Tree of death

I needed something to go in the middle of the table for Christmas. Husband had returned from one of his many trips to Walgreens or was it CVS - do those guys love each other or not?? I mean the stores not my husband - though I've renamed him Bargain Man. If you look for a CVS here in Orlando - a Walgreens will be yards away.
Anyway - I digress. He came back with some tiny tree ornaments - free! Quite pretty but much too small for our big tree so I thought - table decoration.

At home in the UK, I could have found a little branch and hung on the decorations with no problem. I found a tree outside but it was still full of leaves. So I went out with scissors. Boy, are those branches hard to cut. The leaves were covered in - er - eggs? so I chopped those off and finally had a bare branch.

Then I started to itch. And itch. When the first spider dropped off onto me, I screamed and itched. But never let it be said we Brits are scared of spiders. I scoured the branch until I was sure there was no lurking raccoon or bear and stuck it in an urn I just happened to have around. Itched. Stuffed the sides with Walmart plastic bags. Itched. Hung on all the decorations. Turned my back for a moment and the tree slipped over. Everything fell off.

Three days later, I'm still itching but I finally got the branch to stay still. Though if anyone touches it the thing tilts.

It's in the center of the table looking very sad. I hope by the time we've had a few drinks, no one will notice.
Sigh.
Maybe the itching will stop soon.

Reading at the speed of light

That's me. The Buzz Lightyear of the reading world. Difficult to say how fast because I've never been anal enough to actually count words but I read about 80 pages in 20-25 minutes. Which is fast. Husband reads a book a week or a month. But as he likes to point out, he does remember what happens in his books. Sometimes I'm hard pressed to remember character names let alone the plot. The better I like the book, the more I remember, though.
I think I developed the technique from when I was at college and I was expected to read three Dickens novels in a week. Read fast or you're in trouble. Now I find it hard to read slowly and that frustrates me sometimes. I think it must be something about me though because I do everything fast - cook, clean, speak, drive, write - ah that explains why no one can read my writing, nor eat my food and perhaps explains that speeding ticket.
Damn, maybe I'd better slow down.