I don’t really like the gift giving part of Christmas and this year I have an opportunity to not buy very many gifts, so I’m not. It is exhilarating! But I’m part of a few white elephant/secret santa exchanges and I like to buy everything early, like the first week of December. But oftentimes, the rules change about which method of gift giving a group wants to do and, like I do every year, I’ve messed up. (What can I say – I want to not feel rushed and I like free, slow shipping.) I honestly tried to get people to agree, but they weren’t ready yet around Thanksgiving. I’m not bold? imposing? bossy? enough. So on Dec 1st, I went with last year’s rules and bought a few beautiful gifts (which was white elephant – recipient unknown) and then the rules changed (secret santa) and now my gifts are not appropriate for the name I drew. Oh well. I will save the gifts for another time.
One of my favorite parts of the holiday is the open fire part. Vince and I have a candle ritual which I’m hoping to implement when he gets home (Saturday!). I ordered all the special candles for all my spinning holiday decor and the menorah. This year, I had time to polish the menorah! Unbelievable – it polishes up nicely. I did not let these candles burn down. Just for dinner and the moments I could be around the table. The wooden one has a tendency to stop spinning and burn the fan leaves, there are already a few scorch marks from when I wasn’t paying attention. And it’s just freaky to leave this much open fire unattended.
A quiet weekend because we were supposed to drive to Philly for Kiki’s birthday party, but it was cancelled because Kiki and Bob both got Covid (both are fine now). I know other people’s weekends are filled with holiday activities, but I’m quite content to stay at home. Jeremy got a weird stomach bug after his trip to Denver – he puked on Thursday and spent a lot of Friday lying down and watching youtube videos. Elka did her doggie duty and kept him company.
I finished another knitted hat which I’m pleased about. My mom decluttered her entire yarn stash to me so now I never have to buy yarn again for the rest of my life if I go at the rate I’m going.
Jeremy spent the entire weekend working. I know this sounds dreary, but he’s excited about something and fleshing it out and he was so excited he couldn’t sleep on Saturday night (weird, I know.) I happily spent the weekend doing laundry, running a few errands, going to the dog park, testing out running with my slightly not perfect ankle, practicing guitar, learning the brioche stitch in knitting and installing our new doorbell/camera thing-y.
Busy, busy – though not really with holiday stuff (we are doing a very, very low key holiday – hardly any gifts and maybe no parties) and less busy than I thought we’d be. Jeremy was in Denver this week, back last night. We hosted our friend Lael on Tuesday night and were supposed to host her two nights but she got sick and wanted to retreat back to a hotel room (even though I wanted her to stay). We were supposed to go to Philly this weekend to see Jeremy’s parents and do a big Kiki birthday celebration, but Kiki is sick too and we cancelled. (So if you are keeping track, we had to cancel both our mothers’ birthday celebrations in the last couple of weeks due to sickness…whomp whomp…)
I’ve been going once a week to help my mom declutter her house. It’s interesting to declutter with her there are a lot of things I remember her wearing as a child that are coming out of storage bins. My mother has a weakness for clothing which is on sale and “is a good deal”, many of them new and she wants to keep. Which is fine, we are making progress and she’s doing great. We also find some hidden money, my mother likes to tuck money here ad there and then forgets about it. So we found two crisp 100 dollar bills in a purse that hasn’t been opened in 20 years. Fun!
We had a nice dinner with Xiao Ying and her family on Saturday night. Peking duck and such things. The kids are getting so big! It’s what happens when a pandemic gets in the way of seeing each other.
It was the first time we talked to Elka over the google home camera. She looked around for our disembodied faces. And then we told her to get off the couch and she got up and off the couch and disappeared into an un-camera-ed part of the house.
I twisted my ankle on Thursday night by tripping over a yoga block, so no running for me for a few days (which continues into today). So instead, I’m playing more guitar and I spent a long time drilling rocks. I need to drill holes in the side of my house (which is stone) to mount a camera front door bell. It didn’t work that well. I wore down a bit and three rechargeable batteries for the drill and only got about 1/3 of the depth that I needed. I ordered another bit. I also polished silver and got on my hands and knees and cleaned some bathroom grout. I obviously am not busy enough.
Unexpectedly, Jeremy and I were able to dash away to an early dinner date on Tuesday and go grocery shopping together. It was a lot of fun. Ginny took Edda out to dinner on their own.
Jeremy has helpfully gone through all his bike parts and paraphernalia and decluttered them. We donated all of them to the Rockville Bike Hub (they were only open on Tuesday night – hence the date and the grocery shopping as well).
