Man-YURE and other holiday treats

There's just something about December that keeps me from posting on this here blog of mine. Could it be the stress? The buying? The partying? The mania that is my house? That's a big fat yes right there. Right now as we embark upon our fake Christmas Eve (last year the kids won't get the whole "it's not really Christmas" thing), I'm wound.pretty tight, as my darling husband likes to say when I get hyper and stressy.

We just spent a mere hour wrapping/assembling/gathering Santa goods, nearly two hours shorter than last year when we were up until the wee hours fighting with a racetrack and a big wheel. This year's assembly item was a workbench, which Mr. Pigs threw together in no time, while I spent far longer than I will admit assembling a simple PVC pipe soccer goal.

We are packed, loaded and ready to go after Santa happens in the morning. You know what we're going to go in? MY NEW CAR! Waaaahooo! Once we realized a couple of weeks ago that we were going to be traveling at Christmas after all (not our original plan, mind you), we got serious about the car hunt we've been dragging our feet on since our September road trip to the beach. I get a little misty-eyed when I realized I've been blogging long enough to have bought my second car in the course of this little blog. I know this because I went schlepping through my archives looking for a particular detail from my last car purchase and found a description of my last car buying event. I like to keep a car for a while due to my abhorrence of car payments. So, I kept 'ol Lucy the RAV4 for six years. I was sad to let her go (and it didn't help when Piglet announced on the way home in the new car, "Mommy, I want to keep your old car forever and ever."), but we had completely outgrown that car. Feet on the backs of seats, no room for even one extra passenger, car seats 4 inches apart, knees in the dashboard. It made for great car trips. You have no idea how relaxing they were.

My new car is pretty awesome, though. It has real grown up features like heated seats and a smart key and a DVD player (Holla!!). I'm not used to it yet and it will be awhile before it has a name....I'm not even sure the gender of this car yet! Gasp! Hopefully we will not have to test the powers of snow handling this weekend as we drive all over the Carolinas in what is predicted to be a white Christmas. Ugh.

I must go finish up some packing and get myself to bed before the wild 'n crazy holiday travel marathon begins tomorrow. I will leave you with the argument that Mr. Pigs and I had the other night that still has me laughing. Mr. Pigs was about to pop an unwashed mushroom into his mouth and I stopped him and said, "Don't eat those, they haven't been washed. You know they grow in manure!" and he began to laugh hysterically at the way I said the word manure. I was soundly unamused, as I have only heard it pronounced this way, and he is notorious for pronouncing words some backwoods country way and having no idea that it may be incorrect. He delicately sounded the word out his way, and I heard: "man-YURE". Seriously? I promptly pulled up my friend dictionary.com and heard the proper pronunciation. If you want to be amused for a minute, just go listen to the dude say "manure". Then imagine us playing it eleventy hundred times in the kitchen and pressing the button each time we walked by the computer just to hear it one more time and laugh some more. The passion in his voice just cracks me up.

Aren't you glad you read to the end? Merry Christmas!