Highs and Lows of November

November was a good month!

Highs

1. My son and his wife and their dog came for a nice, long Thanksgiving visit. They went to the grocery store when they got here, got ingredients for side dishes and cooked five types of wonderful go-with-turkey food! It’s the first time I’ve ever seen my son cook — so the sight of him chopping veggies (brussel sprouts and turkey bacon shown here) like a pro was pretty astonishing.
2. Got my tree early — day after Thanksgiving! — and bought a second tree and made three pine Christmas wreaths. They smell SO good.
3. Went shopping on Black Friday from 7 a.m. – 2 p.m. There were hardly any people at the mall until about 10, and by noon it was packed. The first store I went to had about three other customers in it and a lot of clerks wandering around. It was like the Twilight Zone! I didn’t get gifts for anyone else, but found a few bargains for myself…
4. This month was the biggest ever for my blog — got 12,000+ hits, and most of them were for adult advent calendar gift ideas. Must be a lot of people out there making them this year!
5. Went to a really cool military retirement for a friend of mine, who’s also a scrapbooking buddy.  You have to admire and respect someone who made it 22 years as a military officer (getting two master’s degrees along the way), while also being a wife, mother, friend, sister,  and genuinely nice person. By the end of the touching ceremony — that involved her immediate family and a lot of friends from out-of-town, I wasn’t the only one wiping my eyes.
6. Thanksgiving decorations always make the house more cheerful.
7. Went to a great drive-through recycling event at the mall. They took electronics, batteries, old paint and more, and also donations for Goodwill, and items to shred. Crossed a lot of things off my to-do list that day.
8. Put on the last fundraising event of the season at work — a Tallest Tower Contest. Teams of three or fewer people got 30 sheets of newspaper each, and had to construct the tallest tower they could. No glue, no staples, nothing else. (I saw one team spit on some paper to try to stick it together!) Each team also had to construct a hat from newspaper and one member had to be wearing it — and the structure had to be standing unsupported — when the bell signaled time was up. It was fun! (I saved newspapers for months before the event in a stack on the fireplace, and it looked like a hoarder’s house.)
9. Went to Myrtle Beach for a weekend scrapbooking retreat. The weather was kind of weird, though. One day it was too hot to sit on the oceanfront balcony and have breakfast and the next day it was too cold! But it’s always nice to go to the beach.

Lows

1. None, really.

Hope you had a good November — and that December brings you lots of things to be merry about.