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So I ended up taking three days off of work to nap and putter around and cough phlegm up from the depths of my lungs. I skipped choir rehearsal on Thursday, I went to guitar lesson on Friday and on Friday night, I went to orientation to the Izaak Walton League Rockville Chapter. That was fun, I’m hoping to learn to actually target precision shoot air pistols – I met the instructor on Friday night and the board of directors and got approved to join. On Saturday, I spent the day sealing my fruitcakes in jam, marzipan and royal icing with hopefully enough sugar and alcohol to preserve the entire thing. One for this year and I’m saving the other one for next year.

On Sunday I went to weightlifting, there is a meet in January, we’ll see if I make it, I’m trying still to work on my technique – now the extension to get the bar to fly up from my thighs before I get under it. Elka went to the doggie park with Jeremy.

Sunday night was also alumni night for the fire department and their neighborhood Santa brigade and it was slated to run through our neighborhood – I had NO IDEA (I know they do this every year, but never did I know there was a schedule and a route! This is a 70 year old tradition and we’ve been in our house almost more than 15 years). Sharon texted and asked if she could park at our house to watch the festivities – there is a gps tracker on Santa now, so you can predict when he’ll pass by your house. We had what seemed like a lot of kids at our house for about 15 minutes. Elka was so excited running around with the boys, sometimes I feel a little bad that Elka didn’t end up in a house with 8 kids.

Merry Christmas! There were about 2 dozen trucks!

And we celebrated the last night of Chanukah. I think we got nights 3, 4 and 8. This was not my best batch of candles, they wouldn’t stay put in the menorah, so the tall ones Jeremy put in after the other ones were almost burned down. Now Edda just got send home sick, poor thing. We’ll have to figure it all out.

We went to Edda’s day program’s holiday party yesterday – I guess I can call it a Christmas party since it’s run by the Catholic Charities. I didn’t quite know what the party was going to be like – it was scheduled for three hours which I thought was…long, but it was really lovely. They had games, a photo booth, an incredibly delicious catered lunch with chicken and salmon. I would say there were about 75 people in attendance, the kiddos (I guess they are not kids anymore) – parents, staff, alumni staff.

Everyone wore red and it was tremendously festive. We met some old friends and made some new ones.

Edda’s main staff person has been out this week because she’s been sick, but it was nice to meet the all the other staff members. They really do seem to enjoy working with each other and taking care of all the folks. As it goes, sometimes I’m sad at these things, but today, mostly happy and tremendously grateful to have found this for Edda.

I’m a *little* bit sick. Not too bad, but not super great. I took a few days off work and napped. I’m excited for the holidays – I got a few gifts for myself this season. I got a wreath from Pottery Barn with Dani’s employee discount. I thought I could hang it outside, but I could not, so its spot is on the stairwell.

I also bought myself these technique weights for training. I needed light weights which were the right size, but weighed nothing. lol.

Jeremy’s been taking walks with Elka all bundled up. I think sometimes it takes them 10 minutes to get dressed (all those booties) and then after a quick pee/poo, Elka’s like – it’s too cold, let’s go home.

But sometimes they make it to the neighborhood coffee place. We are like….very good customers of the place.

Our new car can apparently drive itself a lot of the time. Here’s Jeremy not driving at about 60 mph.

It took this turn just fine. Incredible.

Happy birthday Ginny! She turned 42, you get the candles? four and then 2? Hahaha. We had a great beef barley stew which was perfect for a chilly day and celebratory and I made a raspberry swirl poundcake.

I had a very social weekend, lots of celebrating. I’m grateful for the friends I have and continue to make. I went to this gorgeous Indian restaurant on Friday night in Fulton Maryland to celebrate Kristen’s birthday earlier in the week. The only person I really know is the birthday girl – but what conversation topic did we open with? Menopause. Lol. And there was lots of talk about cat poop.

