I'm exhausted, but I finally got the Christmas tree up. I thought this was going to be a two or three hour ordeal, but it turned out to be much more than that.

I first went to Target to buy Christmas lights, but they were all out of the white ones (I didn't want colored lights). So I went to Lowes. Nada. IKEA. No luck. In a state of desperation, I drove out to Wal-Mart, where they had white lights, but not LEDs. Fail. But being tired of driving around trying to find white LED lights, I decided just to go with the normal white lights.

I was a bit optimistic about how many ornaments should be adorned on my 6' tree ... I have three more boxes of ornaments (which I'll return tomorrow).

All in all, a worthwhile experience. But I'm not taking this Christmas tree down until at least March.

I also went out on a photo shoot this morning with Aaron and his adorable daughter Ashby; his take on what we did is up on his blog. I haven't had a chance yet to go through the photos, but I don't expect they'll be better than Aaron's. Ashby's pictures are awesome, though. (More on this later).

I also mounted my first piece of "real" artwork at my place (which involved a trip to Michael's and Staples) - wrapping paper from the MindTouch white elephant party. More on this later.

I was going to try to make it out to Joshua Tree State Park tomorrow (a two hour drive), but I'm pretty exhausted right now, and my place is a mess (boxes everywhere). I'll have to see if I can get enough sleep tonight :)