We had a lovely Thanksgiving hosted at our house. Jeremy made the turkey/gravy/stuffing/cranberry sauce and everyone brought everything else. My mom started off the meal with her famous egg rolls. We had 20 over, down from our usual 40, but we miscalculated the food and basically cooked twice as much as we needed to and have been having turkey leftover for days. Everything this year was delicious and perfect (except for my St. Louis gooey butter cake which did not do its proper rising) and I’ve been enjoying the leftovers very much.
We zoomed various family members all over the country (and the world).
We had two large tables with seating split between the two.
Jeremy and I did not go out to the movies, instead, we decided to take some time and go through our wire collection (I think this was Friday).
Pip enjoyed leftover turkey as well.
We went to Pike and Rose to go window shopping and shoe shopping for Bob and Katherine.
Now we are ready to go into the holiday season. Elka is a reluctant hat wear-er.
And the first lights to go up are Jeremy’s zoom office lights. LOL.
I’m always behind on paper mail, so it was only three weeks ago that I opened the mail to find an invitation to Kitachi’s wedding in Little Rock. (Kitachi was one of Edda’s caregivers who worked with us for about five years – she’s the one who helped us through the pandemic and patiently walked Edda through a year of virtual school.) My first instinct, honestly, was to not go because it would be expensive and sometimes I think these things would be too much trouble to ask Jeremy to mind Edda for the weekend or just too much trouble for myself. I told Jeremy about the invitation and he said — you should go! You’ll never be invited to a party like that again. To which I said – I wanted you to tell me that I should go and then I asked him if we could all go and he smiled and said – of course! Edda needs to go! And so we found ourselves on a flight to Little Rock on Friday afternoon.
Logistics: We’ve paid extra for the PreCheck and it’s totally worth it for Edda to not take off all her shoes and getting her up and out of her chair. It’s a relief to know that we won’t be hung up at security for 15-20 minutes. We’ve also upgraded – not in the sense that we pay for seating with extra legroom or any of the extras the airlines want (we still fly the cheapest economy seats we can get), we just upgrade to fly at convienent hours. So no early mornings or late nights for us and we try to get non-stop flights. Also, I did not book a bunk bed to save $40 and we rented a car after thinking we might Uber around town. I wasn’t sure about the Uber service in Little Rock and we have a lot of stuff with us.
We picked up Edda after school on Friday and went to DCA. Our plane was boarded on time, but there was a computer glitch and the plane needed to be rebooted. They turned the plane off and waited a couple of minutes (where Edda happily yelled Baaahahhh so everyone could hear) and turned it back on and it was fine.
We got in Friday night and slept and Saturday morning, we did a walking tour around Little Rock. We saw the Heifer International Center (we’ve been donors in the past)
We walked around the Clinton Library.
Stopped off at a fancy coffee shop where they make beautiful foam art.
We saw the high school where the Little Rock Nine desegregated it in 1957 to great outcry. I wanted to see this after seeing the high school in Topeka KS that was critical in Brown vs BOE.
Then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the partay! Edda wore a one shouldered outfit that Kitachi picked out for her for homecoming a few years ago. Jeremy and I wore the exact same outfits we wore for Sumit’s 50th birthday party about a month ago.
We were so happy and honored to be invited to this party. It was great to celebrate with Kitachi and Keyera!
I was determined to dance at this party and I did dance and have a wonderful time. There was a lot of twerking which I was trying to build up my courage to participate, I’m sure Kitachi would have done it with me, but I felt just a bit too self conscious to do it in the end.
Keyera is trying to convince me to join in more enthusiastically.
There was also a lot of complicated line dancing, here’s Keyera’s mom trying to teach me the steps. It was so much fun! So incredibly and fabulously joyful in many ways that I’m not familiar with. Jeremy was the only white guy and he dressed in a suit and looked like a banker. lol.
We flew home on Sunday during the day. Edda spent much of the time leaning up against me and rubbing her head on my shoulder and smiling. It was a great weekend – so happy we went and so happy we could go!
Look at what I found! A brand new hanging chair. When did we buy this? I have no idea. Why did we never use it? I have no idea. The house keeps unearthing mysterious things. This is getting decluttered.
We also found a lot of sitting chairs. Five of them! All different. These I’m sentimental about, so I didn’t get rid of any of these…
Last night, we went on a quick walk around the block with Joab. I handed him my phone so he could play Pokemon with Jeremy. He went through all of my Pokeballs and I had to buy more. He also needed to borrow a coat – so here we are, both in oversized coats made for sub zero degree weather. Jeremy was laughing at us funny ducks. I said that I had to bust them out of the closet because one never knew if this was the last cold day ever (even though it was only like 40F).
