Well, last weekend my sister & her hubby came over for a visit.  The  visit went very well.  My hubby & hers shot some pool in the game room and hung out while my sister dragged me to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond store.  She bought me a Roomba vacuum cleaner there!  She said she has one and loves it, and wanted me to have one, too!  Wasn’t that sweet of her?

So, we brought it home, charged it up and gave it a whirl.  I LOVE IT!  Today’s convenience appliances are just too cool!  Granted, it does not clean as deep as my “regular” vacuum cleaner, but the fact that it cleans without me having to push it around is wonderful!  I can run it every day or so while I’m doing something else, so that will help to keep the house cleaner than running the regular vacuum once a week.

One of my favorite products in the world is the Hershey’s Good Night Kisses Hot Chocolate mix.  It is 99% caffeine free, and I like to drink it at night before bedtime.  It is sweet and soothing and I believe that it helps me to sleep because I mix it up with milk instead of water.  After all, the old folk wisdom is that a warm glass of milk will help you sleep at night seems to be true for me, and the fact that the Hot Chocolate is 99% caffeine free I don’t worry about the caffeine keeping me awake.

The problem that I have with the product is that often times the grocery store that I buy it from is out of stock for weeks at a time.  When I do find it on the shelves I usually buy three or four boxes.  But I ran out of it two weeks ago and the store hasn’t had it on the shelves the last three times I’ve gone shopping!  So I guess the next time I find it on the shelves I’ll buy every single box they have!

I think that on the first day of winter everyone should have enough snow to make a snowman!  That would be a great way to celebrate the first day of winter, don’t you think?  We don’t have any snow on the ground around here, though, so I am wearing my snowman sweatshirt today instead, trying to get into the spirit.  It’s a cute sweatshirt that I got as a Christmas gift a few years ago.  It is mostly white, with a snowman’s face on it, with the saying “Just add snow.”  I don’t buy myself Christmasyclothes because I don’t feel that they are practical enough for me to spend my money on them, but other people do give them to me as gifts, so I wear them.  It’s probably a good thing that people DO give them to me, I see so many people wearing Christmas themed clothing that I’d probably be labeled a “Scrooge” if I didn’t wear Christmasy clothes too!

Last weekend we bought a small artificial Christmas Tree at a thrift store, and brought it home and set it up.  We had to re-arrange some furniture, and now walking through the place is a little bit more challenging, but we’ll make do with it for a few weeks!  I’m hoping to have the time to decorate it this weekend.  I have a pretty large collection of handmade ornaments that I like to put on the tree.  Some were made by friends and family, some I made.  Each one is full of memories, and that is why I like to decorate the tree – each ornament holds a memory that is very dear to me in some way.  I think that is why I like Christmas so much!

I was reading on the Time.com website that there is a shortage of bananas in Japan because of the popularity of a new diet fad called the morning banana diet. The “diet” consists of eating one (or as many as you want) bananas for breakfast with a glass of water, and eating anything you want for lunch and dinner (as long as you skip dessert) and you have to go to bed before midnight. People seem to think this diet works, so they are buying up bananas as soon as they reach the store shelves! I haven’t noticed a shortage of bananas around here yet, I wonder if the fad will hit here too!