Cold be damned, it's purty!

I love where I live. Cheesy, yes, but I do. Of course, I didn't love it quite so much last night, when I was arguing with car seats in my little bitty car at my mom's house, and it was four degrees out. Yeah, four degrees. Cold enough that your jeans hurt your legs when you finally sit down in the car. Anyway, once I'd gotten a few miles down the road & the car had warmed up (and my fingers had regained feeling), it was actually a very pleasant drive home.

My mom's farm is about 35 miles south of my apartment, and to get there, you have to drive through some of the most fertile, beautiful farming country in the world. And I do mean that literally; we are a MAJOR producer of corn & soybeans to, well, the entire planet. I can't for the life of me understand WHY anyone would want to plow any of that under to make strip malls, but I digress. Anyway, it was a beautiful evening, aside from the freaking bitter cold. The moon was full & bright, and sparkled off the snow like something out of a Disney film. You could look out across the fields and see for miles, and every so often there would be a huge old red barn outlined in Christmas lights, which is really cool in my opinion. There was even one farm that had an old 1940s John Deere tractor parked in the front yard, and someone had outlined the whole thing with Christmas lights, and sat a lighted Santa on the seat. Maybe I'm just a simple girl, but I just loved that. The tractor really was beautiful, and the Santa was just silly enough to make you smile. I really love my area, though I could certainly do without the booger-freezing cold.

In other local news, we are now less than a WEEK away from Christmas, and panic is trying to seep in. I'm fighting it as best I can, however. I'm having the girls over for another alcohol-fueled Stitch & Bitch tonight, and will hopefully get at least one or two project completed while they're here. I have at LEAST six or seven projects to finish by next Sunday morning, and that's not counting the ones I'd wanted to do with the boys. I also have to finish wrapping about a million things, and I've got to buy some more bows & tags & a couple groceries, and I've got to clean off this black hole of a desk before anyone comes over & sees what a disorganized wretch I am, and and and... Oy. The good news is, I've already got most everything for my husband wrapped, and a few things for the kids wrapped, so at least that's a start.

Y'know, it does sort of occur to me that I *could* be working on the aforementioned projects now, rather than sitting on the computer & babbling my brains out...