Christmas tree and winter days

its been a while huh! I guess that is end of semester madness for you! You know what else comes along with this time of year? Talk about the length of the days!! We keep telling ourselves up here on at the 42nd latitude that Monday is the shortest day of the year! yah! But this year instead of fretting over how our sunrise/sunset is:

Dec 20, 2009 8:05 AM 5:07 PM

We just decided to look up edinburgh, scotland:
Dec 20, 2009 8:42 AM 3:39 PM

Ouch!!

And in case you were wondering: The December Solstice (Winter Solstice) is on Monday, December 21, 2009 at 12:47 PM in Lansing.

And here is our cute christmas tree! We decided to decorate our indoor palm tree. We debated back on forth on whether to get a real tree or a fake tree, but all of the research we read said the best thing to do is to get a live tree and then plant it outside when you are done. We did that last year but ended up killing the darn thing. Apparently if you go the live tree route, the evergreen shouldnt be indoors more than 3 days. That was probably Step 1 in how we killed the tree last year. No need to get into the other steps we followed. Suffice it to say that we went the live tree route again this year but are using a year round indoor plant that we've had for a little while. Bee and Frankie think it's cool and it kind of warms things up a bit!