A Visit from the Elves

The elves came over this morning and helped decorate the tree. They had fun looking at all my tropical themed ornaments and finding perfect places for them on the weird wire tree. The tallest elf even hung an ornament on a plant hook in the ceiling.

 

One of my favorite ornaments is this little wooden Santa carved by the tallest elf. I had to move it around a few times so he hung looking out at me but I finally managed it so I could take his picture.

 

I even wore my Christmas Converse elf shoes for the day. I lucked onto them one summer at a Rogans Shoes tent sale and save them for important Christmas doings. They used to terribly embarrass DD so they made me feel like I was doing my parental job. Which is to embarrass your children, right? If you look very carefully at the heel of the left shoe you can see the tiny jingle bell hanging there so I jingle when I walk. There's one on the right shoe too. What's not to love? OJ couldn't figure out where the faint jingling was coming from but when I showed him my shoes he understood.

 

The Red-bellied Woodpecker showed up in the middle of a flurry of Sparrows and defended his right to sole ownership of the perch. He poked his beak and lunged at any Sparrow daring enough to fly too close or look like it wanted to land.

 

And an hour later the squirrel was in the square green feeder digging into the seed with a vengeance. It's paws were working overtime and it's jaws were snapping up goodies as fast as it could.

 

Today's drawings are a Reindeer and Snowglobe. I was kind of intimidated when I looked at them yesterday but they weren't difficult to draw at all. I let myself be put off by drawings but usually manage to make them look okay. I need to stop being afraid.

 

I drew a gratitude journal page for the day. I was most grateful for the elves' visit to get the ornaments hauled upstairs and put on the tree. I put a Netflix fire on the TV which also played Christmas carols and we shared one of the coffeecakes after the decorating was done. DS had some sage advice about whether I will do more vendor fairs, helping me to sort out what I want from them. Do I want profit or to get my books out there? Something to think about.

I got an email from BookFunnel for a Holiday Stories sales promo so I hurried up and made a landing page for Christmas at Seaview and applied to join. I learned a couple weeks ago that I can have a book in Kindle Unlimited and still do a SALES promo but not a NEWSLETTER BUILDER one. Last week I put all of my books except The Seaview back onto Kindle Unlimited because I realized that the page reads added a lot to my royalties. If you're a member of KU, you can get eBooks for free, read the pages, and the author makes royalties. This week I've gotten 366 pages read which means a couple bucks that I didn't have before.

 

Today's word total was 1,013. I started something different yesterday and built on it today. Rose is feeling old and Iggy is feeling taken for granted so things aren't as rosy between them as they have been. It occurred to me that no relationship is as smooth and hassle free as I've been writing it. Let's see where this goes.

There's another home Packers game tomorrow and I think I have to wash socks. I'm almost out of my commercially made winter socks. I still have a bunch of hand knit winter socks but they're not always as warm as the store-bought ones. Besides doing laundry isn't hard, just tedious. Maybe I'll paint some more postcards tomorrow too, because it's so much fun.

--Barbara