Where Have I Been? and Christmas Details

Well, the honest answer to the question "Where have I been?" is I've been at work. I presented at a conference this week in Colorado, and my boss is presented in NYC at the same time, which means I was quite busy getting both presentations ready to go.
Further, while in Colorado (Snowmass Village, near Aspen), I suffered from some fairly serious altitude sickness. For those of you that don't know, when you go to somewhere that has a high elevation, the amount of oxygen in the air decreases, meaning your body has to compensate. Most people handle this with little inconvenience, but I was one of the lucky few who had a really hard time. I got to take TWO separate ambulance rides to the hospital, on two different days. The first day was relatively mild, I was short of breath and vomitting, so I got some fluid and an oxygen machine to use while sleeping. The second day was much more scary, I was still slightly short of breath, but had a horrible headache, was vomiting much more violently (sorry if this is TMI) and was generally confused and not sure what was going on. That day I was given a bunch of different medicines to take-- 2 steroids, an anti-nausea medicine, and some pain medicine.

Why didn't I leave early? Well, I tried. But as luck would have it, all the flights out of Aspen on Saturday morning had been cancelled because of the weather, so all the afternoon flights were overbooked. There was no way I could have gotten out of Aspen/Snowmass Village on Saturday. So I had to wait until my normally scheduled departure on Sunday, and hope for the best. I stayed hooked to the oxygen machine (the granny machine, as I was calling it) every minute I could--this was not a portable one. It had to be plugged into the wall to work. And I spent most of the day resting in bed and wishing I could be at the conference and/or in the hot tub.
Needless to say, I am not anxious to hurry back to that kind of altitude. I have seen various numbers for the altitude of Snowmass Villiage, but the consensus is something between 8000 feet and 9000 feet.

And now, back to normal posts: Here's part of what I've done to spruce my apartment up for Christmas:

The beginning of December meant some subtle changes in the decor around my apartment. My Christmas decorations aren't as elaborate as some that I see on blogs, but what I do makes me happy. One of the first things I did was change the filler for the big vase on the counter in my kitchen. Earlier this summer I got a whole bunch of lemons at the Salvation Army for very, very little, and they had lived in the vase until now.

I replaced the lemons with some purple ornaments I got a couple years ago.

I also replaced what was one the glittery pink pumpkins on my dinning table with a more seasonally appropriate centerpiece:

Ellie made a rare appearance in a picture to give us her opinion, and it doesn't look to good.

The silver beads are of the same type that I used for my tree--which can also function as a centerpiece.

And finally, I pulled out the Pièce de résistance-- the pink Christmas tree.

Yes, you probably notice that the armoire isn't around--I'll have to explain that in a later post (I am so behind!)

I also put up some multicolored lights around the sliding door in the living room, and some snowflake ornaments on the windows.

Edited to add: I took some better pictures of the pink tree and the other trees I made.