Back to Normal?

Well, the holidays are finally over and hopefully, life can get back to normal, whatever that is.

We had a nice time with our children and grandchildren at Christmas even though the youngest granddaughter careened into a doorway edge and put a large dent into her forehead!  Children are so resilient though and she was fine after a few minutes of intense wailing.  We thought about taking her to the emergency room but it didn't seem necessary and the rest of the visit was completely normal.  No problems since then either according to her father.

The scanner I had ordered arrived on the 23rd but I didn't have time to do much more than install it.  It seems to work well although I have to tell a funny on myself about it.

I installed it and was really trying to get it to work and it just wouldn't produce any picture no matter what I tried.  I ended up uninstalling everything and reinstalling it and even though it made all the proper noises and seemed to be working, it wouldn't scan my picture!  I was beginning to think about returning it when I blew out my breath in frustration.  A corner of a protective sheet of paper fluttered just the tiniest bit and after I removed the paper from the scanner glass, I was able to get a beautiful scan!

No nasty comments, please - remember, the same thing could happen to you!

Crunch Time!

It's getting down to the wire as far as Christmas is concerned - is everyone ready?  I still have one or two gifts to get but don't know exactly what - do you all have people like that?  It's the ones who you don't really know that well but want to bless with a little something and you want it to be something they'd like to get.  Well, not much time to figure it out, is there?

Sorry, no pictures with this post - I have been painting a little but my scanner died so I don't have any pictures to show.  I don't know about you all but I have a difficult time taking a digital photo of my paintings and would much rather scan them.  Not only has the scanner gone south, but the weather has been very overcast and rainy so there hasn't been any good natural light for photos anyway.

As a matter of fact, we started out with a snow/sleet mixture yesterday morning and got some intermixed snow off and on for most of the day.  The temps rose overnight and are above freezing so there's nothing on the ground, thank God.  I know some people like snow for Christmas (& there's a chance for it on Christmas Eve here!) but it's a nasty four-letter word to me!

It doesn't help that everything practically shuts down here when one snowflake falls so you can't do last minute shopping or anything.  Of course, most people just jam the grocery stores for a while then stay home and watch it fall.  That's fine for them but it's such a pain to try to get to the barn to take care of Bonnie when it's slick and icy out or if you have to slog through snow.  Then, there's the extra clean-up because she stays in her stall more and ice to either chip out of the water tank or having to put in the tank heater.  She's worth it, of course, but I'd still prefer no snow!