It's Beginning to Look a Little Like Christmas

Although Christmas decorations have been in stores for weeks, they don't come out at our house until after Thanksgiving. Thanks go some new decorations that Billie bought on clearance last year, we split decorating into two days, putting most of the things up last night and finishing with the tree today. For comparison, you can take a look at last year's pictures (and our relatively restrained decorating two years ago). Now, on to this year's pictures:

Here is the entryway with our new garland and some new small trees up on the landing.

Speaking of the landing, here are our new trees. One seems a bit weaker than the others...

Despite being seven years old, our regular-size tree is still doing pretty well.

Finally, here is the fireplace with more new garland and some old stockings. Billie bought four of these lighted garlands last year but we only used one.

Now that the decorating is done it is time for pizza, spiced wine, and Love Actually.

Fall Decorations

Since the yard work we did in the spring makes the front of our house visible (though the newly-small tree makes it a little more visible than would have been ideal), Billie finally got to fulfill her lifelong dream of decorating the front of a house with cornstalks. In order to experience that dream she also got to carry the cornstalks, straw, and pumpkins in her car!

For Comparison's Sake

This is a view of our street on November 13 of last year:


And this is a view of our street on October 29 of this year:

Powerless

The last time we posted something it was about the fact that Hurricane Irene hadn't done us much damage. Unfortunately, that wasn't our last storm of the year. Our snow started accumulating on Saturday, October 29 around 11 am and Dad called in the early afternoon to see if we still had power. At that point, we did, but it didn't last much longer.

Our power went out at about 1:25 on Saturday afternoon and stayed out until 9:55 on Sunday night (32.5 hours). As of Friday evening there are still almost 8,000 people in the area without power, so I guess we were relatively lucky. The maple tree in our front yard, which had not lost any of its leaves when the snow hit, was relatively unlucky. It turns out that leaves provide a lot more surface area for snow to pile up on than branches alone. After the power went out we could hear cracks from all directions as branches broke under the weight of the snow. In the end, our tree lost major limbs from three sides, including several near the top of the tree. It has been trimmed back to a fraction of its former size in the hope that it will one day return to its former 15-year-old glory.

The newspaper says that our official accumulation was 5.5 inches. While it might not sound like much, the total accumulation of all known October snowfalls since 1869 was 3.5 inches.
The pictures below will give you a sense of what our weather looked like.

Note how many limbs are touching the ground. They're not supposed to do that.

The view from the front porch a bit earlier.

The view from our bedroom window.

The view from our bedroom window this afternoon.

And finally, some candlelight Yahtzee (at 6:30 pm).