What Would Jane Austen Do?

Y'all go sign up for Jen's swap.

Talking to my friend, Bonjour Madame , just made me realize: I am the Tracy Flick of the holidays. It seems that no one else keeps a spreadsheet of activities and gifts going back 8 years, as well as a database of Christmas card addresses. Any of my homies out there doing the same thing? pic via

On Sunday we had a party to celebrate my Grandmother's ninetieth birthday and her new house (an addition to my parents' house). Funny story: Grandmother is a twin, and she spent her actual birthday with her twin sister. Even at their ages, these ladies are CRAZY competitive. [You do NOT want to play a board game against them.] My mom called my great aunt and asked how her party was; when she asked how many people did she have, she told my mom, "About... 51." You know, roughly . So our goal was to beat that number. We had 76. Or so ;-). Some photos... This is a bad picture, but we were able to play some of her favorite records on an old Victrola my parents have. She likes Big Band. From the florist. I made cheese crackers, pecan tassies, and chicken salad finger sandwiches. We also put out cheese and crackers, fruit skewers, nuts, and of course a cake. Sherbet punch -- now it's a party! Winnie will kill me for posting this, but I thought her jacket was so ...

Watching Papi and I couldn't get into this show at first, but enough people kept calling it their "favorite show" that we had to give it another try. For whatever reason, now I think it's absolutely hilarious. We've been watching the episodes on Hulu . This season has me in tears with laughter. This was really and truly coincidental, but today's Amazon Gold Box deal is the box set of Seasons 1-4 at 60% off regular price (in case you're interested). If you order it, make sure to get the Christmas DVD at the same time, because you'll get another $10 off.* *Disclosure: I bet I get a shiny nickel out of it if you order through that link. Which is obviously the only reason I blog -- for all the phat loot.

On Sunday I went to the Urban Market , where I found these great carved horn birds at a booth run by the lovely and talented Carolina Saunders . She had so much great stuff; I wish I could have bought it all.

You know that calendar that Martha has in the front pages of her magazine? She has it on her website, too, only it's more detailed. You can display her calendars for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Homekeeping, and Gardening. And! You can put her calendars on your own Google calendar (or Yahoo!, Outlook, or iCal calendars). Of course, you may not want to display them all at the same time, but they will be there in the sidebar when you're ready for them. Ooooh, I'm so excited.

I finally figured out how to make the kids' costume pictures work. Updated post here .

Anybody want to trade Christmas cards? Leave a comment here; I'll email you with my address and you can send me yours.

At the kids' school they have a "book character parade" for Halloween. Every kid is supposed to dress up as a character from a book. Emmet and Becca decided that they wanted to be their own characters that they made up. So they each wrote a book with those characters. I decided that would have to count. Emmet is Emmet from the Emmet-Power Aquarium. His story involves rescuing seven crystals or something. You can't see his costume very well. We wrapped duct tape around an old t-shirt; the blue is a painter's tape bandolier. There are also some plastic "crystals" on there. The bottoms are sweatpants with crystal compass points on the left hip. Becca is the Beccatron. She's wearing a bike helmet covered in foil and two foil roasting pans attached with duct tape. The buttons on the robot are condiment cups that she colored and I attached with hot glue. [There are also buttons on the top of the helmet.] Her outfit is complete with the famous ...

We had a Halloween party Saturday night. Becca and I worked together on the decorations; I liked the way they turned out. papel picado banner (it was longer than this, obvs.) eyeball ornaments glitter skull arrangement on the windowsill in the bathroom ghost luminarias The ghost luminarias are made from milk jugs (I'm sure you totally couldn't tell). I used flameless tealights inside. I thought the tealights worked great, but if you buy them, be advised that there will be a lot of duds in every package. The first package had about 50% duds; subsequent packages had maybe 25% duds.

Who's that Spartan in my Tee-pee? Its ME ITS me! , originally uploaded by houston mamacita . You wouldn't want to be on the bottom of that pyramid.