Holidays....

Here they come...... Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's....... and they will be here and gone in a heartbeat.

Right now, I'm in the midst of planning our Halloween party. Invitations are written and will be sent out this week. Favors and gift-bags and special prizes are all ready and waiting on the closet shelf. All I have to do is decorate, and I'll be doing that within the next week. I was in a card store yesterday and found cute Halloween invitations, so I bought them for next year. I considered leaving them there and buying them when the store puts them on sale after Halloween, but there were just three packages... too cute to take a chance that they'd still be there.

We've made up the list for the Christmas party, and I've already got the invitations for that. I've already begun wrapping Christmas gifts and getting them packed into shipping boxes. Other Christmas gifts (specialty foods) that I send from catalogs are already ordered and set to be delivered during Christmas week.

We're still talking about New Year's Eve. I'm planning to have a sit-down dinner here at the house, for 10 or 12 people. An ultimate pot-luck dinner, with friends bringing a really special and fancy recipe to share with everyone. I'd have to ask some to bring appetizers, others to bring a main course, maybe someone else to bring soup, then a special bread, and one or two spectacular desserts. This way we'll have everything "from soup to nuts," as the saying goes, and we can have a relaxing, leisurely dinner without the confusion of a busy restaurant. And champagne or wine........ can't forget that for the holiday. I'll have to start making a list for that.

As I type, the trash trucks are outside, picking up all the tree branches and limbs that fell during the hurricane. Piles of branches are all over every street, piled up near the curbs by homeowners or gardeners. Thankfully, the city is sending extra trucks to pick everything up and make it all disappear. I know that all our friends will be asking everyone at the Halloween party what they did and where they went and how long did it take as they ran from Rita.

Hopefully, by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, Rita will be just a memory.