Happy Independence Day from GoDaddy.com!

The is the BEST Independence Day video I have seen this year, enjoy!

I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year

I started working on a year in review post but I haven’t finished it yet so I guess it will be posted in 2009.

I have so many things to be thankful for in 2008 along with some sad losses but that’s life.

Fifteen minutes till count down here in the midwest,

I ish you all a Happy New Year!

Be Devine in 2009

I’m looking forward to sharing with you in 2009

Happy Birthday Jesus

When the kids were little I would have a Birthday cake for Jesus and we would sing and blow out the candles. I don’t know when I stopped that tradition but maybe I’ll start it up again tonight with candles on the mint chocolate pie.

I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas today.  I hope you are all able to share it with friends and family. I wish you all safe travels good company and great food.

We have a White Christmas with over a foot of snow on the ground.  As you can see from the picture we have a very long and wide driveway to keep clear. The forcast calls for a wintery mix tonight so I’m glad we won’t be driving anywhere. 

It’s hard to believe that this year is just about done. I’m starting my list of goals and dreams for 2009.  Now for a cup of coffee in front of the warm fire then off to work on dinner.

God Bless

The sights and sounds of the holiday season

This is a BIG time and money saving hint for the season. 

Watch this video and save yourself the time and expense of putting up thousands of lights.  Just hit play anytime you feel the need to view the pretty lights.

 I want to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas

Happy 1st. Day Of Winter

Well it has looked like winter for a long time now up here in North Central Wisconsin.  No, I’m not complaining, I love winter and snow.  That’s one of the reasons we moved further north 7 years ago.  In the winter I feel happy and alive. 

The summer heat really gets to me and I feel tired and nauseous, we don’t have air conditioning.  I might have SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) in reverse. OK I just looked t up and it can sometimes be in reverse.

So what does Winter Solstice mean? It means the nights will be shorter and each day will be longer.  There will be more and more daylight.  I’m all for more daylight.  We live in the woods and our house is pretty dark inside already so more daylight means less electricity used on lighting. That will be a savings.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Winter!

This past weekend was spent with my husbands family celebrating Christmas at his parents home near Chicago. Friday we packed up the van and my husband, son and I headed south.  First stop was UW Stevens Point to pick up our older son then on to WI Lutheran College in Milwaukee to pick up our daughter. 

The drive between Milwaukee to Chicago was dotted with areas of stop and go and one car in front of us lost his spare tire, but we made it safely.  Saturday afternoon the rest of the families started to show up, 16 members in all. Jim’s parent put out a feast fit for Kings and Queens.

This year instead of my hugh roasting pan of lasagna I tried a crock pot lasagna that turned out well.  I also do a breakfast and I found a crock pot egg dish that cooks all night and was ready when we all got up, that too went over well.   I will give the recipes in the next couple of days.

The kids are all High School age and above so now they each draw a cousins name, make contact with them to get a list of shopping ideas.  They do the shopping and it saves us parents a lot of extra work. We don’t buy for the adults but we do all buy for the parents (Grandma and Grandpa).

We started the tradition for Jim’s parents of  using the same very large wicker basket and filling it with practical items like; vitamins, hand lotion, soup mixes, dip mixes, candies and nuts etc. And then we usually come up with one or two large gifts.  Then we take the basket back for the next year.

This year the basket got filled once again and I came up with the idea of a digital photo frame and Jim thought of a web-cam for his Dad.  He had to buy one for our house too. I had the other two families bring photos on a flash drive to upload to the frame we were able to view all those plus what Grandma took all weekend on her camera.  When we got home Jim called his father to see if they could talk over the web-cams but they couldn’t get them working right. Guess one of the kids will have to get them up and running.

Some of the kids gifts that were fun were 40 individually wrapped golf balls.   Each was different so it was fun to read each ball. 10 different photo frames from a dollar store. Both inexpensive gifts.

My next posts will be the crock pot recipes I served this year at the in-laws.