Wednesday, November 28 - Christmas lights and mowing

Holy smokes, I haven't writtein in SO long. Today, Barry and I put up the outside lights for Christmas decorations. Most of our Christmas stuff is still in Maine, so we're going easy this year. It got down below freezing this morning, but this afternoon with full sunshine, it's near 60. Seems SO weird -- putting up Christmas decorations, then mowing the lawn -- yes, we need to do that again! The fellow on the radio the other day said, "IF we have snow this winter".

A couple of years ago I had bought a kerosene heater but never took it out of the box. Even though electric prices are 1/3 of Maine's, we're supplementing the electric heat (we found out we do NOT have a heat pump -- we have an electric furnace) with kerosene and wood. Even at $3.39 a gallon, all we need is an hour of kerosene a day to keep the house nice and toasty warm. We haven't had much sun over the past week so today was wonderful -- the cat seems to find all the warm spots. And if he can't find one, he crawls under the comforter on MY bed, right up next to the pillow!

We spent Thanksgiving in Paducah with Rick and Laura, and Laura's family. Barry made a sweet potato pie, Laura made pumpkin soup, Nancy did a corn casserole, and Buel did turkey and beef tenderloin with cognac sauce. To top it all off, Nancy made a Bavarian chocolate cake! Barry went online and bought a treadmill the day after...looks like we can use it. Nice time, lots of good food -- Paducah's almost a second home now, having spent more time there since July than we have in Maine! I'm absolutely not sure when we will return to Maine -- we thought we'd have to come back up in December, but that doesn't have to happen now - some of you know why... ;) -- it has to do with $600 (that's a hint).

OK, time to get back to work. I'd like to promise it won't be this long again before I write, but ...