Then I went out on Saturday to catch a matinee showing of the Gay Men’s Chorus which was a fun outing. This was at the Lincoln theater which I had not been to before and we ate at Poets and Busboys afterwards. This was our Alto Outing – we are mostly altos in the choir and it was nice getting to know these folks more. The theater was very warm (I might have dozed off… – warm, dark, sitting still and sometimes very lovely lullaby songs), and the performance was nice – there are over 200 members of the choir and there was a dance troupe. It was a very strange mix of lots of songs with the word “God” and “Jesus” and also…raunchy (not in the same song!!!)? It was weird. I mean, the singing was fantastic, but thematically, it was a bit all over the place.

While I was out and about, a big shout out to Jeremy who took care of the ailing fridge. He emptied the entire thing out, let it defrost (I suspect it was ice clogging a drain hole, but I couldn’t really find it) and then plugged it back in and IT WORKED.

All the food went into the drink fridge, all the frozen stuff went into the chest fridge (I know, we are very lucky to have back up refrigeration). Then Jeremy cleaned the entire fridge and we got rid of 10,000 condiments that we didn’t use. And now we are back in business. It is a nice week to have the fridge fail, because you could just put your stuff outside in the freezing cold and it would be OK.

We had dinner with my parents last night. My mother has been cooking for us this year and I’m so happy. Last year, they had decided that it was too much work for my mother to cook anymore, so we were doing takeout and/or Jeremy was cooking, and I kind of lamented that I had eaten the last home cooked meal from my mother – sometimes you don’t know when you are doing something for the last time – and I was very sad. But this year, my mother started cooking again, but now each time, I think it might be the last time because they are good at CHANGING THEIR MINDS. haha. Anyways, it was delicious and Elka, terrible dog that she is -spent the entire time pestering my mother.

Because she knows….if she looks into my mother’s eyes with literal sad puppy dog eyes, she gets not only one, but two, TWO! homecooked dinners. My mother is delighted.

I’m so proud of my parents, they are decluttering! Gone are some old clothes, old books, I’m hoping old DVDs or even VCDs or maybe even VHSes! They pulled Donald’s childhood Transformers from the basement and are mailing them to him. They got rid of the original IBM PC and the IBM selectric typewriter. My mother is also downsizing her plants – I took home this one which will go on my new dresser when I get it.

I have many houseplants, I think I’m still at less or just about 20 which is where I’ll stay. I’m watching a lot of houseplant influencers on youtube and they have well over 100, in special lighting and cabinets with humidity – too much! I can’t do that of plants or room of plants – plants are strictly decor for me, so I can’t have too many plants that depend on specialized treatment. I’m at the point where I think no more plants can come into the house and if I want a new plant, it has to take over the spot of an existing plant. This year, I’m going to switch from plant collecting to container collecting. I want to upgrade the plastic planters to ceramic ones and I want big ones, which are in the weird space of being not really thrift-able and not really on-line-orderable because they are often heavy and unwieldy. The ones in thrift stores are the small ones for table sized plants which I have gotten lots of – but strangely the thrifted prices are very close to the new-prices you might find at TJ Maxx or Home Goods.

My mother gave me this plant which I remember from my youth (she gave me this one a few years ago).

Also…our fridge is dying. It was at 55F this morning saying…I…can’t….stay…cold. This fridge has been threatening to go for many years now, I wonder if we can save it..

It’s been a “lost week” in some ways, Jeremy has been sick – really since Friday and he’s been sick ever since. Powering through his mother’s birthday party with face mask (so far Katherine seems not sick – that would have been a terrible birthday present), he really was knocked out the rest of the week, each day hoping to feel 100% again, but not really – not even today, almost a full week later. He carefully checks his watch for metrics on his heart rate and temperature and sleep, we are clearly over the hump now, but he still feels crummy and needs the ibuprofen every 6 hours. He feels so poorly that he can’t really remember if he took a Motrin, so he’s resorted to taking photos of the pill bottle. We tested for flu and covid (albeit with expired tests) and those turned up negative which was confusing because Ginny is positive with covid this week and isn’t working in the afternoons this week either.

