Yeah, the holidays are among us.  There will be ham, cranberry sauce, decorated cookies, and spiced drinks.  There will be good gifts, bad gifts, forgotten gifts, and returned gifts.  There will be kids home from school, businesses open but workers not working, packed stores, and busy streets.  General attitudes will deteriorate at the biggest gift-giving day of the year nears closer and closer.  Unless of course, you do not celebrate holidays.  Then for you and me and many, many other people, these next two weeks are hell.  What worse, it is during these two weeks of hell where the non-celebrators are secretly hated, loathed, and admired by the hectic, stressed gift givers.  They are wishing they too could just sit at home and play board games instead of trudging off to this party and that party and not really caring about any party.

Yup, next year they will be debating celebrating Festivus for the Rest of Us.  It is a totally better way to spend the crazy season.

However, being what it is, schools are closed meaning kid holiday camps are open.  Yeah! Camp for the Kid.  So off he went…to infinity and beyond!  OK just to grandma’s where she dropped him off daily at SpaceCamp.  Can you image a whole week learning about robotics, jets propulsion, space, and rockets?  I know all my friends are jealous.  Hell, I am jealous.  I never got to go to space.  Did you?  And if the fact the Planner and I are getting a mini-vacation isn’t awesome enough, when asked where the Kid is, we get to say “he went to space”.  I can hear it now: “Oh, the Kid, I got tired of him so I dropped shipped him to space.”  “Oh, the Kid, he lost his mind and orbited into space.”  Hehehe, yeah it is gonna be great telling people where the Kid went.  Somebody, just one person needs to ask me where the Kid is at. If I don’t get to use one of these sayings it will have been an opportunity wasted.  Wasted.

Kids….In….Space.  Wonder if they are going to watch the Muppets.  If I were the counselor, I would totally work Muppet movie into the curriculum.  Oh, Kermie…..

Now that Boxes in Fields has a steady source of water, we decided to splurge a little and decorate the yard.  Kinda tired of looking at a bare construction site.  Needed some color to liven things up a bit. That might be a stretch.  There is no color now but there will be maybe next year, if not, then definitely the year after.  Investment coloring.  Long-term coloring.  Citrus trees!

One grapefruit…

one lime (whose leaves smells ever so fantastic)…

one mandarin orange…

and one tangerine.

What was better?  After months and months of discussing planting our very own citrus grove around the septic spray field, the plants were on end of the year clearance.  40% off clearance!  This savings allowed the purchase of four instead of three trees.  Yeah! There was even enough saved a second purchase for instant coloring.

One red hibiscus….

and one orange cape honeysuckle.  These small plants will adorn the deck along with the elephant ear my mother-in-law donated.  Plants are great.  They add instant happiness to a drab environment.  Yeah for plants! These plants will not only bring color, they are admired by bees.  Bees are good for the citrus trees.  See, they were not really impulse buys to add instant color.  They have a long-term goal too.

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As with all things it seems, the purchase was the easy part.  Once home, holes had to be dug twice the size and depth of the tree.  Being the trees are in five-gallon pots, the holes were quite the hole.  This surprisingly did not take very long.  In fact, the holes were dug faster than the filling, planting, and watering of the trees.

Just as the last of the pots were saved for future usage and the garden tools were cleaned and put away, the sun started to set.  It was a beautiful day to begin with.  Now it is was a beautiful day with the start of a beautiful citrus grove.  The only way the day would have been better was if the Kid was here.  Two days gone and my ears miss the non-stop chattering.  Two days ago I would have sworn there was no such thing as too much blissful quite.  Just two days.  Who knew.