Holiday Blog Hop--Blog Hop of Goodies



Susie at Susie QT Pies Scraps of Life is hosting a Holiday Blog Hop that I'm participating in.  The problem is, I'm not a big holiday decorator or baker or shopper until well into the season. So in order to participate in the blog hop, I'm linking to several of my past holiday posts, just to get us in the spirit of things.

First is my post on "Whatever Happened to the Twelve Days of Christmas?" 

Second is a tutorial on one my favorite easy Christmas crafts, Candy Cane Reindeer

One from a Doors of Welcome post I did a couple of years ago that highlights some easy dollar store decorating I did when I was in an apartment two states away from all of my holiday decorations

 One of my favorits dollar store decorating posts on four different versions of a thrifty centerpiece

  

And last but certainly not least, three posts on why this gentile Christian gal celebrates Hanukkah

So click around on some of the links below and hop from blog to blog to your heart's content!

Is That a Zebra Beside the Road?

• She looketh well..

Do these stripes make my hips look too big?

I live in the country, outside a small town, in a mostly rural area. I put a lot of highway miles on my vehicle, with mostly the same old scenery--pine trees, oak trees, tallow trees, pastures, hay fields--you get the picture. So imagine my surprise one day last year when I was driving past an otherwise ordinary piece of land that just happened to have an extraordinary (for here) tall fence, and glanced over and saw a zebra. Not only that, I saw what was apparently a momma zebra with two baby zebras. Two.

Did I have my camera with me?? Of course not!

Not too long after that, I was driving past and saw them again.  I had a phone with a built-in camera, but it was brand new and I couldn't figure out how to use it.  I pointed to toward them and pushed every button I could find, but couldn't get it work.  Drat!

So I made myself get back in the habit of keeping my camera with me everywhere I went.  No zebras, of course... 

Although I did see these kind of weird looking ducks one day...

...you really need to click on the picture to enlarge it to get the full effect of the red circle around the eye.

But finally I caught them close enough to the fence to get a decent picture!

Unfortunately for the sake of the pictures, they aren't babies anymore!

I know this sounds weird, but when I see an unusual, brightly colored or patterned animal up close, I'm fascinated by how "real" they look! (As in "That zebra looks almost real!")

There's just something about seeing zebras in the piney woods that makes me do a double-take!

What have you seen that's caused you to do a double-take lately?

This post is linked to:

Outdoor Wednesday at A Southern Daydreamer

Mountain or Molehill?

• She looketh well to the ways of her household... 

(The mountain pictured above is a "real" mountain, Mt Shasta, in northern Cailifornia)

Have you ever had one of those tasks on your "to-do" list that you dread doing so much that you just keep putting it off over and over?  You transfer it from one "to-do" list to another because you know you need to do it, but you just really don't want to do it--I mean, you want it done, but you don't want to have to actually do it to get it done?

Cleaning out my freezer has been one of those for me.  My parents raise their own beef, and they generously share with us when they have a butchering done, so we usually get a fairly large quantity of it all at one time.  Last time they had meat done, my son and I went with them to the processing plant to pick it all up, then helped them sort and store in freezers at their house.  When we brought ours home, instead of unpacking the bags, we just shoved them into the freezer to be unpacked and sorted later. 

Well, as you can guess, "later" never got here, so I have been digging through bags of frozen meat for months, trying to find what I was looking for, until the whole thing was just a mess.  I knew I needed to pull everything out, sort it, and organize it so I would know what I had on hand.  But who wants to do all that??

Then this past week, as I was digging through the freezer for something to thaw to cook for dinner, I decided to pull out just the packs of hamburger and put them in the door of the up right freezer.  Then I pulled out the frozen vegetables and sorted them.  Then I started emptying the bags and sorting the rest into their types.  And literally in a matter of minutes, it was done.

I wonder how many other molehills we have in our lives that we make into mountains in our minds?  I was reminded of the 10 spies from the children of Israel who went into the promised land to spy out the land, and when they came out, they told about how great the land was, but the people, they said, are giants.  "And we were as grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in theirs." 

Maybe my mountains aren't mountains after all, maybe I'm just too small in my own sight.

I hate to admit, at least publicly, how many things I have on my "to-do" list that I've been putting off and putting off until they've become like mountains, always looming in the back of my mind.

Blogging has become one of those.  I love blogging, I really do.  But I don't have internet at home, so the logistics seem insurmountable.  And every so often I do one of those "I haven't been blogging for awhile, but from now on, things are gonna be different" kind of posts.  And then if I don't get right back on, the silence looms larger and larger, until it seems I have to have some wonderful, larger-than-life, perfect post to break the ice with.  Again.

But I've decided that if I can take one mountainous job and whittle it down to a do-able molehill, I can do it with others.

Like I stated, I have way too many of those on my "to-do" list. 

But I have one two less than I used to. 

Until next time...