And on the 29th day...

I'd like to say that on the 29th day, I rested. But that might not happen until the 30th. Of April.

Christmas was wonderful. Busy, blessed, tiring, all those things at once. Our tree didn't just drop needles before the 25th, it was ejecting them like a porcupine in defense mode. We stripped the tree of decorations on Tuesday and got it out for pickup yesterday morning.

We have a piece of furniture that we call a room divider because it was my mom's and that is what she always called it. Every year we wrap white lights around the shelves and place decorations on it that can be viewed from both sides. Two days before Christmas, half of the lights burned out.

When we took them down yesterday, hubby began unwinding the string as he usually does, then said to heck with it and got his wire cutters out can cut the dead string off. This is big news! Huge! Hubby didn't even flinch when he threw out the entire string although we knew half of the bulbs were still working. Notice I didn't say they were still "good"? 

Normally January is a quiet month and I get a bug to reorganize things in a big way. Successful de-cluttering in past years would mean less work this year, but I doubt even that will happen. We have an unusually busy January and February ahead and I am trying to streamline housekeeping chores by sending my snowmen collection on vacation.

Before Colton became so mobile (and tall!) I had snowmen out among the Christmas decor and they remained out until February so that the house wouldn't look so bare. I had to downsize what came out on display this season for safety's sake....both Colton's and for the sake of breakable items. I might just be a wee bit superstitious too. I didn't put snowmen out and we haven't had a snowfall that required shoveling yet. Think I'm on to something?

One bit of organizing that I am doing concerns the computer. I deleted a lot of photos and saved graphics this morning, will be saving what is left on an external drive and then taking more off of my hard drive. This brings me to a question for all of you, especially those of you who like to use many photos and graphics in your posts.
Do you mainly upload images from your hard drive for your posts or do you have them stored elsewhere, such as Photobucket? I mention Photobucket because I use them for animated images and pictures that I want to share on a forum that doesn't allow direct uploads from hard drives.

I am almost at capacity for free storage through Picasa albums with Blogger. The down side to using photo hosting sites such as Photobucket is that sizes have to be changed there rather than a simple click and adjust through Blogger. Another downside is that if you clear out a Photobucket album, forgetting you used one of the images on your blog, you leave this message in its place:

Darn. I hate when that happens.

If you are a graphic-aholic or photo junkie, what are you doing to stay within your free range in your Picasa album?

I'd go take some photos of what I'm working on, but I'm already at 95.66%. Maybe I should just email everyone instead!