My sister visited last week, so I visited with her rather than write a blog post 🙃. Somewhat ironically, after my last post; the last two weeks have been rather slow, at least on the house front. The dumpster did finally get filled and taken away, so that feels good. I didn’t take a picture of the full dumpster, because it had a layer of snow on top and you couldn’t tell it was full of stuff… in retrospect, that probably would have been a good picture ❄️😆.

My aunt and I have been picking away at the upstairs parlor, but that is very slow going. I am skeptical that we’ll have it empty and clean in time to put up a Christmas tree… we’re not stressing about it 🤷🏻‍♀️. We’re planning a pretty low-key Christmas anyway… it just doesn’t make sense to bring more stuff into this house 😵‍💫😂.

Decorating for Christmas has been a source of fun and adventure, however. As we randomly stumble across different masses of decorations, I pull out a few I like and find places to put them. Chaos decorating is how I think of it 😂. I’ll probably just keep doing that until Christmas – so keep an eye out for new photos 😊💗🎄

While my sister was here, we started making Christmas cookies, a time-honored tradition in our family. When our mom was alive, we always made a lot of cookies – double and triple batches of half a dozen or more different kinds. The only thing we never made was sugar cookies – mom always said they were too much work! My sister and I carried on that tradition for several years after mom died, but after a while we just didn’t keep up with it. We made probably thousands of cookies, then packaged them up and mailed them all around the country. I tried to maintain the tradition after moving away from my sister, but it was too overwhelming to keep up with by myself. Looking back now, I’m not sure how I ever did it 😂.

These days we just do a handful of favorites. Everybody loves peanut butter blossoms… I didn’t make them first this year, and each member of my family asked me at least once if we were making them/when we were making them/why hadn’t we made them yet 🤣. We made a double batch two days ago and they are nearly gone already – I’ll probably have to make more!

I have also been working quite a lot on social media, particularly Facebook. It would be amazing if we could make a living doing social media, so we can focus our energy on the rehabilitating the house and living our lives. I don’t know how realistic that is 🤷🏻‍♀️. I think we have an interesting story to tell, and I think we’re getting good engagement, but we really don’t know what we’re doing 🤣🤣🤣. I guess we just keep doing our thing – keep learning, keep growing, and hope for the best 🤞. And like anything else, if we really want to make it successful, we have to put in the work. That means spending a lot of time on Facebook, which feels a lot like I’m just being lazy 😕… this is a weird life we are living 🙃