Housewife, 54

 December has been an interesting month so far. We got more outdoor decorations up than we have done previously here. along the front walkway And I re-strung the lights for the star over the garage. Both of these outdoor projects took extra work as the old lights had outages and we had to get new lights and re-work the star as well as the Tree outline.  The deer are new, but after a heavy snow and some fierce winds, we have had to re-set them a couple of times! Indoor decorations have been set up in stages.  Wth my birthday on the 10th, we have had a tradition of not getting into Christmas until after then.  So on the 11th, I got things going! I am loving small table-top trees!  My heavy Georg Jensen ornaments look nice hanging from the curtain rail! For the Nativity this year I decided to forego the stable. It is huge and we can't see out the window when it is up here!  I tried to find a lightbulb for the star, but they are sold out...and ones I ordered from Amazon did not fit.  I

 ALL RIGHT! I don't usually rant, but I am totally annoyed with all those people who do ornrey things and make life difficult for the rest of us! Today's case in point is the travails of ONE half of a married couple trying to do things with accounts held by both in joint.... but you can't really do that anymore, can you (the plural 'you' here)?  SomeONE has to be the account holder, and anyone else is just an "added user", and ONLY that main account holder can make any changes to the account.  That is because so many back-biting couples have done nasty things to accounts held in the old-fashioned "joint" fashion during divorce processes.  My first experience with this was when I was traveling alone (with kids, but sans husband) and tried to use our old "joint" credit card that had HIS name on it to buy clothing for the boys.  The store would not take the card because it did not have MY name on it!  Today's issue is similar... we nee