Time Flies, Holidays Happen

I can't decide if Michaels is off message again for this year, or maybe on message. I guess it depends if HOME means you stay put or if you travel. Stay put, okay?

It looks as though we will have 5 out of 6 kids with us for Christmas (because 4 are already living here and the other is local and lives alone), so I feel lucky compared to a lot of people. But I was still dreading it, because we usually have another family over for dinner, which makes the day feel special, and that can't happen this year. 

The whole thing was making me miss my friends more than usual, and I wondered what we would do all day, once the gifts were opened. I sure didn't want everyone to retreat to their own rooms, like the housemates that we now are. So I half-jokingly suggested to the "kids" that they spend Christmas Day building gingerbread houses, like they used to, out of graham crackers and confectioners-sugar glue and candy. LOTS OF CANDY.

The results (2012 here) could be fairly impressive, I must say...

As you can imagine, when they were small, this was a popular Christmas time activity, one we would invariably invite neighborhood kids to, and there was generally enough sugar flowing that we'd have to administer insulin shots on their way out the door.

I exaggerate, but you get my drift.

The amount of prep required? Also fairly impressive.  

Anyhoo, as everyone aged out, soon it was only Susie who wanted to build a house and so the practice fell by the wayside. And I didn't really think anyone now (ages 15 - 29) would be interested. But they all pretty much jumped at the idea, and so that's what we will be doing on Christmas Day. Building graham cracker houses. 2020 has yielded quite a few surprises, so I'll just add that one to the list.

I'm in the final stretch of Christmas knitting, which never looks pretty:

My hands hurt. A LOT.

And we went all out for Chanukah, making latkes AND sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts), both events being spearheaded by Theo, because I hate frying things.

Disappeared so fast, I didn't even get a photo of the full plate

Tree is up, gifts are bought, Thanksgiving feels like eons ago. EONS. And, of course, Christmas cookies are baked:

Pecan bars, YUM

What a stupid year this has been. I mean, really. I feel as though we will all wake up on January 1st and shake our heads and go, "What the heck happened?" 

In the meantime, we soldier on. Stay safe! And keep your hands off those cookies...

Miscellaneous Taken To A New Level

Whelp, here we are, once more at the end of our family's birthday season. If you check out the info on the right there, in the sidebar, you can see that all my kids are getting really old. I don't know how that happened, actually, but with Theo having just turned 29, I can't ignore it anymore. I'm not sure if people without younger kids are even allowed to blog, so I'll have to check the rule book on that and get back to you. In the meantime, let's catch up!

Halloween still life, with Twizzlers

Halloween - our second year with no resident trick-or-treaters, and I'm still sort of annoyed about that. It's no fun stealing candy from myself, TBH. We saw 54 trick-or-treaters for our modified festivities this year (candy left at the end of the sidewalk, with us old people waving and exclaiming over costumes from the front porch). I am currently experiencing the remorse of one who has way overindulged in those fat little strawberry Twizzlers that are sold only for Halloween.

But the most exciting news from October was that the appliance repairman finally returned with all the needed parts and fixed our dishwasher. Honestly, toward the end of our broken-dishwasher ordeal, I had pretty much convinced myself that we were way more efficient at doing dishes when we had to do them by hand. "This is actually much better," I would announce to anyone who would listen, as I washed my 51st fork of the day and balanced it in my overworked Michael Graves dish-drying rack. 

"Dishwashers are a waste of time and energy resources," I'd say primly, as I tried to scrub the food stains off my white plastic cutting board. "Really," I told a not-listening Larry, "let's just take out the dishwasher and put the condiment fridge in that space."

The other residents of our household wisely chalked up my ravings to the dishwashing version of Stockholm Syndrome. But now we have our dishwasher back, and oh, it is a joyous experience to load up those 3 racks and start it up. JOYOUS, I tell you.

It cleans ALL THE THINGS

8 WEEKS, people. We went without this miracle of modern convenience for 8 weeks. No wonder I was suffering delusions by the end.

Spending less time washing dishes means I finally finished knitting the socks I've been working on since March and which will forever remind me of COVID-19. I am now fixated on knitting fingerless mitts, because it is November and Christmas is coming. Also, bulky cowls. And watch caps for the boys. That's my plan, anyway. Hopefully that dishwasher stays fixed.

