Thanksgiving Day - That was day 4. This day we had off and was given this day to do whatever we wanted. I must say the prior 4 days were very exhausting from travel to working on a time line, and it was really nice to have the day off to enjoy what we wanted. We slept in some and decided that maybe we would just take a ride around to just see what we could see. My husband and I have a thing about just riding around and just to see what we run into. We rode towards Maryland and decided that by the time we got to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge that we would probably turn around and maybe find some food. The bridge had a toll and of course my husband decided that we need not to pay for that just to come back across it again. About this time it was getting later in the day and we realized that we had not had breakfast or any lunch. Time was creeping up on us so we decided to pull over and check to see what kind of restaurants were open. Well, it was not easy trying to find one. They were all either closing in a few minutes or closed all day for Thanksgiving. By the time we were really getting hungry we didn’t have anywhere to eat……. Accept the local McDonalds! Yep, you heard me, McDonalds was the only place open and so by this time its almost 8:00. We went in and ordered and about all I’m gonna say about that is…. It was a little sketchy! Told my husband to eat pretty quick so we could get back in the car. Needless to say, that day was just a passing of time. We got back to the hotel and it was crash time again to get ready for another busy day the next day. Six a.m. came pretty early on Friday but it was another day to look forward to with going back to the White House. Met my friend Ginny down stairs and we both started talking about how maybe they brought in professionals to finish the lights on the trees over the time we had off. After all, it was so time consuming and we were looking at a time line and it was Friday. Our goal was to be done and out of the White House on Sunday, 3:00. When we go to the White House we had breakfast and we all were ready to get started. A lot started happening when we started that day. They did actually bring in some professional lighting people and who knew there even was such a thing? A lot of us on our team began wiring balls together in clusters, some started making ribbons and others started to compile ornaments and florals together that what go on certain trees. I did help with that for a while until our leader asked for about 4 volunteers to work on a special project to make tree covers/tree skirts for all of our 28 trees. So, my friend Ginny, Donna and another friend Christy and myself volunteered to take on this project. This was a perfect team. Ginny’s background was seamstress so boy was this a great asset for our project. We got our brains together on how to execute this project. Now, let me back track a bit and say - There was a plan way ahead of us coming to the White House. You see the decorating project for the People’s House is spearheaded by First Ladies and in this case Mrs. Trump. She had already picked her colors and the style of decorations and everything on how she wanted things to look. We were the hands and feet and brains to make it all work for her. So getting back to the tree collars. We decided to make these out of very thick paper and burgundy velvet material. It all looked so rich and was just so beautiful. All the colors for the Grande Foyer were of deep burgundy in muted shades and gold. So so beautiful. We cut every collar and then the challenge was covering them with the velvet so it wouldn’t show from the outside. We thought about glue, and staples and clips. Nope, none of that would work. What to know what we used? The old trusty wide black duct tape we found in our supply’s. Yep, duct tape. I’m not real sure if our First Lady would approve of duct tape but it worked perfectly! It took us all day on Friday to get these done with also having to do a few the next day to finish up. That day the whole room was looking so beautiful and we did get quite a bit accomplished. Everyone in the other rooms were working very hard on their projects as well. There was the red room, blue room, green room, west room and the State Dining Room to be done. (I’ll talk about those rooms later). We worked pretty hard that day and were so exhausted. I would take brakes here and there and walk to see what some of the other teams were doing. I have to say some of their projects I would have loved to work on too. But I’ll go into that part later. Another thing that was happening on Friday was the show HGTV was there and they were recording for the upcoming HGTV special of the White House. They would go around and talk to people and also stage some things they wanted to include as well with the workers. They actually recorded us doing the skirts but only aired just a little portion of it. During our work there were many many supplies to choose from that were available on our supply carts. I kind of had to chuckle a little bit. We had to go through so much security checks and secret service for safety and here we are in the White House with available scissors and sharpe objects and we even saw some box cutters in there. Not sure about that but its all good. So that concludes this part of my story. I’ll be writing again very soon. Next blog will be about what we did to prepair for the first family to come home. So, stay tuned and always remember to live life in bloom. This pictured today is of my special team.. [End] Sent from my iPad