A little Christmas cheer...and raisins

We have no snow here in Southern Maine, except for the odd snowflake here and there. The northern half of the state, though, is getting hammered with a nice snowstorm today. I'm envious. I like snow for Christmas, then after Christmas I like it for cross-country skiing. A friend told me this morning that the Farmers' Almanac predicts little snow for us this winter. I hope it's wrong. It's been known to be wrong.

I won't fully get into the holiday spirit until that first significant snowfall, but in the meantime I've begun digging out the Christmas decorations.

The bubble light mantel box is in place, along with the nutcrackers beside it.

Yesterday Ken and I dragged the giant nutcracker out onto our front porch. He's a big fella, weighing well over 100 pounds, so it's a two-person job to take him outside and bring him back inside after the holidays.

In the past we've stored him upstairs, in one of the closets, but this past year we decided to make our job easier and just store him in Ken's walk-in closet. It took me awhile to adjust to his being there: I'd jump every time I walked past Ken's open closet door, thinking a stranger was standing inside.

I'd intended to get a lot of Christmas decorating done yesterday, but once Mr. Nutcracker had vacated his space, I decided to give Ken's closet a good cleaning.

That's a problem I seem to run into a lot since retiring: I used to stay focused on one task until completion, probably because I was always pressed for time and didn't have the luxury of wandering off course.

Now I constantly wander off course and find myself doing something totally unrelated to the original task. I've been known to find myself using Q-tips and rubbing alcohol to clean the vents in my oven door when I thought I was going to do a load of laundry, for instance.

Anyway, I did manage to set up our four little trees in the kitchen, dining room, front hallway, and bedroom. The big tree isn't up in the living room yet, but we'll get to that later this week, probably.

A couple of you have asked for an update on the gin-soaked raisin treatment for arthritis.

Ken is quite sure it's working. He says he's either not feeling the pain or not thinking about the pain, which to me is a good sign the pain isn't there. Once in awhile he feels a sharp jab, but for the most part the constant pain is gone.

I need to mix up a new batch of raisins and gin soon, so it will be ready when Ken needs it. He's being good about eating precisely nine raisins per day. Why that's the magic number, we don't know, but nine seem to work.