The Next Chapter in the Book . . .: Chapter 369

First of all, our hearts go out to the entire Casebolt family for the loss of their husband, son, father, uncle and brother David Casebolt. He was a very talented man with a heart of gold that loved his family very much. We will all miss you, David.

My projects here at home are not nearly as exotic as David's airbrush art. I did a Christmas shirt for Reagan with my Silhouette. I think the Sil going to get a workout this year making some gifts. Reagan probably won't wear the shirt, but I wanted to do it anyway. I also got her the hideous Christmas pants but I know she won't wear those, she's already made that declaration.

Carissa needed to buy some jeans so I went to Reagan-wrangle so she could shop. I promised Reagan could ride one of the fancy shopping carts. When we got to the carts I found they were $8! Since I had already pulled the trigger on her having a fire truck cart, I got my debit cart out and obediently paid out. The sign said if I returned it to the rack I'd get a 50 cent return. Nope, I gave it away so someone else could get some use of my $8 and get my money's worth from it.

Reagan got to sit in all the mall rides and got to choose one to ride on. She loved driving her little food truck!

I've been eyeballing the "Veggetti" vegetable spiralizer (who came up with that name???) for some time now. While we were out, Carissa endorsed it as a useful product. Hoping her taste in small vegetable appliances wasn't as bad as her past recommended movies, I bought one. I mounted an unsuspecting yam to the Veggeti's shark teeth and turned the handle.

Soon the unsuspecting yam was spiraling it's way into my bowl. I made some Thai peanut sauce using powdered peanut butter for tomorrow's lunch. I'll report back how it went.

Bob put up the Christmas lights today and bought one of those laser light sprayer thingies that are popular this year. It looks kind of cool. What didn't land on the garage can be found on the trees behind it. I hope the trees stop it all and it doesn't go on to a neighbor's bedroom wall or something. I certainly don't want it going all the way to the cockpit of an airplane! I'm hoping they are not that powerful of a laser. Bob wants to get a second one to light up the roof part of our house. We will have little laser sprinkles on our bedroom wall if he does that.

Dinner at Applebee's. Don't laugh. Auburn is seriously short of serious restaurants.

Then home to bed. This weekend was the All-Grampa channel and Reagan wanted Grampa doing everything for her, right down to brushing her teeth and putting her to bed.

Today Reagan helped us decorate our Christmas tree. She enjoyed unwrapping each ornament to see what was inside, it was up to Grampa to do the boring stuff like hang in on the tree once her little spot was overfilled and they had to move to other parts of the tree.

While the rest of us were putting the "merry" in Merry Christmas, Bear was sentenced to the cone because he has the itchies again. No knees or furniture surfaces were safe from the knife edge of Bear's cone as he turns to and fro trying to keep tabs on his people. Since he can't see his feet, he plows through Reagan's toys like a wrecking ball, tripping and flinging toys every which way, all the while Reagan is telling him to be more careful.

Cone selfies.

The playground supervisor is on duty.

Just another forgotten toy tossed aside.

"Looking good in my cone of shame."

"Yup, I can rock this like no one's biz."

"I'd like to think I'm rockin' this cone like a boss, but it's kind of hard to be taken seriously when I am being upstaged by an inflatable penguin."

Grama and Grampa's previously-off-limits-to-the-kids living room is now Reagan's personal playroom. You can't even see the newly installed hardwood floor!

After the kids leave, Bob immediately starts vacuuming and getting the house set to right. Carissa brought some glitter ribbon over for me to make a bow tree topper for their tree. Since I was up in the middle of the night, I made it then. I didn't see that their were buckets of glitter falling off the ribbon and I dragged all the way upstairs and back to bed with me. Bob will never get it all hunted up and destroyed.

After clean up and flirting with snow this morning, the afternoon cleared off to be a fine blue ribbon day so we headed out to catch a couple of caches from the Auburn Summer of 2016 cache event. The caches are hidden in historical areas of Auburn so we can learn about our hometown as well as have fun. This cache was hidden at Auburndale park right near us.

One of these rocks is a cache at another park up by our house.

Reagan gets to play with yet another "heritage" toy. This one was Chelsea and Jenna's dollhouse and after making a pit stop at Eileen's house for her two kids to play with, it was off to Reagan's house for yet another round of kid fun.