Never Use a Hammer on Your Tree

I was talking to my mom on the phone and mentioned that after 2 weeks, our tree had stopped drinking and I hoped it would make it ’til Christmas.  It is loosing lots of needles, all over our white carpet.  She recommended that I try nailing some holes in the trunk to try to get it to drink through the holes.  Word to the wise, never use a  hammer on your tree.  I crouched down under my tree with my hammer and nail and in my enthusiasm to revive my dying tree, I may have hammered the nail in a little too far.  It got stuck.  In the tree.  SO, I turned the hammer around and used the back to dislodge the nail.  But, I had to use a lot of leverage, it was in there really tight.  In the end, I may have  gotten a little too close to the whole operation, and somehow ended up with a hammer against the bridge of my nose.

Tomorrow our family is doing the lighting of the advent candle and reading, and I imagine I will be up in front of the entire congregation with a bruised black and blue nose.  Swell.  (no pun intended).

I went ahead and pounded in a few more nail holes, despite the first incident.  But on my last hole, I nearly knocked the entire tree over pounding the nail in.  I was hammering too hard.  SO, I suppose it could have been worse.  Instead of a vertical tree losing lots of needles, the tree could have ended up horizontal on my living room floor.

I should have realized that tonight was not the night for creative home remedies.  While giving Harry a bath and supervising the girls’ showers, I decided to try to fix a broken light bulb that was stuck in the socket.  It has been like this for probably a year.  I read on the internet that you can get the rest of the broken bulb out with a potato.  SO, I sacrificed one of our good, organic, farm potatoes in hopes of bringing light back to the bathroom.  Instead, I ended up with bits of potato all over my bathroom, when the potato fell out of my hands and splattered all over the counter after several unsuccessful attempts.

While driving home from yoga today I was composing this blog post in my head.  It was going to be entitled “Best Day YET!”.  I was going to write about how I woke up to sunshine, headed outside to rake leaves, watched the kids run around in the front yard with the new puppy from across the street, visited with my friend who happened to be jogging by, got to see Elyse’s best friend Hannah who is back from Singapore for the holidays, got to take Harry to the park just the 2 of us, had lunch and dinner prepared for me by Chris, and got to go to an awesome 90 minutes of yoga where I flirted with a handstand.  It really was a fabulous day.

But just after dinner Elyse went to go practice her flute and realized she must have left her flute on the bus on Friday.  It is Christmas vacation, and there is no way we will be able to get ahold of anyone to try to locate it or get it back.  She was so looking forward to practicing, and maybe doing a little Christmas concert with Alice and her harp when we go up to Bellingham after Christmas.  She will lose 2 1/2 weeks of practice.  And here’s something interesting:  Thursday night she played a little for Alice and Rody.  One of the songs she played was “Joyful Joyful”.  Alice was checking out her practice book, and said “Where’s ‘Joyful Joyful’ in your practice book?”  “Oh, that’s not in there,” Elyse says.  “I just figured that one out on my own.”  WHAT??  You mean to tell me she just figured the notes out with no music to follow?!  These kids never cease to amaze me.

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