Near Northsider – Houston

Christmas came and went and it turns out no other people put lights on their house. Not even us. It was a nice time, though and it finally felt like Christmas on Christmas Day. Squee got lots of gifts that he’s too young to play with and he ended up liking the boxes they came in rather than the toys themselves.

It’s been a relaxing week since both of us have been off. Not that we’ve had nothing to do. It just means that we;ve had more time to clean and be with family – all of the family.

It’s been quiet on the block except for a few firecrakers that we hear going off and quite a few gunshots being fired. We’re hearing more gunshots than in past years, so I’m getting a little worried. It’s usually not bad at all as far as gunshots. Both Sarah and I can remember growing up hearing all kinds of firearms going off on New Year’s eve and bullets falling on rooftops like metal rain.

Hopefully it’ll stay laid back this year. I’m not interested in throwing parties or going to parties this year. Just a nice night at home with just us, watching TV and drinking champaign (except for Squee of course).

It doesn’t quite feel like Christmas yet. It’s getting close, but still not quite like it used to feel.

We’ve got the tree up already. Sarah decorated it with a few strings of colored lights and all of our ornaments. We don’t have a lot of ornaments, just what we’ve managed to collect and make for ourselves. We have just enough to decorate a 7-foot tree with some festivity while it still looks like there’s room to grow. It’s a real (biological) douglas fir tree. We buy one every year. It’s one of those things that both of us agreed that we just have to do.

We’ve gone shopping for some gifts, but of course we still have more shopping to go. We always have so many gifts to buy, so we can’t spend very much one any one thing. We only have the weekends to go shopping, so the stress builds the closer to the 24th we get.

I still haven’t put lights on the house. Maybe that’s one reason things don’t seem christmasy yet. Actually, there aren’t many houses on our block that have lights up yet. Now that I think about it, there are NO christmas lights on our entire block. That’s unusual. I wonder if people are just too busy this year. We have had a few new people on the block in the past year who might not be into the lights on the house. We still have a week before Christmas and we all do things at the last minute, so I guess we still have time to see how lit our block becomes.

One reason I may not feel like it’s the holiday season is the fact that it’s been like 80 degrees for the past week!

not posted for a while, but nobody reads it, so it doesn’t matter too much. I mostly just write this because I can. I’m up late again trying to be productive after a day of work, but not really getting anything done. as usual. Just kinda sitting around spaced and tired while doing little bits of things here and there.