For me, Christmas starts when Santa goes across the screen at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The holidays are officially here!

TiVo, in a rare moment unreliability, decided to delete the parade before I got a chance to watch it. Grrr . . .

So I started Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. Mama and I went and bought a very real(istic fake) tree for my apartment. My first Christmas tree! I brought up all my Christmas decorations from Florida the last time I was home, so I put out all my Nutcrackers and my nativity set, and then left the tree for another day (since I wasn’t feeling well).

Last night I got the tree all set up - AJ helped me by putting it together and helping me fluff out all the limbs (he’s pretty good at it, LOL)! I then sorted through all my ornaments. There was a bag that I set aside that would be great for a little girl (but are a little too young and pink for me), and the rest I put on the tree. Drumroll please . . .

This is my lovely decorated apartment !

My first Christmas tree!

And a little close up of some ornaments:

Some of the ornaments are newer, like the little Cavalier King Charles Spaniels that look just like Ella and Olive and the little Moravian star to remind me of Winston-Salem, NC (where I attended both undergraduate school at Wake Forest University and graduate school at North Carolina School of the Arts). Others are very old, like the pink sand dollar with a Nutcracker (this was given to me when I danced in the Nutcracker for the first time) and the blue and yellow angels (these hung on my mother’s Christmas tree when she was a girl)!

As I have mentioned, I have a Nutcracker collection, so here is a look at it:

Hmm, let’s get a little closer! Here are Steinbach wisemen . . .

And Steinbach Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare!

And a few more that I have on a bookcase near the kitchen (the short one on the left was my mother’s first nutcracker from before I was born - it’s the first in my collection)!

And my nativity set - I just got this last year and LOVE it!

The only thing I’m missing is an Advent wreath for my table, but that may have to wait until next year.

So, now I’m ready for Christmas for the first time in my adult apartment. Ahhh! I’m so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Something interesting I stumbled upon. This comes from Charles J. Sykes, author of Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, Or Add.

Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)

Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.

Thirteen Things about LINDSEY

1. As you can see, I am back and ready to go! There was a bug in DirectAdmin, the software that the server uses, and it allowed hackers to manipulate anything running on PHP, especially WordPress. However, my host ROCKS, and in less than a week she had physically replaced the hard drive on the server, re-set up EVERYONE’S accounts, restored all the databases (in mint condition), and all websites were back up and running! She’s my favorite :-)!

2. As much as I hated the site being down, and as much as I missed blogging (I was gone less than a week, how pathetic am I?), it was probably good that I couldn’t blog. Last week we did an intense business simulation that absolutely consumed my week. I literally had time for NOTHING else. And that was supposed to be the easy week between sessions! I don’t know what they were thinking!

3. Speaking of . . . school is killing me. The further I get into this program, the harder and more intense it gets. I have NEVER had this much work for school. And it’s not easy work. Some of it makes sense . . . a lot doesn’t. I’m working hard to grasp the concepts, but there are SO MANY new ones that I feel like I’m lost. The schedule is crazy, the work is hard (and in high volume), and my brain doesn’t like to work this way.

4. One nice thing is I FINALLY have a roommate ;-)! Ben finally moved up here this past weekend, and it’s been really nice having him around. He’ll sit around and talk about artsy things with me, which apparently my brain is craving. It’s amazing how an intellectual conversation about something artistic makes my constant headache GO AWAY! Plus, Ben gives me hugs, which I was quite deficient on after a summer of living alone!

5. This sounds so trivial, but one of the things that has made school be so exhausting has been waking up MUCH earlier than I have been the past 4 years. I have to be up around 6AM and be sitting in the classroom ready to go for class at 8AM.

6. One of the things that has gotten me through those hard mornings is coffee! Yup, I was able to cross off #93 on my list of 101 in 1001 - I’ve switched from Diet Coke to black coffee in the mornings!

7. Another thing that gets me through the mornings - breakfast! When I was waking up at 11AM every day, it as easy to skip it, but now I eat it every day! Mark #18 off the list!

8. This past weekend (I didn’t have much homework) I was able to finish watching all the DVDs that I own. I had a couple of TV shows to go, but now I’m good! Cross #82 off!

9. As I posted in my post about backing up, I am now backing up both my websites and my hard drive regularly, knocking off #67 and #68 on my list!

10. Tomorrow my parents, brother, and cousin are all coming up here. And on Friday Bo (my brother) will be moving onto campus at Elon University, 45 minutes from my apartment. He’s growing up so fast, I can’t believe he’s starting college!

11. Along with all my family, the puppies are coming to visit! And since they’re all gonna be busy moving Bo in (and my parents will be staying in a hotel), the puppies get to live with me for the weekend! Woo hoo!!!! I’m so excited, they’re so adorable, and I miss them so much! They are Cavalier King Charles Spaniels - the black one (Tricolor) is Olive, and the tan one (Blenheim) is Ella :)!

12. After browsing around blogs yesterday, I found a post about FlyLady - and decided to join. We’ll see how it goes!

13. Before the crash I did a lot of blogroll checks for Thursday Thirteen, and now that I’m back, I’m gonna pick up where I left off! It was actually a lot of fun because I visited a lot of sites that were newer to the blogroll, so I hadn’t seen them before. But goodness, we’ve got a lot of participants now, LOL!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Leave me a comment and I’ll give you a shout out!

Thirteen Things about LINDSEY

Note: The pics from Barcelona are really fuzzy and I don’t have the Paris pics on my comp yet, but here is a VERY small sampling of the pictures from the trip (my dad took about 2,000 pictures). These are scaled down for the blog. To see larger, uncut versions with descriptions, look at my flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/greystonegirl16/. And now, the pictures!

1. Arles, France







2. Florence, Italy





3. Vatican City







4. Rome, Italy





5. Pompeii, Italy





6. Sorrento, Italy



7. Capri, Italy



8. Mykonos, Greece









9. Istanbul, Turkey









10. Ephesus, Turkey





11. Athens, Greece





12. Corinth, Greece



13. Venice, Greece

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Leave me a comment and I’ll give you a shout out!