Day 268: Celebrations

Posted on 12/06/2020 by chick
  • My niece’s drive-by birthday celebration was today. Everybody who was part of the “parade” met up in a large parking lot, then drove by her house one by one, horns a-honking, stopping just long enough drop off a gift and grab a few a cupcakes in return (or, in our case, more cupcakes than we would ever allow the children to eat, because Auntie always gives us extra desserts). As we were the last in the parade, we pulled into the driveway and briefly chatted with my SIL outside, the first real social contact I’ve had since forever. It was nice, even if we couldn’t see each other’s faces because of the masks.
  • Last night’s craft party went well. Here are some of the ornaments that we made.
Excepting the ghosts, these ornaments are wood cutouts that Livia, my husband, and I colored with markers and decorated with various craft supplies, including glitter glue, jewels, pompoms, tissue paper, and feathers. Marshall has been on a ghost kick since we made our Halloween decorations. Having made pilgrim ghosts for Thanksgiving and a birthday ghost for his Dad’s birthday, he has now moved on to Christmas ghosts. They are cute additions to our holiday decor.
  • I have already prepped the kids’ Advent tickets for tomorrow and the following day. Sometimes I amaze myself, which is good, because it helps to offset all the times I disappoint myself :p
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Day 266: Expiration Dates

Posted on 12/04/2020 by chick

Today I discovered yet another peril of online Christmas shopping: a sale that expired as I was shopping, making everything in my cart suddenly quite a bit more expensive. <sigh>

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Day 265: All Good News

Posted on 12/03/2020 by chick

On Monday we had a storm with high winds and downpours. The wind nearly knocked our power out several times, and it did knock out the cable system, leaving us without Internet and home phone for the entire night. But, I am grateful, because no trees or tree parts fell on us, we did not lose power, and though the rain fell heavily enough to form a pond in the back yard, it didn’t reach flood level. Plus, with our Netflix out of commission, I convinced my husband to finally move a disk-player into my office so that I could have my annual pre-Christmas viewing of Die Hard.

As if that weren’t enough good news, on Tuesday I found that the Sometimes Stream had started flowing again for the first time in many months. Welcome back, water!

Sometimes Stream

The latest drought map was published today. I checked it, because we’ve gotten a lot of rain lately, and I was hoping that our drought status had changed. I’m happy to report that it has. We are now rated “Abnormally Dry,” which is the lowest drought level and a big change from two months ago, when we were in the “Extreme Drought” category. That is very good news!

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Day 264: Springtails on Waterslides

Posted on 12/02/2020 by chick

On Thanksgiving we noticed that there were tiny bugs all over everything outside, including our trash and recycling bins, even our front door. It was an overcast day and none of the pictures I took turned out very good, but here’s a shot that will give you a rough idea of what they looked like:

Mystery Bugs on the Recycling Bin
They might be some type of springtail, perhaps globular springtails.

When it started to rain, the bugs on top of the recycling bin headed for the sides of the lid, where they were swept from one end to the other by swift streams of rainwater, like waterslides for bugs. It was a fun thing to watch. However, I was not so amused today when I found some of these bugs inside a package that had been left on my front walk. If they are the type of bug that I think they are, they’re unlikely to infest my home, but still, I would prefer that they stay out of my stuff!

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Day 263: One Day Down

Posted on 12/01/2020 by chick

I took the Advent calendar out of storage last night. I was a little disappointed when I opened up the box and looked through the ideas that I had “paid forward” to myself back in January, because the pandemic has put the kibosh on many of them. But I’m glad that I didn’t know back in January what the rest of this year would be like. Ignorance was bliss.

On the bright side, I put the first ticket in the calendar last night so that it would be ready for the kids this morning. That was amazingly prompt of me (woohoo!). One day down, twenty-three more to go.

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Day 262: A Little Bit of Good

Posted on 11/30/2020 by chick

Today we had a parent-teacher conference with Livia’s teacher by phone. I would have preferred to have the conference in the usual way, which is for me to drive to the school and meet the teacher in person. But, the bright side of teleconferencing was that both my husband and I were able to take part. He had never been to a parent-teacher conference before, because on those nights when I used to go, he used to stay home with the kids, because someone had to. So, as with many things that the pandemic has changed, there was a little bit of good to be had along with the bad.

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Day 261: Unwilling Shopaholic

Posted on 11/29/2020 by chick

Like yesterday, I spent most of my day Christmas shopping. Christmas shopping is always time-consuming, but even more so when it’s done online. Why? Sometimes it’s because . . .

