ericestate.com

It’s a new year, and after I nurse this hangover from my birthday and NYE party, I’m going to get started on my goals. There’s an old custom, that says you should do what every you want for the new year, you should be doing on the first day of the year. It’s nothing new that I didn’t grow up in Texas. I’m gonna do what I want, to start the new year off right.

It’s actually called a chanukiah, but that’s another blog post. I have quite a few that I’ve collected over the years, but I only put out 2, a modern silver one, and my grandmother’s brass antique menorah that has so many memories attached to it. Usually I make latkes (fried potato pancakes) but this year since I’m trying to loose a few pounds we kept it simple and had some spiralized baked potatoes for the first of the 8 nights. We did make one after dinner trip to Krispy Creme this year for some jelly donuts, and drove around the neighborhood eating them, and looking at all the beautiful displays of Christmas lights.

All these products work with Amazon Alexa, as well as Apple Home Kit, so you have full control by voice, phone, and even Apple Watch! the August Smart Lock is different than most smart locks – not only do you get control from your phone, but because of the way it is installed (from the inside), people coming to your door won’t know you have a digital look because they can’t see it. Finally you have the ability to select from 3 color temperatures: 2200 Kelvin (warm glow), 2700 Kelvin (warm white) and 4000 Kelvin (cool white), depending on your style and taste. In order to be able to control these items by voice – you need something that responds to voice commands – I’ve selected the Amazon Echo Dot.

Because of this fact, and the fact that she loves Disney, she has a small collection of custom Mouse ears. And a few days later we didn’t just have one display box for the magic mouse ears, we had FIVE! The smaller sizes hold 2 custom made mouse ears, and the larger shadow boxes hold 4. She carefully lined them up and then using the push pins she carefully pushed them into the back of the box, and set the mouse ears on them.