The Fifty-Five Days of Christmas?

I think I’ve mowed the yard for the last time this season. I may get the mower out again but it will be more in a leaf sucking capacity then as a lawn mower. This is also the weekend that the wasps have returned to my living room.

This year I am much better armed than I was last year. Last year I relied on bathroom cleaner to both poison and if that failed, drown the wasps. That turned out to be messy and not 100% effective. Sometimes the wasps just got drunk and flew around in circles - trust me, wasps in tiny little Zeros buzzing Bonzi! as they dive bomb your head does not put you into a suitably charitable holiday place. I didn’t want them confused I wanted them dead. In some cases the bathroom cleaner/ poison would knock them senseless for a while and lull me into thinking they were dead, time would pass and the bathroom cleaner/poison would evaporate and the wasps would go on their waspy way. This year I am armed with the vacuum cleaner and an extra long hose. So far, I haven’t had any escapes but I think I’m going to pay someone else to empty the bag. I’m pretty sure they should not live through being sucked into a hose, but I could be wrong. Maybe they have evolved extra strong waspy exoskeletons just in the eventuality they would get sucked into a vacuum. Another plus for the vacuum is that if it happens to sit on the floor for a couple of days, it doesn’t eat the finish off my floor. The More You Know...

The official “Sounds of the Season” is now Christmas. I flipped through the digital music stations on the TV and as of 11/1/05, it is now Christmas Time. On 10/31 they were playing recorded screams around the clock to play at your haunted house and then as of 12:01am on 11/1 they started up with White Christmas.

Doesn’t Thanksgiving have any sounds associated with it? Are there no good Autumnal hits? It’s very sad. Nothing singing the praises of football season or school days? They couldn’t just play the “Top 100 Half Time Performances” or songs about Harvests or something? There is a local radio station that switches to an All Christmas All The Time format around Thanksgiving. I had heard they had started early this year but after tuning in I learned it was only a “Christmas Sneak Peek Weekend”. Whew. My Wal-Mart doesn’t even have all their Christmas stuff up yet.

I do need to find some DIY stocking holders because I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay the $5 a pop for them that even the dollar stores are asking for them and all the holders I’ve seen are big clunky heavy jobs that I don’t need or want. I must have fallen behind the curb on stocking stuffers because I don’t think the holders we used growing up need to possess the towing capacity of a full sized truck.

Despite our lack of rain, the leaves are finally changing. It’s very impressive. I’ve wanted to gather up leaves and send them home to my friends at home in fall foliage challenged Texas, but I haven’t figured out how to accomplish that withy it turning into a huge project. I don’t want to have to go out and buy supplies just so I can say “Look! Real life fall color! Orange! Red! Yellow! Wow!”. It’s cool and all but I don’t want it turn into a project. If any one has any cheap and easy solutions, that don't really require any skill or a lot of patients, let me know.