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About Table for Five:
First there was me and my husband, and then there were two wonderful sons. And then there was a new baby coming! One day, we walked into a restaurant, and the waitress asked how many? I said, table for four, please. Then I turned to my husband and said, when the baby comes, we'll need to ask for a table for five. And the rest, as they say, is history. I hope you enjoy my posts, reviews, photos, and giveaways!
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Once again, I’m coming to you live from the Township Library, because there is STILL NO INTERNET CONNECTION at my house. Whatever happened to cause this outage must have been a doozy for it to take this long to fix.
Today is my last post for NaBloPoMo 2006. I would like to thank M Kennedy, who surely couldn’t have foreseen the kind of response she would get when she suggested this back in October. Other participants have mentioned that they didn’t like having to post every day but not me-I appreciated the challenge and the opportunity to look for post material every day. I learned to write for myself, and was surprised that people still came to read, every day.
Thank you, readers, for giving me that boost of confidence. You kept me going with your comments and never once made me feel like you wished I would just stop posting already. I signed up to post every day in December, too, through a website called Holidaillies, but I’ll only post tomorrow if my Internet connection comes back. This library that I’m using is very, very small, only one room, and I just can’t keep dragging the kids here every day. So I might miss a day or two in December before I resuming daily posts.
And now, I must sign off. There is a Winter Storm Warning in effect, the prediction is for anywhere from one to twelve inches of snow by tomorrow. I have to take the kids to Target (yay! Kaitlyn crying in the cart!) to buy Ryan a pair of snow pants and boots. Snow pants are required at school if they want to go outside for recess on a snowy day. With the blizzard a ‘comin, I want to beat the crowds and get to Target now. So, good night, and please do keep stopping by. Once I’m able to use my own computer again, I’ll be updating Flickr and getting ready to write about Christmas Tree decorating, my Dickens Village, Christmas gifts, and Nathan’s birthday on the 21st. December should be lots of fun here at Table for Five, hope you’ll join me.
xoxo elizabeth
Exactly how dedicated am I to NaBloPoMo? I spent three hours today trying to figure out why I couldn’t get an Internet connection, calling Comcast twice, and spending two of those hours on the phone long distance with my husband as we ran through the turning off and turning back on of our cable modem, both routers, and eight different network connections. Our server rack is in the basement, which meant going down the stairs and climbing up a stepstool to access the equipment, then down off the stepstool and back up the stairs to the living room to see if the connection was working.
Finally I called Comcast again and told yet another Support Tech that I had done everything I could think of. He suggested maybe it was a billing issue (um, NO) and connected me to billing. She said no, it wasn’t because I was late on my payment or anything (TOLD YA), so I pulled out my wife-of-a-Support-Tech card and asked to please speak to the Second Level Resolution person. After fifteen minutes on hold, guess what I found out?
Comcast had a huge Internet outage, affecting SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND customers in the Lansing and Grand Rapids area. D’Oh! So here I am at the Township Library, using my 30 free minutes of Internet access to write this post, because I’ll be DAMNED if I’m going to lose NaBloPoMo on the second-to-last day because of an outage.
I have to go now, even though I had a great post planned about Christmas gifts. I really appreciate all the great responses I got to my posts about Christmas music and movies, and I’m planning to rent National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation just as soon as I can. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have my connection back, and I can write my NaBloPoMo wrap-up. Maybe I’d better write it out longhand on a legal pad just in case I don’t have a connection tomorrow and have to come back to the library.
There’s no internet at my house. THERE’S NO INTERNET AT MY HOUSE. Somebody hold me.
But before we do that, keep those Christmas song suggestions coming! I’ve already wasted several hours lost in the music section of Amazon.com, where you can listen to snippets of almost every song on every album they sell. I started with your suggestions and then jumped from site to site listening to different artists covering the same songs, trying to find just the right version of every song. It would have been nice to do that on iTunes, but they don’t have the listening feature on very many songs.
Does anyone else like “The Coventry Carol” by Alison Moyet? Does anyone else know who Alison Moyet is? What’s really weird is that “Upstairs at Eric’s” was pretty much required listening at my first college, only EVERYONE called the band “Yaz”, not “Yazoo” which was the actual name. And now I have “Don’t Go” firmly stuck in my head.