Luckily, both Edda and I (knock on wood) are feeling good – still working, still going to the day program. It’s been a few years now that Jeremy has gotten pretty ill (at least 3-4 times, once famously at Vince’s graduation) and Edda and I do OK without strict quarantine efforts. I actually woke up on Sunday feeling a little groggy with a runny nose and I thought for a moment – oh no, here it comes I need to cancel everything, but 45 minutes later, I felt fine and went a weightlifting session and felt fine. We wonder if, 1. Jeremy just has a suckier immune system or 2. if he never sees anyone and therefore, his immune system is out of practice. We brainstormed that he needed to volunteer at a daycare center (he did this when he was younger and got ringworm, lol), but we aren’t really sure if this will make his immune system stronger or if he will just be sick all the time. As I said – the only person he seemed to have seen last week was Ginny – but she has covid and Jeremy does not. But then I checked the calendar and remembered we took Edda to see the doctor on Thursday last week and I’m like — ohhh, you got your illness in the waiting room of the doctors office. whomp whomp.

All winter, my mother has been giving everyone she knows a huge bucket of persimmons. I happily eat them, they are really good. My mom packaged a bunch of them and shipped them here and there – all the way to California. The tree is so large now that she can’t pick the ones from the top, but a bunch of tree contractors spied them and asked to pick the ones from the top and look how laden the tree is with fruit. There must have been over 1,000 persimmons! I have at least 20 of them in my tummy. I’m glad those got picked. My mother hosted a delicious dinner for us on Friday night and we had a good time and yummy food, but Jeremy said…I feel slightly not well which was a bellwether for things to come.

Jeremy spent a lot of the past week outfitting Elka. It has dropped below freezing for a few days and Jeremy bought Elka a jacket.

Then Elka got salt in her paws and it hurt her, so Jeremy got her shoes which she didn’t like very much but mostly tolerated.

Sunday night, we celebrated Katherine’s birthday Sunday night by hosting a party at the house. Jeremy made a delicious chicken dinner from all the recipes from a book that Katherine had made notes in. It was delicious and the party was generally a success – but Jeremy was feeling under the weather and, therefore, the mask. He asked his parents if we should reschedule, but they demurred – so we went ahead. He’s still not feeling well today, fingers crossed no one else got sick. Maybe I should get a quieter tablecloth? This is our regular tablecloth because it’s easy to wipe down and you can spill and entire spaghetti dinner on it and not really see it.

I think I’m enjoying Christmas more this year than in years past – perhaps because we decided to not get gifts for everyone living in the house together. Perhaps because I know we aren’t going to be traveling, nor are we having guests for the week. Everything can be quiet and low key. And I’m so excited to be singing in the Christmas Eve service where I can sing a really beautiful arrangement of Angels We Have Heard on High which is one of my favorite Christmas songs. We started practicing it last night – that really adds to my holiday spirit.

Jeremy and Elka stopped by our neighborhood coffee place, where everyone knows Jeremy and Elka and Elka always gets the same order – a pup cup of whipped cream. Here she is waiting patiently for her order. Note the name “Pup” on the cup.

Jeremy is speaking my love language these days, slowly getting rid of trash and extra things – cleaning his areas. Swoon. There is a piece of IKEA furniture that he’s had next to his bed for years that have cubbies and each of the cubbies has what I describe as…trash. But I didn’t think that I could ask him to clean it out or anything because…it’s really his space. But yesterday, he moved it into his office, cleared out all the trash and the corner in the bedroom is now blissfully empty. And I kissed him. And then he said…maybe we don’t need these extra bowls in the cabinet…haha.

I enjoy our Christmas setup.

Including this little Playmobil nativity scene I bought used on ebay after last Christmas.

Here is my youtube year end results. I do know a lot about luxury purses, but I do not own any. hahaha.

I did not listen to a lot of music this year, I focused mainly on learning music – but apparently Taylor Swift got knocked out of the #1 spot for the first time in like a decade by Rachmaninoff! I kind of can’t believe it.