montage monday: xmas preparations

christmas preparations 2006You see... that's the problem with having a whole day where I'm not here... the following day rocks up and I feel all out of sync... of course it has nothing at all to do with the fact that I've been wasting time wandering around a new website I found... nothing at all *looks around shiftily*...

Anyway... today's Monday Montage is all about yesterday's adventures trimming the tree and wrapping the presents...

To be honest, the whole process wasn't that dissimilar from the previous year, at least in the majority of the details... but I have to say, that for whatever reason... whether it was because it was a full moon yesterday... or, oh I don't know, Jupiter's third moon was in our collective rising houses... but we were seriously out of the perfect Christmas prep groove...

Nothing seemed to be going according to the plan... or it was going to the plan... but not well...

It was very weird...

Last year (which was the first year that I was in charge of putting the baubles onto the tree) there really wasn't any problem with getting the baubles in exactly the right spot so that no two colours were too close to each other... this year, I think I shifted six or seven of the baubles right after I'd put them on because they turned out to be next to the same colour.

And I realised this morning after having a quick look at last year's post that we are actually down a set of lights... we only put two sets on (and had a hell of a hard time getting them to look right) rather than the three sets we put on last year... which also explains why we couldn't get them to look right...

It also means that the new note I put on the box for the lights is wrong, so I'll have to fix that up later...

And then when we started wrapping the presents neither of us was that much better... we'd just lost out groove...

Oh, and I very nearly spoiled the surprise of Ma's seahorse painting (that's it in the purple paper on the bottom row of the montage by the way)... I needed her to vamoose upstairs for a while so that I could stuff some newspaper in the box and just generally make it ready to be wrapped... and I wasn't thinking and said something like "... so I can wrap your seahorse..." and then realised what I'd said... but lucky Ma interpreted the "oh crap, I just fucked that up" face I made for my quite similar "I didn't mean seahorse, I'm losing my mind" face... so she just thought that I'd said the wrong thing... *phew*

I don't know why I never mentioned it last year, but at some point during the last Christmas sales, Ma and I hit Myer's post Christmas decorations sale with a vengeance and bought a ton of stuff, not to use on the tree... heaven forbid... but to take a leaf out of the book of the woman who wraps all of Oprah's presents for her... and add various ornaments to various people's presents... Ma's purple parcel has this cool purple spiral ball on it with a bell in it (or "the cat toy" as I'm calling it)... the second shot on the top row of the montage has a red bauble with "Merry Christmas" printed on it... and so on and so forth. I gotta say... they look really awesome... and it's more useful than just a normal bow or whatever.

I just realised that that was the one thing I DIDN'T photograph yesterday... all the decorations hanging off of Ma's candelabra...

And yes, that is tiger print wrapping paper in the second row... thank you Ikea... but they're parcels for someone with a serious tiger fetish, so it's okay...

I did do some experiments with both the out of focus Christmas tree idea that I stole from Andrew (which I gotta say, with a digital camera that you can't seem to control the focus on manually, it was a whole production in and of itself), and the whole "kinetic light trails" shot which I stole from, well, myself I guess... mostly they were a bit of a mess, but there are a couple of halfway decent ones, so I'm sure they'll be showing up shortly.

And yes, I did take a bunch of shots to make up this year's Christmas template with... but I probably won't work on that until tomorrow some time.

In other news...

During last year's Christmas sales I was kind of annoyed because the cowboy hat I liked had vanished off the face of the earth... well, while that exact hat didn't reappear, I did snag another one that actually fit me. I SO don't have an appropriately shaped head for most hats (it's kind of too long when viewed from the top), but this one actually fits pretty well. Of course, I'm SO not a cowboy either... so it could be a very shortlived fashion item, but we'll see...

Speaking of fashion items, Ma and I hit the Rundle Street Markets again (this time in a bid to help Ma actually find the last few things for her Christmas list... but alas we came up with nothing)... and they can do the teeshirt I want... YAAAAY! She said not yet, but it can be done... yaaaaaay!

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