I wish I had a lot more than ten dollars to spend, that’s for sure. I almost ditched the entire Christmas music plan to buy THIS. I promised, way back when I was doing Thursday American Idol Recaps, that I would buy any album Chris Daughty released. But it will have to wait, for ’tis the season first.
And NOW, let’s turn our attention to Christmas movies. I LOVE THEM, as you might have already guessed. My kids and I have a core group of DVDs that are on rotation from Thanksgiving to at least New Year’s, we take turns picking from their favorites and mine. We like the classics: Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph, Frosty, The Year Without a Santa Claus. I still love to watch Elmo Saves Christmas, and now with Kaitlyn in full Elmo-addiction, I’m guessing she’ll love it too. We have it on VHS though, so I have to get it on DVD first. WE also love a Veggie Tales movie called The Toy that Saved Christmas. You can get it at Blockbuster in a 2-disc set along with The Star of Christmas, which is also good. Another movie I love to watch at Christmas is an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Jingle All The Way. It’s not the greatest movie ever, but the co-stars are Sinbad, Rita Wilson, little Jake Lloyd before he was in “Phantom Menace”, and Phil Hartman. It’s interesting to watch Ah-nuld do physical comedy, and it has a happy ending. And of course, we love to watch A Christmas Story, preferably a dozen times back-to-back during the TNT marathon every year!
Our newest Christmas movie favorite is Elf. On the DVD commentary, Jon Favreau says he purposely designed the movie to look like a holiday classic, and to me it already is. We also listen to the soundtrack in the car almost every day. We watch both The Santa Clause, and The Santa Clause 2. I don’t own Christmas with the Kranks, but I’ve seen it and I liked it, and I think Tim Allen is becoming the Christmas movie guy.
Other movies that aren’t specifically Christmas movies but that I like to watch this time of year are You’ve Got Mail, and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Both movies show New York at Christmas time, which to me seems like it would be the most exciting place on earth during Christmas. All those lights, and the store display windows, and the huge tree at Rockefeller Center-I would be in heaven.
So, now we come to the audience-participation section of this post. I want to know what your must-watch movies are for the holidays. With Blockbuster Online I get a ridiculous number of rentals every month, so tell me what Christmas movies are worth renting. Even if it’s not a traditional holiday movie, what flicks mean Christmas to you?
Back in October, I won a ten dollar gift certificate for iTunes just for using Blingo to do a search! Although I don’t have an iPod, I can save the music to my hard drive and play it using the Xbox 360 and running it through the TV and stereo (which is very cool, by the way).
I’ve added a link to Blingo on my sidebar if you’re interested in checking it out. Meanwhile, I want to use the ten dollar credit to buy some new Christmas music. Here’s where you all can help-although I have an extensive collection of Christmas CDs, I’m always on the lookout for new ones. But rather than buy a CD which might have only one or two songs I like, I want to use iTunes to put together a selection of YOUR favorites.
In the comments, tell me the name and artist of your favorite Christmas song(s). It can be a classic or something new, any genre. I’ll pick ten that I don’t already own and hopefully they will be available to download on iTunes (if you felt so inclined to check first, that would be great).
So, you’ll help me out then? Thanks. You’re so sweet!
I went shopping again today, ALONE. My husband is really racking up the get-sex-when-HE-wants-it points, I tell ya. At Best Buy, I bought “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “The Santa Clause” on DVD, 2 for twenty bucks. Such a deal. At Target, I returned a pair of pajama bottoms that Chris decided he didn’t want after all, even though they were printed with Stewie from Family Guy and the words “Obey Me”. You’d think he would have wanted to keep those. Last stop was Meijer, for net lights for our shrubs, plus other outdoor-lighting accessories.
The Michigan weather is being atypically cooperative where outdoor decorating is concerned. In about an hour, Chris got us all hooked up:
There are four more shrubs on the other side of the door, continuing the alternating red and green, and the icicle lights go all the way across. This is the earliest we have ever put up the lights, but Chris leaves for Salt Lake City on Tuesday and won’t be home until the following Wednesday. So, lights now. It makes me very happy and gets me in the Christmas spirit. What about you? Have you started decorating yet?