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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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!

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