I can’t help it, I have a love affair with the Christmas Season. I will not be one of those complaining that it is already in full swing. I just can’t. The minute the kids came in from Trick or Treating, I started singing Christmas Carols and wondering just when the local radio station would switch over because no time is better than NOW!

Getting into the Christmas Spirit has totally given me a much-needed boost of energy. Today I vacuumed the whole house, including the stairs which was actually a huge amount of work. I scoured the fronts of all the appliances and cabinets (note to self: never have a kitchen with white cabinets again!!!) and washed some windows. I made the menu for the next week, made a shopping list and did the grocery shopping at two different stores (hate that!). I created a whole digital scrapbook for Dalton’s 2008 year and started on Noah’s. Tony got the oil changed in one car (long overdue), did some Christmas shopping and also picked up a replacement enclosure for our trampoline that was damaged in Ike so now the seemingly constant stream of kids playing on it will not cause me to sprout new gray hairs daily. And we settled in and watched Tinkerbell with Addy and Noah - we had read it a few years ago and I loved it so it was fun to see it made into a movie. I’m much more of a fairies girl than a princesses girl and it seems, so far, that Addy is too.

Whew! I love a productive weekend and we haven’t had one in months.

Here’s a funny story that I just can not help but post about. When we tore down all our Halloween decorations, Tony asked me what I wanted to do with the glitter pumpkins we made. I’m pretty sure what I said was that I wanted to keep them through Thanksgiving. What he heard, though, was something else entirely because I noticed today that the white pumpkins we had decorating our mantel were missing in action. I assumed he threw them out since we had not explicitly discussed those. No big deal. But then I looked around for the glitter pumpkins and couldn’t find them.

That’s when I realized….he KEPT them. As in, he put them in the bins with the rest of the Halloween decorations and promptly placed them in the rafters in our garage. In Houston. Where we can’t even keep candles, much less perishable produce!!!!!!

Sure enough when he came home I tried (not very hard) not to laugh while asking him if he actually put fruit in our Halloween bins! ha. hahaha. He does not find any of this even a tiny bit funny even though it is totally hysterical. He actually made things so much worse (read: hilarious) by attempting to argue with me that it is, in fact, ok to save pumpkins from year to year! Oh, my Tony.  So hysterical that I keep telling everyone I run into. Which is why I had to blog about it too. I’m so sorry honey. I love you and I promise tomorrow I’ll pretend like it never happened. Until next year when you do it again.

On a few miserable notes, my doggy is itchy. She has a yeast infection in her ears, a bacterial infection in her ears, systemic itching from allergies and FLEAS! Frick! I hate fleas! Thankfully there’s cool new high-powered anti-flea meds available in pill form! yay! So actually since she got the pill a few days ago I should say she HAD fleas. Buh-bye fleas! Puppy seems to be quite a bit more comfortable already. I wish I could figure out what she is so allergic to. I’m pretty sure it’s wheat/corn which she only gets when she steals table food (which she does at every available opportunity). So we are being super-diligent with our table foods now and hopefully that helps her too.

And speaking of itchy, today a rogue mosquito got into the house (Mosquitoes in November. Sob) and Addy was naked. She got bit a dozen times. 4 on her legs, 4 on her arms, her belly  and her back shared the rest. She swelled up like a balloon and I almost pulled out the liquid Benadryl. I had to wrap her up fast in clothes so she wouldn’t itch until she bled. She was miserable until the topical stuff kicked in. Mosquitoes in November. Mosquitoes in November. I hate Texas right now.

And one last note: I’ve decided to try to do NaBloPoMo this month. So far I have written every day of November and plan to keep it up. I have no idea what I could possibly find to say every day now that the election is over! This may be harder than it seems.

So now that the race is decided, here’s what we have according to FiveThirtyEight.com:

Obama:

Electoral Count: 365 (fooled me - he took that final EV in Nebraska!!)
Popular Vote: 52.3%

McCain:

Electoral Count: 173
Popular Vote: 46.2

Remember that bonus question about what percent of eligible voters would turn out to vote? Probably ya’ll thought I was nuts (tony says cynical) but dudes, I wasn’t too far off. Mine was the lowest prediction, too. According to the latest data, the voter turnout is pretty much exactly what it was in 2004 - the difference was in WHO showed up. This time the Dems showed up, the Reps stayed home. But the overall turnout was almost identical. Bummer.

Ok onto the final results. I’m gonna have to call two winners, one for the EV and one for the Popular Vote.

Electoral vote goes to Melinda who was just 3 electoral votes off! Brilliant Melinda! She guessed 368 to 170. Impressive!!! I think I was actually second to you with my 12 votes off. I’m proud

For popular vote, I am SHOCKED that several of us came so very incredibly close, especially given how far off we got in the EV! It is crazy to me that we all called it! Several people (including me! yay!) had mere fractions of a point off both candidates but the winner for the closest call is Jonathan who was just two-tenths of a point off both candidates with his predictions of 52.1 for Obama and 46.4 for McCain!

So both of you, contact me with your mailing address and you’ll get your yumminess ASAP! Thanks for playing, everyone! That was fun! Now I’m off to tally my kids’ predictions to see who gets ice cream tonight!!

Halloween night, a friend and her family were over. Dalton offhandedly asked if her kids could sleep over that night. We had a busy day for Dalton’s birthday and Addy’s G&R Anniversary the next day but I said that they were welcome to spend the night the evening of the birthday instead. The birthday boy always has the option to stay up all night on his birthday, by tradition. So what if a few friends joined, right?

I am not exactly sure how it happened but before I could blink there were other friends invited and then suddenly there were 7 very loud tween/teen boys in my home and they did.not.sleep.all.night. I do not exaggerate. I can’t sleep when there is noise in the house when it is otherwise usually quiet so I was awake the GREAT majority of the night. I got about an hour of sleep at one point and woke up at 5am to hear that some were STILL awake! Crazy, I tell ya. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t think I ever went to a sleepover were I managed to stay awake all night.

Oh wait, that’s right, now I remember how they did it. It might have had something to do what that 2 liter of Sunkist Orange soda I bought thinking it was caffeine-free. Um, nope! Nothing like filling a bunch of boys with caffeine and Halloween candy (more caffeine I”m sure) to keep them hopping until all hours. I only send my deepest apologies to the parents

So hopefully everyone had fun. I can sacrifice one night of sleep a year so my boys can party, I guess. I’m such a martyr.