down the cabinet and the front of the dishwasher, and splashed all over me. Nice way to start the work week, eh?!

But my early morning escapades didn't end on Tuesday. This morning I woke up around 4:30 a.m. to the sound of a cat batting one of the Christmas ornaments on the bedroom tree. Sitting up in bed, I hissed "STOP IT, MISTER!" Stitch sat on the dresser, calmly looking at me. I laid back down and started drifting off to sleep when I again heard the tap, tap, tap of a batted ornament. "Okay, that's enough," I thought, and jumping out of bed, I grabbed Stitch to assist him in reaching the other side of the closed bedroom door. Unfortunately, Stitch was somehow attached to the tree--hard to have known or anticipated since it was still pretty dark in the room. The longer the tree "followed" us, the harder his claws dug into my stomach/chest/arm. I swear he grew at least two more paws! The tree ended up on the floor, Hubby sat bolt upright (and confused) in bed, and Stitch happily left the bedroom (and his bleeding victim) far behind.

After picking up the tree and all the ornaments, I went back to sleep until the alarm went off a couple hours later. At least I didn't have to make coffee again this morning.

Oh, and I DID wake up--that second time--feeling a little better than I did last night. I really DO think it must be allergies. AND I think I've made friends with my Kindle. At least I'm starting to understand it a little more. I just need to finish the hard copy book I'm currently reading so I can try out an e-book and see how I like it.

If you've posted any questions in comments that I haven't answered or if I've forgotten to follow up on anything I've written about, let me know. With the year coming to an end, it's nice to tie up loose ends.

Have you accomplished what you hoped to accomplish in 2011? We'll talk about that in the next day or two, so give it a little thought if you haven't already. Thanks for stopping by!