  • No matter how hard you look, the thing you want simply cannot be had, but you can’t stop trying until you’ve looked everywhere. You’d give up much sooner if driving were involved, but you’re already used to letting the computer have far too much of your time. This exercise in futility goes something like this: Maybe at this store’s website? (No.) But what about that one? (No!) Okay, but surely this store will have it? (NO!) Ah, I know just the one! (NO YOU DON’T! YOU CANNOT HAVE IT!).
  • Yes, the thing you want can be had . . . in 17 million varieties. Good luck choosing exactly the right one!
  • You want it in green, but they don’t have the right size in green, so you think maybe blue would be good, but the blue is bizarrely twice the price. If you’re willing to drive to Albuquerque to pick it up, you can get it in grey, but do you really want grey, and is it worth the drive to Albuquerque? If only you could talk yourself into the yellow, because they’d ship the yellow tomorrow. You know you don’t want the yellow and that there is no way you will ever order the yellow, but it’s still there in your mind, a phantom option.
  • You scroll and you scroll until you find exactly what you want, only to discover at the last possible moment that the shipping is ten times the price of the item and the item won’t ship until next century. Do you remember which website it was that had the next best thing, because that second-choice option is looking top-notch now, right? No? Too bad! Time to start over.
  • You must join the secret society to place an order, but first you need a verification code which will be sent by e-mail. You wait and you wait, but the e-mail never arrives. Never! The secret society has rejected you.
  • You need six things. Store A has items 1, 4, and 5. Store B has items 2, 3, and 4. Store C has items 1, 3, and 6. Not only can you not get all of the items from one store, or even two, but because you have to make three small orders instead of one large one, you don’t qualify for free shipping on any of them. So you shop for something else to buy at each store, some minor thing to throw you over the free shipping hurdle, because it’s better to pay for something you don’t necessarily want than to pay for the shipping that ought to be free, but somehow every extra item you convince yourself to buy still leaves you a few cents shy of the free shipping minimum. GGRRRAAAAAAGGGGGGHHH!

I know, I know. I’m lucky to have problems such as these. But they are frustrating and almost enough to make me miss the dehydration and endless checkout lines of mall shopping. Almost.

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Day 260: Unsuccessful Saturday

Posted on 11/28/2020 by chick

I did a lot of online Christmas shopping today. It was Small Business Saturday, and I tried to find local businesses from which to buy, but my success was limited. I ran into a lot of problems, some of which I will mention in a later post. I wish I could have done better, not only for the small business, but also for myself. I was hoping to get a lot more shopping done today 🙁

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Day 259: Wedding Ring

Posted on 11/27/2020 by chick

Twitter asked me today, “If you’re married, do you wear your ring all the time?” I will answer that question here. First I have to say that I love my husband, and I love the ring, and I love that my husband bought the ring for me as a surprise gift before our wedding. It is beautiful. However, the answer is no. I do not wear my wedding ring all the time, or even at all these days.

I have good reasons, though. When we first got married, I wore the ring all day, every day. I was proud to wear it. But, as I went about my daily business–washing dishes, playing piano, etc.–I kept accidentally banging the ring into things, which was a danger to the ring and to the things it banged into and even, occasionally, to my hand. I am a bit of a klutz, and that was working against me.

For a while I tried simply taking the ring off whenever I had to do something with my hands. That was fine until I misplaced it a few times, and I realized that if I continued that way, I was going to lose the ring forever. I am notoriously absent-minded.

So then I started wearing the ring just for social occasions (i.e., whenever I was out of the house and likely to talk to anyone). That worked well. To everyone in the outside world, it would seem as if I always wore the ring, and I got to enjoy wearing it at those times without the worry of wrecking or losing it.

But currently I don’t wear the ring at all, because I’ve lost weight and it’s too big for me now. The last time I wore it, it randomly slipped off my hand. Fortunately, I was inside and the ring simply rolled across the floor, not into a gutter or a lake. Still, the incident upset me, and I haven’t worn the ring since. Someday, when the pandemic is over, I will take it to a jeweler and have it resized. Then I will go back to wearing it for social occasions, and it will be a joy both to wear the ring again and to have social occasions again!

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Day 258: Thanksgiving

Posted on 11/26/2020 by chick

Today my husband cooked us up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, potatoes, and stuffing. Since it was such a small gathering, there was no point in getting all of our new dishes or flatware out, but I very deliberately washed four blue goblets, four crystal water glasses, and four Calamityware dinner plates the night before, so that we’d be able to use them. When I set the table, I gave myself the sea monster plate. Livia got the zombie poodles, Marshall got the black hole, and my hubbie got the pirates. Everyone seemed pleased with their catastrophe. I hadn’t purchased new table linens yet, so I used what I had on hand. They weren’t the colors I would have chosen, but at least they made the table look festive.

Livia loves to dress up, and by dressing up, she reminded the rest of us that we ought to make an effort to look decent. We weren’t well-dressed enough for a party, mind you, but at least we weren’t in our pajamas. After dinner, we had pumpkin pie for dessert, and then we played a few rounds of Kakerlakenpoker. It was a pretty good day. We took a few pictures for the photo album. It will be in stark contrast to last year, when I took pictures of my husband’s family in all sorts of combinations, and with so much success that I had more pictures than I could use. But we did what was right. We stayed home, and we stayed safe.

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