Merry Christmas to All

I know our wish to y’all is not politically correct but why not live on the edge a little? I can’t believe that it is Christmas time already. It seems we have just arrived and looking forward to the festivities and celebrations around the Plantation. We have a lot of stuff to cover to bring you up to date of our ‘doins’.

The last post left you on the edge of your seat, wondering what  our decorations were look’n like – or not! Well, I’m gonna show y’all anyway! On Dec 5th, Barb & I started with the great outdoors, planting poinsettias in our planters and put up the lights that we purchased last year on the post Christmas sales. We ‘McGuyvered’ a way to hang the icicle lights around the shed. Each light is LED, alternating blue then a white one. Unwittingly, we bought all blue and white lights last year – who knew! We strung another blue and white set of flashers around the edge of the deck – we don’t like flashers so this will be their last year on display at our site. I don’t mean to rub it into our northern readers but it is nice to hang the lights in the 70’s (20C). Now let’s move inside and mix up some rum & eggnog to fulfill our Christmas decorating tradition… The wreaths were hung with care and the lit garland draped over the slides. Now lets add some poinsettias and small ornaments. It is coming together nicely and helping to create a festive mood. Last but not the least, we hang snowflakes from the ceiling to give us our ‘winter wonderland’ and that’s as close to snow we want to get!

 

 

 

 

 

We also start to get the site back into shape – pulling the grass out of the walkways, lifting deck boards to get the grass and a tree stem out and spraying some Round-up so this pesky grass does not come back while we’re here. We have 1 garden left to clean out and we may do more than just clean it out. The Wisteria grew a couple of runners about 15 feet long, wow we have never experienced growth like this – my designer is pondering the options.

Barb is back to the sewing and quilter gatherings at the club house. I am going to do some caning for the Mardis Gras auction but I’ll start that in January. So, we’re getting back to normal here – it took us a few days to get our bearings with all the goins on but we did hit the ground running and have caught up. Here is a link to the calendar to give you a feel of the activities available to anyone staying here. The ladies have a Christmas party  and gift swap and Barb has been working on it for awhile and the results show it. Great job babe, Mary will love it! Since she was making one, it’s not too much more effort to make 2 so she did one for us it too looks great.  On ours Barb put 3 Nutcrackers on the back that are paper pieced.

One of the mainstay activity is the Flatulent Fest. Members bring their cooked bean dishes in slow cookers to the club house and the rest of us get to savor all the delicacies. Hummm good, lots of great bean dishes and of course, the fart jokes are  not with standing. The Tuesday and Thursday meals are always well attended and inexpensive – maybe that's why they’re well attended.

Our TV saga continued through the first part of the month. I had sent an email to the campground ‘grape vine’ scrounging any used satellite equipment that anyone wanted to recycle and were offered a couple of systems. One even came with the manual and the remote! It’s always good to ask. Anyway, to make this ordeal even longer, we spoke to both providers down here, Dish & Direct. We understood Dish would give us a monthly plan if we owned our own equipment but this was not the case. Both providers wanted a contract and both were prepared to come out with new equipment and install their service. Both would suspend service for 6 months while we were away but now we have an even longer contract! After talking with several RVers, most use Direct so we tried to initialize one of our donated satellite receivers but found out it was too old and would not work on the latest satellite technology! But of course, the Direct rep was more than happy to upgrade us! Dan, a friend here, suggested we hang a piece of wire off one of the input jacks on the trailer and see what we can get off the air. Wow, we pulled in 8 digital channels so I jumped  online and googled OTA antennas – I am basically cheap and didn’t want to pay $50-$100 for a nice looking antenna that may or may not do the job – so I found a site to describe how to make a HD Bow Tie Antenna for OTA digital signals. The parts cost me less than $10 and about an hour of time to construct but voila, we picked up all the channels (about 30) that are available. We get all the major networks and CW plus a bunch of PBS channels. Barb can watch her soaps, we can get most of our favorite shows in the evening and some golf! The down side is no Canadian news, weather or shows so we feel a little disconnected from home.  Amazing after being on the road for 13 years that this is our first year we feel we are away.

If you checked out the activity calendar, you will see all the plans for our Christmas celebrations, a parade, Christmas dinner and dance, Christmas eve party and gift exchange, Christmas dinner on Christmas day and a Boxing day pot luck. The parade meandered all through the park and the village. The golf carts and tractors were all decked out with lights and holly, we had cyclists and of course the requisite convertibles and Santa on a flatbed trailer with all the ‘kids’ that were on the naughty list!

 

One of the community events is the Santa Boat Parade along the Fish River. Last year was a good show but it was cold. Not knowing what to expect last year, we went a little early and froze ourselves, so this year we arrived a little later but the temps were in the 60’s (15C) which made the viewing much more comfortable. We have met new friends from the Ottawa area and are having a blast with them. The 4 of us went to the boat parade together with the appropriate libation – Sandy and Barb with Margaritas and Simon & I testing that the Black & Tan and Guinness bottles had not gone bad! Yes, Mark, I drank Guinness, LOL.  After an even better parade than last year, we went out for a cat fish feast in Foley. A great day and evening – too much fun, this can’t be legal.

 

So, we wish all y’all a very Merry Christmas with happiness and success in the New Year…..