Why I Oughta...

Thanks to the magic powers of Google+ and AutoAwesome, I woke up this morning and was gifted this cute movie.  Didn't have to lift a finger.  They picked the photos, they picked the videos, they even picked the music.  All I had to do was post it here (and on Google+ of course...) Pretty incredible example of the fun stuff that can come out of massive computing power in the cloud.

I don't seem to have posted on our Front Yard Tree in 2012, but above is the photo (made #autoawesome by Google) of this year's tree. The full story is here in this post on our 2011 tree - which shows the sad state of snow last winter.  We're already ahead of last year's total it seems. Here's my  post from our 2009 tree . Here's my  post from our 2010 tree .   Here's my  post from our 2011 tree .

Longtime readers know my fascination with Christmas Villages.  Hell...I even came up with the name for my own town:   Mantleburg .  But, due to space and a little bit of sanity winning out, I've really slowed down on the acquisition of any sort of new Christmas Village stuff. That was, until I was gifted this Chop Suey Palace from A Christmas Story this am. That lead me down a web rabbit hole where I discovered these:   National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation village stuff . Yeah...they're all there.  Cousin Eddie with the full shitter.  Clark's over-lit house, and even the huge tree on top of the Truckster.  As I've learned in the past, these things roll out in phases, so I'm expecting to see more next year. Maybe Mantleburg will get a new subdivision after all...

We kicked off Christmas in our traditional way:  by cutting down perfectly good trees on a farm down in Braidwood.   Here's last year's post/photo .  Just took a little bit of shaving to get our tree in the living room.  Took about a foot off the bottom and it fit perfectly!

After resisting the purchase of seasonal inflatbles for our yard, I finally caved.  You can see the big guy is now taking up residence in my garden - right outside of our dining room window.  After a nap this weekend, the Bird came down and couldn't have been happier to see him. Am I embarrassed by finally caving to these ridiculous things?  Kind of.  But, that smile on her face more than makes up for it.  In fact, I went out and doubled-down.  More on that later this week!