I’ve been feeling pretty lazy about pretty much everything.  I said in my first post of the year that I wanted to get back into working with my polymer clay and jewelry and stuff, but I just haven’t been bitten by that bug yet.  Instead, I’ve been spending my off time playing World of Warcraft with my new Death Knight (I’m now level 61, they start out at level 55), and having seasons of “Supernatural” running on my Mac while I play WoW on my PC.

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All the shopping is done, now I just need to wrap the presents that aren’t the Kiddo’s so I don’t have to worry about rushing to get all that done before bed.  So I’m about to go do that now, and then after my cookie baking marathon yesterday, I need to pick out a bunch of cookies to take to the holiday party later tonight.  Then after we get home from that, I get to make one more dessert to take over for Christmas lunch tomorrow.

Maybe after we get home from lunch tomorrow I can finally relax for more than an hour.  Eesh!  I’m really glad I had this week off, I never would have gotten even a quarter of what I had to do, done, if I had to work.

Well, off to wrap gifts.  Happy holidays!

It’s a very pretty scene, isn’t it? But this is something we can’t see where we live unless we drive north for an hour at least. Snow is a once in a very rare blue moon kind of thing here, and even if it does get cold enough to drop snow, it doesn’t do much more than a dusting, and certainly does not stay on the ground.

I’ve always thought that part of the reason it really never quite seems like Christmas around here come December, is that we never see snow, at least not like in that picture.  When I was young we lived in Kansas where it did snow, and I remember there being snow drifts six feet high or more.  If I recall correctly, I think one year my dad even had to dig out a walk way from the front door with the snow piled up at least three feet high – at the door.

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I’m not sure why, but I just can’t seem to get into the Christmas spirit this season.  Neither of us has an ax looming over our jobs, so no worries there.  We have a bunch of stuff we posted on craigslist and got a lot of inquiries, so there is some extra potential Christmas money there… 

I just can’t quite put my finger on it.  Maybe I’m just picking up on every else’s mood?  I don’t know.  All I do know is there is a little over two weeks left before Christmas and I haven’t even begun my shopping yet.  I am usually a procrastinator but even last year I had most of my shopping done by now, or at least it was ordered and was en route to my house if I bought it online, which most of my purchases were.

I think it partly may be due to that on Sunday I drove 20 miles with the item that would net us the largest amount of cash in one purchase, and waited for 20 minutes for the guy to show up and he was a no call / no show.  He hasn’t even responded to the email I sent later asking what was up.  Communication just completely ceased.  At worst maybe some unfortunate incident happened, at best I hope he was just a flake.  I haven’t heard anything from him so I offered the item to the next person who inquired, so hopefully that person will not flake out.  It really puts a damper on my mood when that happens.  The extra money was going to go toward getting some extra things for the Kiddo and maybe pad our limit for everyone else’s gifts, too.

Originally I had tried setting aside any leftover money out of my weekly lunch allotment, but I have maybe half as much as I should since I ended up spending some of it at a fall festival we went to in October, and another sum went to some new fall clothes for the Kiddo in November.  Ah well, we can make do but the extra money off craiglist sure will be nice.

Now to pull myself out of this funk and at least get SOME shopping started or risk stuff not arriving before Christmas…  

Every year Amazon has this neat program where they list three different products that, if it receives enough votes, will be available for certain selected buyers to purchase at a GREAT discount price (sometimes like 50% off).  This year they have 18 different products to vote on in six rounds.  If you vote, you get entered into a drawing to get a chance to buy the product that wins the vote in its round.

We participated a couple years ago when the Wii was especially hard to find, and we won the opportunity to buy it, and got it for my husband’s brother as a Christmas gift.

This year they have a choice of three PS3 bundles – each with a PS3, a game and a movie, ranging in price from $199 to $229 (the $229 version actually has 2 movies, I think, both of them James Bond movies).  So whichever one wins the vote will be available to 500 people to buy (I think the purchase limit is one per winner in these deals).  The other “rounds” have other different products, round 3 has a 46″ Samsung HDTV for $699 (should it win, of course)!

Not every one will win of course, but hey it’s worth a shot if you’re eyeing one of the products as a gift to someone, or even to yourself, and that product wins the vote and you get drawn to be able to buy it if you want… so go visit Amazon to participate in the voting… You never know, you may win the chance to buy a great product at a super low price! But hurry, the first rounds end soon – as of tomorrow!

Over the weekend I came across a site that led me to pick up another domain and set up a couple more blogs, to try a different avenue to earn some extra money, hopefully, once things get rolling on the blogs.  One blog will be a review site for video games on all consoles, hopefully written by my husband and his best friend, and occasionally some posts by me as well.  The other blog will be reviews about the safety of products geared toward babies and toddlers.

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