Someone likes their Christmas present! She even brought it to bed with her - my bed that is....
I don't mind that she sleeps on the bed, but playing with the squeaky toy while I'm trying to sleep gets her kicked out....
When I took the dogs for a walk on Christmas Eve, I found out that my street is seriously flooded just past the house.
We got quite a bit of rain recently, but it's never flooded like this, as far as I know, so something went wrong somewhere - drainage plugged? It looked like the County was working on it yesterda morning - lost of flashing lights there when I left for work.
Merry Christmas!
It's a quiet morning so far - Alli is up, the dogs are sleeping, and Jessie is curled up in my lap. Deb made it down last night, so I stayed up way too late talking and getting her settled in. She made it down after dinner, but I hadn't put everything away, so she had smoked turkey (which was done on time this time...) dressing, potatoes, gravy, etc. Today is a brunch for the Redding family. Pixie is bringing the egg dish - a good thing since I have an electrical issue and have no power to my oven. I'll do waffles, bacon, sausages, etc. Stuff I can do on the stove top. A fun day!
For a quick break in cleaning/Christmas preparations/shopping, etc. that I had going on this weekend, I tried a quick little project. It was definitely quick, and turned out cute and useful - a gift card/cash holder. Super simple, but pretty enough to make a gift a bit special. And no, I did not get everything done for Christmas, but I got my packages mailed to my work teams. That was my highest priority. I still need to mail calendars out, but I need bigger envelopes, which means a trip to the store tonight.
The Redding offices had a pot-luck Christmas breakfast on Tuesday - a nod to the MBOC legacy Christmas breakfast, where Management prepared and served staff breakfast. A couple of us "old-timers" organized the pot luck, decorated the kitchen area in the old TASC building (I have no idea what UB calls it now...) complete with table decorations to be raffled off, and set up an ornament exchange. I was not the main volunteer, but I helped!
I also volunteered to bring a quiche, even though I couldn't make the breakfast (scheduling issues with Alli). Which all sounds good, until I remembered at 6:00 on that morning that I was supposed to be sending said quiche in with AJ....at 6:40. Since quiche takes an hour to bake, there was no way that was going to happen....so I decided to improvise and they would get egg bites. Which sounded great, until I could only find one muffin pan. They got a dozen sausage and green chili egg bites and 2 dozen "mini" egg bites, because all I could find in my rush were my mini-muffin pans....and some were still in the oven when AJ left. Luckily he said they had plenty of food.
Once again, I had helpers when I tried to get my quilt sandwiched. First, I had Jessie on top of the fabric....and notice that James is on the back corner taking the tape off for me - such a helper!
Then, Jessie was under the fabric. Since the whole reason i spread out the different layers is to get everything smooth, no wrinkles, etc., this is NOT helping....they were both banished to the bedroom until I had everything put together.
The quilt top is finished - I'm still not completely happy with the color choices, but decided to go ahead and "gett'r done". It was either that or continue to look for more fabric, and this was the 4th one I tried.
Here's the backing fabric, which has the same shade of pale green as the sashings. I'm hoping it will all "look good" together.
The weather was warm and sunny when we left Redding, which continued most of the way over the mountains to Susanville. There was quite a bit of ice on the road, so driving made me a bit nervous, not looking forward to driving home after dinner in the dark. That all changed when we got close to Susanville. Where the Dixie Fire went through, close to the 36/44 intersection, you have a clear view of the valley. Saturday you could see the inversion layer over Susanville. It was 35 degrees and sunny, then it dropped to 28 and overcast. The pogonip was so cool - you could see the line on the trees where the temps changed.
I wandered around Jeff's place while I was there.
We went to Jeff's for the Thomas family Thanksgiving - Kolby and Jake came up with their families - Andrea and Franco with Kolby, and Jackie and two cats with Jake. Franco is 15 months old and is a little doll! He's just learning to talk and they are raising him bilingual, which is just so cool. He is already getting in to everything he can, and Grammie and Grandpa's house is wide open to him. Jeff told Andrea that he'd let her know "if" Franco ever did anything wrong, but he didn't think that would ever happen....
He and Alli spent some time studying each other. She's really good about not stepping/walking on the little kids when she's spinning, and they got along just fine until Franco found the TV remote and started changing channels. She doesn't seem to care what's on TV so she was fine for a while, and then he turned it off....AJ came to the rescue and got it going for her again, whew!