Freeform

Ok, time for some free-form thought, just because I wish I was writing more. Yesterday, Lori put up the tree, and put lights on the tree. We watched Elf and part of Arthur Christmas yesterday and listened to a lot of Christmas music.  Today it's been less Christmasy, though we have the tree, the lights and Lori's put up some other decorations already. 

The day started way too early today, the cat waking us up several times, and Ben waking us up, too.  He was just ready to start the day far earlier than we were.  In the past, I might have seen the extra time as a chance to get some more stuff done, but today, it was difficult to drag myself out of bed.  And then I had to make coffee twice because I didn't get the pot pushed in all the way the first time and it overflowed and got all over and filled everything with coffee grounds.  Yuck. 

Things improved after that.  I've been slowly nursing my first and now second cup, I got some good cleaning done on the back patio that I've wanted to do for a long time and it hasn't been as hot today as they said it would be. 

I'm typing this in a very cool website called https://wordcounter.io - as you type it counts words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and pages.  It also shows you the  "keyword density" - the words you've used the most.  And it's all updating in realtime as you type.  I think I will use this from now on when I want to write a certain number of words.  When you first start, it also counts down how many characters you have left for Twitter and Facebook posts.  Really smart tool.  There's also a little graph, it looks like it wants me to get to 2,500 characters.  Not sure why.

I'm at 4,500 steps and I need to get to 10,000.  That'll be difficult as Ellie's going to have friends over so we'll have access to less of the house, including the living room where I usually make up the steps by jogging in place.  I'll have to see if I can do that in the bedroom, I guess.

31 days to Christmas.  I have some, but not all of my Christmas shopping done which is sad because I have two people to shop for - my wife and my one direct report at work.  It's sad because my wife is shopping for everyone else and I'm sure she's much further along in her shopping.  How else can I make today more Christmasy?  There's the tree frame I made, I can hang that up.  I also still need to do a blog post about it because it was a fun DIY project. 

So far today we haven't listened to any Christmas music because it's all been about listening to whatever Ben wanted to watch.  Which is ironic because he's the one who got us up earlier.  He should be listening to what we want to listen to or watching what we want to watch.  But I guess it doesn't work that way.

I reached 2,500 characters.  Nothing fancy happened.  But feels like I've written enough for now.