It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ...

The Prairies have finally made it through the deep freeze we've been in for the past two weeks. It has been nasty cold with significant wind chills to make a trip outside even more - shall we say "bracing"? Yesterday and today have been absolutely balmy - decent weather for washing my car except that there's been enough melting going on that I would just be trading old dirt and salt for new mud and slush.

We have received a good bit of snow in the past couple weeks. The ditches are filling up - might even be enough to close roads if the wind blew right. Glen had to clear out the yard last weekend or I would have never made it out to work on Monday morning. That's something that he didn't have to do once last winter.

His project last week was leasing a Cat (earthmover) and using it to deepen an exisiting dugout and use the dirt to build up a sort of dam across where spring snow melt usually flows toward a small creek. This will give him a decent sized pond if it fills, and take away our water worries. He and Jesse have long ago decided that they want to name our farm "Skull Ranch" (I think mostly because I don't like the sound of "skull" in a name), and now he tells me that this new body of water will be dubbed "Skull Lake". Could be a world class resort some day, he tells me. Remember folks, you heard it here first!

I've had a very disjointed week. We were to Dauphin, Manitoba to a wedding the Saturday before and came home to try to do two day's work in less than one. I went off to work on Monday morning not even realizing that the Christmas rush at the Post Office would be kicking into high gear - to say the least, it was an interesting day! And an exhausted evening.

Tuesday the hospital in Brandon, Manitoba finally called that Mitchell could book his surgery date for Thursday. The poor kid inherited his mother's lousy genetics as far as gallbladders go, and is every bit as anxious to get rid of his as I was to get rid of mine. We set the date for Thursday, my staff was super about rearranging their week so that I could go, and then the hospital called the morning of the operation and "bumped" his surgery for a more life and death case. It left poor Mick even more stressed about it all, and me with a day off in the middle of the week. I decided that it wasn't going to go to waste so I tied into my Christmas baking.

By the end of the day I had two kinds of tarts, a double batch of cookies, and enough poppycock to feed an army. I've hauled a big part of it down to the deepfreeze so that there might be something left by the actual holiday, and I threatened to take a picture of it with today's newspaper so that I could prove that I had, indeed, done Christmas baking for 2006.

Today I house cleaned all morning and then asked Glen to climb up into the attic and bring down the Christmas decorations. I had plans to get a whole bunch of that job done, but it just didn't seem like much fun all by myself. Jesse and Jenn will be home after their last exam on Monday afternoon - maybe they'll help me. Sandy won't be home till the following week as her exam schedule is different. And Mitchell should be minus his gallbladder by Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully, while he is sleeping off the anesthetic I'll have time to get out to the stores and get the last of the things I need for gifts. I know what I need so it shouldn't take me too long.

Then there should only be the tree to put up, the gifts to wrap, and maybe a bottle of wine to unwind with ...