When I got back from Arizona, great-niece Madison's Flat Stanley was here. The poor guy had been sitting on my desk in an envelope for a week. I pulled him out and planned a few adventures with him but first....
Our offer on a house in Council, Idaho was accepted and we will be moving to Idaho sometime within the next 6 months. That will depend on how quickly we can sell this place which we can't even put on the market until mid-January because of the work I need to do here.
It is 2 hours north of Blaine and Jill, not in Montana but kind of a compromise because we wanted to be near the grandkids and also wanted to have some property and not be on top of neighbors. Council is a tiny town but they have a church and a grocery store so what more could I ask for. We are going to have to build a barn and put up fencing around at least 40 acres so we can get some animals. We will be close enough to the grandkids to see them frequently but not so close that we are in their face all the time.
Because of the timing, John spent our anniversary in Idaho to be there when they did the home inspection. I spent the time while he was gone either working or doing some packing around this place.
Thanksgiving at our house was extremely quiet. John had to work so I cooked a very small turkey with all the trimmings. He got home at 4:30 and by 5:00 we sat down to eat. 5:15, we were done. How sad is that.
Only pecan pie at the Van Haren's because neither one of us are fond of pumpkin pie at all.
Thanksgiving weekend, we spent some more time packing and just vegging a bit. I had a church meeting at 10 on Saturday morning to talk about a nativity display a ward in our stake had asked us to participate in. They hadn't got it approved early enough to make it a stake event but it was a start.
On December 5th, as soon as I got off work, I went down to help set up tables for the nativity display. To my surprise there were all kinds of decorations in the cultural hall - which is where we were planning on putting the nativities. Due to some issues with scheduling, another ward had planned their Christmas party for Friday night and the display was all day Saturday - 10 to 8. Oh my goodness.
The lady in charge wasn't too stressed about it - she said she had calmed down since she had first got the news. Instead of setting up the display in the cultural hall, that is where we would have the musical numbers and a table for cookies and punch. We would have a white room, a mini room, an eastern room, a kids room in the primary room with coloring and an international room in the relief society. So we worked on setting things up. I had to leave at 3:30 to get home in time to go to a Christmas party with John.
This year we get to go to both of his company's parties since they have one for each crew - not sure why since the way they arranged the scheduling of the parties, the people who were either getting off on Thursday evening or the ones that had to go to work on Friday morning are the ones scheduled for the party. So of his maintenance people that should have been there, only about 4 made an appearance.
Friday the 6th, as soon as I got off work, I went down to the church again to take my nativities (I took 11). I stayed from 2 until 5 helping to set up nativities in the different rooms. It was going to look so good.
Saturday morning after breakfast, I finished decorating our tree and putting things away a bit - this place is turning into a bigger and bigger mess. Boxes of Christmas decorations everywhere, boxes of packed boxes stacked in every spare spot in the downstairs bedrooms.
There were 3 things I wanted to go to on Saturday and John agreed to go to one of them which turned out to be the one that opened earliest - 9:30.
It was the gingerbread house contest. They had several different categories but sadly there weren't a lot of entries and it only took us about 30 minutes to check them out.
I love the fish swimming in the river.
Lots of candy on this one - I have been trying to figure out what the white and pink things are around the edge as I am not familiar with them.
The one above was very pretty but the one below got our votes. It is so Alaskan - we loved the fish hung to dry outside the cabin.
Not sure why someone decided a snowman should go in the water above.
I was sad that there weren't more houses on display. From what I've heard, in the past it has been really good. Maybe such a late Thanksgiving threw everyone's schedule off.
From there, we went to do some shopping. They had drawn names at work and John got the name of one of the girls in purchasing so we spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what to get her. Not a whole lot of choice in this town but we did finally find a halfway decent box of chocolates.
We ate a little lunch then back to the house to rest a bit before I went down to the church to help with the Nativity until 8 and then assist in taking down everything. Time for a short nap...
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