"Oh jingle bells...batman smells...."

Yes it's December 1 and only 24 more sleeps till Christmas! My tree will go up tonight when I get home from work because I REFUSE to put up any decorations before 1 December. At work we have a competition for the best decorated work stations and I have just finished putting up my tinsel and my pretty battery operated flashing lights and have had everyone trounce past at least once saying "Oooooh...pretty!". So now the race is on to see who can outdo the others. I'm going to to wait a bit longer to see how elaborate everyone else's becomes before I add any more to my little festive display. One lady has festooned her desk with santa type ballons and has had every one going past with imaginary pins threatening to pop the balloons only for her to produce at least 2 more big bags of balloons and the threat "Bring it on Sister!" Ah it's so lovely to work for a Christian organisation hehe. We do love our christmas here and the smarter ones of us have actually added some Christianity to our display with Nativity scenes etc as a visiting Pastor will be judging. None of us has any idea what the prize will actually be mind you!

Traditionally we also do a Secret Santa which myself and our payroll lady have organised this year. Once we draw out our Secret Recipient we are supposed to do secret little niceities to them. So far my SS has spoilt me rotten :) Every morning I find choclates, poetry, and a beautiful angel bookmark (seems my SS knows me well!) and this morning I received an advent calendar which is now staring at me daring me to demolish all 25 choclates! Ah I love Christmas *grin*

On the home front I have gotten lazy with Christmas now that the kids are all grown and have left home and are doing their own thing. On Sunday I bought a fibre optic tree which has 150 multi coloured lights so all I have to do is unfold it, plug it in and *voila* Christmas tree is up and decorated!

Sunday morning MM and I actually went shopping together to get another TV as he loves the big TV we got for upstairs but now he wanted a smaller version for downstairs in the office. The old one in there has died and he misses the TV there. We tried the Good Guys first and got a quote from them then off to Hardly Normal to see what their best price was and since we had already bought about 5 TV's there last month (ours plus his dad's and their neighbour and our son who all saw our TV and wanted one too!) we knew the guy there would give us a good price which he did.

Happily for MM the Surf Life Savers also had a sausage sizzle going so he was in heaven! He hasn't shopped in about 12 months as he hates it. In fact he has rarely left the house in 12 months and couldn't believe how much has changed in 12 months! So many new roads and shopping centres etc. He was like "that wasn't here before" and "they changed that". I was like "But sweetheart it's been there at least 12 months! You need to get out more!" We also bought some Blu-Ray DVDs to see if they were better quality than normal DVD's and the verdict is not really. We bought a bunch of choclate bars (tried to find Pollywaffles since they are going to be off the market soon and we love them but they were all sold out!). Silly us though left them on the coffee table overnight and all the cholates were like water next day from the heat!

On Sunday, while I was shopping for my tree and my award winning work desk decorations, a massive storm hit. As I was loading the tree into the car I got a frantic phone call from MM saying we just took a direct hit to the house by lighting! He walked into Mr 20's bedroom and it was a war zone. Because his bedroom holds the phone cable housing, the lightning some how blew it apart and shattered his room with bits of pvp plastic. There are scorch marks on the ceiling and on the wall and it actually shattered his TV. Thankfully he was out at the time as it could have been quite nasty had he been there watching TV on his bed as he usually does. So we have had no phones or internet since Sunday and the power we only got back Monday morning. MM reckons it sounded like an explosion and even he damn near shat himself. He raced outside thinking a car exploded or something only to find the tree beside the house split in 2 with a metre long gouge mark in the ground near the tree. He said all the neighbours came running to see what happened and that was when they smelt the smoke. MM was like "Oh crap" and raced back inside to find the mess in Mr 20's room. So yeah by the time I got home it was all done and dusted and we spent the rest of the afternoon ringing family and friends and customers via mobile to say our phones were out and that business was temporarily suspended as we had no power or internet.

As of 30 minutes ago when I rang MM at home, the Telstra guy was there fixing the lines and MM was arguing on the phone with the ISP as they were refusing to fix the internet saying it wasn't their problem and MM has to go through Telstra. The Telstra guy was saying no the ISP has to fix it so I'll let you know who came off worse for wear!