It's Been a Clark Griswold Kind of Day

I feel like I've been in the movie Christmas Vacation 2: Country Christmas today.

It all started off with not being able to sleep in. During the week, Clint and I are pretty strict about heading to bed early. We generally get a full night's sleep most nights. However, on the weekends, we go to bed late because he hunts and I wait up, and we just can't seem to sleep in. Maybe it's that we get up at 4:30 am during the week. Maybe it's just hard not to waste all that time you can spend relaxing on the weekends. Maybe Bonnie and Hank and Roxy are just excited that we haven't left for work and are here to play with them. Whatever it is, we just can't sleep in.

When we woke up, I made breakfast and we got our day started with going to Clint's parents' house to get our outside Christmas lights. As we were taking the long journey down our driveway, we noticed that Clinton's live trap (what he catches raccoons in) was missing. No where to be found. I start to get creeped out. Who has the balls to come halfway down our driveway and take something? Everyone knows we live here. Who would do that to us? While we are panicking, we are still driving around in the conservation parking lot glancing in the back of pickup trucks for the trap.

We give up on the wild goose chase for the trap and go get the Christmas lights. When we take the curve of the driveway and what do we see by his parents' porch? The live trap. I was relieved that the "thief" was just Clint's dad. Clint, however, was a little hot under the collar. Then, his dad pulls up on the 4 wheeler and as Clint is getting out of the truck, he's muttering about that's illegal...should report him to the conservation.

I couldn't help it. I just started laughing. I laughed so hard I cried. I figured his dad wanted the trap to get the skunk that has taken residence under their porch. Clint saw me laughing and we were both just relieved that no one was stealing from us that he started laughing, too.

We finally get our tub of Christmas lights, hand-me-down multi-colored icicle lights if you wanted to know, and head back to the house to put them up on the deck. We start running into some problems. First of all, as you might have noticed from the picture, our lights are in one gigantic, disco ball of fun. Second of all, after untangling them, some of them only lit up halfway down the strand. Thirdly, when we go to hang them up, we don't have gutters to hook our hooks on, so we tie the lights to the deck railing with last year's leftover Christmas ribbon. All in all, it lights up and people drive far enough away from our house that they're just excited to see that we have made the effort to put lights up.

Later that day, I go to Columbia to finish my Christmas shopping. It is crazy there! I stay close to the mall and Walmart right by the interstate thinking that I won't deal with as much traffic. Wrong! I think I spent more time sitting in my car watching the lights change and people making bad traffic decisions than I do actually shopping. By the time I'm heading home, I'm almost falling asleep waiting on the light.

Now, I'm just sitting here in my recliner waiting for a squirrel to jump out of my tree or for one of my dogs to go all crazy and knock down my table or just sit there and eat trash. Boy, I hope my cousin doesn't bring my hog-tied boss as an early Christmas gift!