Holiday Decorations

I don’t like the weather this time of year (why can’t it rain only when I’m not trying to go anywhere?), nor do I like how early it gets dark, but I do love all the holiday lights and decorations.

For indoor decorations this year, we (read: Matt) hung blue and white LED icicle lights around the top of the dining room.  They really light up the room, and we hardly need other light in that room.

 

We also put up a Christmas tree.  Our Santa hat made a re-appearance as a tree-topper. It’s a great topper, because it covers up any goofy looking tree tops.  Our tree lights are also LEDs — we really like that they don’t get very hot and that they use less power.

For the outdoor decorations, we put a wreath on the door, lights around the front pillars, and light nets on the bushes.  We also replaced the bulbs in the porch light with one red and one green bulb.

The lights are actually so bright that we can see them from at least the end of the block.  They make it way easier to find our house.

We got Helo in on the Holiday action, too, with a holiday sweater.

And finally, we cleaned out the fireplace, & lit a fire today.  It’s pretty exciting to have a wood burning fireplace, instead of a gas one like at our last place.

Garden, before

A few months ago, we started renting a house near Downtown San Jose.  There are lots of great things about this house, but one of the things I’m most excited about is the garden.

When we first moved in, however, the garden needed a little love.

So, I spent a weekend pulling up all the weeds, raking the dirt, trimming the bushes, and removing the trash.  Afterward, the garden looked much, much better, but was still a little empty, except for the rosemary I decided to leave in and bring back to life.

The garden is pretty awesome — it has four raised beds, and a citrus tree.

You can see the base of the citrus tree in the above picture.  We think it’s some kind of orange tree.

It may be tough to see, but those black irrigation lines need some love.

This bed is ready to be planted!

Helo made sure to help.  Or supervise.

In future posts I’ll talk about what I later planted, how we solved the irrigation issues, and my worm composting.