Random Thoughts for a Rainy Day

We went almost the entire summer without rain, but it's rained three times this week already. No one is complaining--it seems that we just recovered from the terrible drought of the last decade, only for the lake to be down several feet again. (At the height of our drought, our local water (and water that went to Florida) supply, Lake Lanier, was down almost 30 feet.)

Like any good writer, I love a dreary day! Sadly I can't spend it writing--I'm supposed to be studying muscles, bones, joints, and skin for my next anatomy exam tomorrow. So far I've slept in, worked out, and am finally eating breakfast and thinking about Christmas.

I've noticed that people are posting Nordstrom's sign a lot on Facebook:

I get it. I really do. But personally, I love Christmas. I'd like to live in a Christmas-decorated world for about 9 months out of the year, with the other 3 months decorated for fall.

This will be my first Christmas as a homeowner. I've already decided where to put my tree. As for whether or not it will be an artificial tree, I still haven't decided. The kittens destroyed last year's tree so hard that I'm loathe to go through that again, especially since it'll be on carpet instead of tile. They may be a year older, but they're not any more mature, let me assure you.

And along the Christmas thoughts, I've decided that I'm going to try and do most of my Christmas shopping in support of small business, whether local brick and mortars, or through shops like Etsy. I'm also going to try and finish most of it by the first week in December so that A) I can spend December writing, and B) those whose items I'm buying can have plenty of time to use my money to do their own Christmas shopping.

Holidays should be interesting this year. I haven't talked about it before, but my grandmother (mom's mom) has been in a terrible battle with her third round of breast cancer for the last two years. This time it metastacized in her bones. She's doing better now than she was for a while, but she's still not in great shape. For the past 3 years, my parents have gone to stay with her for Thanksgiving (she lives in Florida), but this year they've gotten her to agree to come up before Thanksgiving and stay through Christmas. So I fully expect Evan and I will be doing the double Thanksgiving this year, which we've not done before. Even worse, we'll probably be doing damage control with his parents, as it's still very iffy whether or not Evan's brother and his wife will be able to come for the holidays.

Thanksgiving, of course, will be a blur for me, since it's the final week of class before the semester ends and we have finals. I'm just going to eat my turkey and take a nap, and this year I won't be doing the Black Friday thing, unless my MIL really wants my company.

And now that I've had an internal conversation on my blog, I'm going to eat my grapefruit now...