I'm experiencing nascent excitement for the Christmas season. Jeremy was eating an orange a few days ago and that smell, along with the chill in the air was the start of it all. On my way home from SoDak last Sunday I bought a Christmas music CD from the Starbucks in York. That also made me feel like Christmas. Yesterday, we went to a nursery and bought a Christmas tree. Last night we decorated it. It's a short bugger and completely loaded down with lights, shiny garland and ornaments.

As a side note, I want to thank Erin for reminding me about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. This week I had a much needed reprieve from deli meat and mustard.

Pumpkin Pie Blizzards Have Returned!!!

I went to another drag (queen, not car racing) show last night. It wasn't bad, but there were too many sappy soulful songs. Regardless, I highly recommend the experience. Maybe I just like this stuff because from an anthropological perspective experiencing people and situations different from my own is interesting to me.

So Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Maybe you already knew that. As far as we know, Jeremy's whole family (parents, siblings, spouses and spawn of siblings) are coming to our place for the holiday. That's a lot of people - Jeremy has six siblings. Neither of us has ever hosted Thanksgiving before so I have feelings of uncertainty. I mean, do we need to get our turkey(s) now in case the grocery store runs out? I think Carla (mom) and Michelle (sister) usually do the cooking for their Thanksgivings up in SD and Jay (brother-in-law) makes some sort of pheasant dish so I am hoping these people will take over when they get here.

I believe everyone is staying at our house too. We have a lot of open spaces for sleeping and hanging out, but only one working shower so this could get interesting.

Finally, I just want everyone to know that DQ has started making their delectable pumpkin blizzards again. Hurry to your local DQ because this is a limited time offer and boy are they good. Last Saturday, while I was enjoying my first pumpkin blizzard of the year, I started thinking they would not be that hard to reproduce once DQ discontinues them after the holidays. I believe all I would have to do is combine vanilla ice cream, canned pumpkin pie filling and some graham crackers or Nilla wafers. However, making them myself might take the specialness out of the limited time offer at DQ. Wow, these are the tough decisions of my life.

life expectancy

I checked out this life expectancy calculator after hearing about it on Sunday Morning on CBS. I'm not really sure how you can calculate life expectancy with accuracy, but it is a bit interesting.

lemonade stand

Below the Newsweek feed I added "ber's lemonade stand." I heard about it on the Today show. I picked items that I have and like and made up my own ad. Apparently, if someone buys something from the lemonade stand I get some sort of commission. Ah, the beauty of our capitalist consumer oriented society. There are some neat things, like my new camera, a wine I really liked, some of my favorite reading material and Asics running shoes I really like. However, if this really annoys anyone I will get rid of it.