The end of the semester crunch

The CFO’s semester wrapped up last week, leaving finals as the only thing standing between her winter break.  That meant that the weekend was full of grading papers and preparing the final exams.  Despite that pile of work to do, shopping for a Christmas tree took top priority on Saturday morning.

Since we now typically travel over the holiday, having a real tree isn’t ideal.  I grew up with a real tree (often times one way too big for the room it was in) and I really, really, really didn’t want to go artificial.  I enjoy the “hunt” for a tree and love the smell of a tree inside the house.  Last year, we were really busy and we decided to try not having any tree at all, but it didn’t really feel like Christmas without one.  We literally had a pile of presents in the living room without a tree. 

So, I finally came around to the see the benefits of the artificial tree:  No watering and we don’t have to worry about it dropping all of its needles while we are out of town.  We went out shopping for an artificial tree and found a contender at our first stop.  We liked one that was on display, and it was on sale for over half off, so we went to see how many they had in boxes.  Zero, zip, nada.  I went and asked a sales associate if they had any more in the back and he said, “No, all of the trees that we have are right there.”  His manager overheard the conversation and said, “I think we got one more of those in last night, call to the back and see if it is back there.”  Sure enough it was.  We asked if they would hold it for us, but they said that they couldn’t hold it for us.

I told the CFO that we typically always circle back to the first thing that we saw when we go shopping around town for something specific, so let’s just buy it and if we find something better, we can bring it back and get a refund.  With that, we bought the tree, threw it in the back seat of the accord (the box just barely fit) and continued to shop at the other stores on her list of places to check.  After visiting the other stores, we agreed that we got the best looking, most reasonably priced option at the first store, so we took it home.  Surprise, surprise, we bought the first tree that we found.

We got it set up Saturday afternoon while watching the college championship football games.  We woke up to snowfall on Sunday morning, so I decided to run to the grocery store and do our shopping before the weather got too bad.  It was a wise call as it snowed off and on through the rest of the day.  The CFO stayed inside and did her work while I took care of a few tasks around the house and the garage… and a few hours later the weekend was over.

We woke up to cold temps on Thursday morning: