This and That, and a Blessed Thank You!

First, I will do the “thank you” part of this post! It has been cold and rainy today, but it brightened considerably when the postal delivery lady pulled up to the cottage late this afternoon. The Holly Jolly Giveaway goodies arrived from Angie at Sugarplum Patch! Goodness, gracious! Miss Angie certainly has the Christmas spirit for being so generous, and I can also see that she is a talented folk artist too!

She tucked a cute snowman card at the very top of the box, wishing me a Merry Christmas. That slowed me down a bit before I started digging into the box to discover the lovely contents, going "oooh" and "aaah" as I went. LOL! Inside were three beautifully hand-stitched items: a stocking pillow, a Santa candle mat, and an angel ornament. Then there were three sparkly handmade candy canes, assortment of holiday grungy tags, scented tarts (yummy), and magnetic note pad with a snowman motif. Whew!

Thank you so much, Angie! May you have a wonderful Christmas!

Now for the “this and that” part of my post! It has been a busy week for us. We have been baking cookies, visiting with great friends (Hi-ho, DaVonna! I know you will be reading this!), making and wrapping presents, shipping presents, and shopping. The week started off with me going back to the orthopedic doctor and asking for some temporary help for my irritable left knee. I proceeded to get fluid drained off my knee, cortisone shot, and new anti-inflammatory prescription. Now that it has been a few days, I am relieved to see that it is starting to take the pain edge off and I can bend it a little farther. To pamper the joint, a cane will now accompany me on most excursions because the x-rays show more bone on bone wear in the past year.

My blog has been neglected somewhat lately due to lack of time. I have lots of things I want to share, particularly travel pictures and information. Also, I have received several blogging awards in the past couple of months and have not seen myself clear to pass them on. I hope that the blogging police will grant me leniency in the spirit of the season! And, I see by the calendar that the latest photo challenge is coming up in just two days (theme: holiday decorations). Help, I haven’t taken any pictures yet! Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow? Yep, taking pictures!

Next week we’ll be busy as well. We will have some dear friends coming over to the homestead for some Christmas cheer and celebration. We are looking forward to that! We will also be spending three days working at the local Salvation Army’s distribution center. After waiting weeks for this year’s assignments, we finally got the call today! It is a lot of hard work to put together the donations for their massive Christmas drive, but we had a rewarding experience volunteering at the center last year. We have also done bell ringing for them in past years, but this season we’re going to concentrate all our efforts at chaos central!

So my blogging posts will be a bit sparse for a while. I also will be getting behind on stopping by to visit with my many blogging friends. I hope to get on a more frequent schedule when all the holiday sparkly dust settles down! Merry Christmas, everyone!