I live in Minnesota, you know, so I’m feeling a little discontent with the current lack of snow. We have only a dusting. You can still see the grass. This week, the temperatures will reach a high of 45 degrees and that’s just not festive. If you can’t go barefoot on the beach to take photos of the sunset, snow is the required. That’s just how I see it.
My California-living son is flying here Tuesday night for an early Christmas. He’ll be here a week. Then my daughter flies in on Christmas Eve and will be here for a week. Although it’s too bad they won’t see each other, this does mean they’ll each get to sleep on an actual bed instead of an air mattress out in the open where the hooligan cats torture sleeping humans.
My mom was here for a two weeks over the Thanksgiving holiday. I hadn’t seen her since a hurried visit in 2022 when I left her house near the beach abruptly when I suspected I had COVID. (I did not.) Then she herself abruptly left that beach house in the fall of 2022 to relocate to Virginia so I hadn’t seen her in awhile.
A half-empty nest without the addition of any grandchildren feels lackluster. I have yet to put up my outside lights and the bah-humbug part of me says, oh, why bother? But I’m going to put them up anyway because I know my daughter will be thrilled and I like coming home to a lit-up house. We are still worth the effort, right? Right.
Funny story. Our front porch-light was so dim that you couldn’t tell whether it was on or off. On Halloween, I’d string up white lights around the door frame so kids could tell we had treats to dispense. I complained half-heartedly about the dumb light to my husband and he took matters into his own hands and discussed it with an electrician who agreed to put in a new fixture.
That’s when I went outside and peered into the porch-light and decided to . . . try putting in a brighter bulb.
Which did the trick.
Why had I not tried this before? I’m not sure. I assumed it was a solar light or something because who in their right mind would put an extremely low-wattage lightbulb in a porch-light?
Anyway, sometimes the easiest solution is the one that seems too obvious to be true.
I wish all problems were as simple to solve.
If I don’t talk to you again this year (ha ha ha, that joke never gets old, does it?), then have a Merry Christmas!
Actual Unretouched Photo 