The official colors of COVID, I guess

In other not-so-exciting news, I cleaned out some kitchen cabinets and discovered that I possess not even one complete set of measuring cups. Also? I unearthed a sippy cup lid (we haven't used sippy cups here in the past decade) and some taco holders (ditto) which I recall made some of my children very happy a long, long time ago.

Remembrance of things past

I do hope no one came here expecting anything other than the mundane. If there is one thing you can count on in this crazy, mixed-up world, it's that I will continue talking about broken appliances, my inept housekeeping practices, and knitting, all while waxing maudlin about the inexorable passage of time.

Oh, I almost forgot - I voted.

All the cool kids were doing it

I spent the 2 days before the election canvassing for Get Out the Vote, and I spent 4 hours volunteering at the polls on Election Day (hey, someone had to erase those ballots and fill them in the right way, you know - HA HA JOKE JUST KIDDING NO FRAUD HERE), so I spent Wednesday lying on our couch and wondering, along with the rest of America, just what was going to happen. I was exhausted. Spent. Wiped out.

But hey, at least I didn't have to do any dishes...

On The Road

 It's been an exciting 2 weeks, because NY and NJ finally decided to permit the citizens of my apparently COVID-ridden state to visit, so we took full advantage of the opportunity. Susie and I jumped in the car and drove to the Jersey shore, to our favorite beach town, where we stayed cheaply in an almost empty hotel (its being midweek in October). 

Requisite not-so-healthy car snacks

The town was sparsely populated, so no worries about COVID, and it was warm enough (high 60s) to lie out on the beach for a few hours and pretend it was summer. Somehow Susie and I managed to log upwards of 25,000 steps both days we were there, just walking around watching sunrises and sunsets and looking at seagulls and really, these 2 days were just about the perfect antidote for the previous 7 months of pandemic craziness. Highly recommend.

Oh, just one of the coolest sunrise photos I've ever taken, is all

On the way home, we packed the car full of NJ hoagies (yes, they ARE the best) and NJ bagels (ditto), stopped at a farm market to pick up half a bushel of apples and a package of cider doughnuts, and then drove back to reality, all the while feeling as though we had plundered my birth state. But in a good way...

While we were at the shore, we met up with friends from home who were remodeling their beach house. This couple nefariously lured us onto their new rooftop deck to admire the view from all sides, which was indeed magnificent. While we were up there, however,  I - acrophobe that I am - realized that we were trapped. You see, the spiral staircase leading up to the deck was not quite finished - the platform between it and the deck had no railings on either side. Going from the spindly staircase to the solid deck had been only moderately scary. But going down would mean traversing what seemed to be a postage-stamp-sized piece of metal in an attempt to land safely on the narrow top step of the staircase. The mere thought of this maneuver made my legs feel like jelly.

So the whole time we were up on the deck, admiring the view and discussing the furniture to be delivered the next day, my internal monologue was running along the lines of "Pretend there are railings? Scooch on my butt? Live up here until the railings are installed?" Over and over and over.

Susie, it turns out, was doing the same. We're a fun pair.

Not bad for an amateur, eh?

The next week Larry and I took off on Wednesday night - without any offspring - to go hiking in the mountains of southern NY. Again, hotels were really cheap midweek and we packed food for the first day's lunch, and aren't we frugal? 

Not really. Its being Larry's birthday weekend, he got to choose where to eat for dinner the next night, so - lover of beer that he is - he opted for the local brewery/restaurant, which had ample outdoor seating (my requirement). That means we ordered what I considered to be overpriced food that took approximately 11 hours to reach our table, plus we overtipped the waitress, because pandemic. In short, we spent what seemed to me to be a buttload of money and time for no real return - the food was mediocre, at best, and I found myself pining for those NJ hoagies of the previous week. 

No matter, I thought, Larry's enjoying himself drinking locally brewed beers. It's his birthday, so it's worth it. The second day, as we were meandering through the town after checking out of the hotel, I said, "Hey, didn't you want to buy some of the local beer to take home?" And he said, "Nah, it sort of sucked."

We're not very good at this vacation splurge thing. I guess you can take the girl out of fast casual, but you can't take fast casual out of the girl.

The hiking was wonderful. I love the Catskills, it was autumn weather, and it wasn't crowded on the trails. 

See? AUTUMN

This was billed as a "scramble over some rocks." Yeah, no. Terrifying.

It was so pretty up there, we got carried away and ended up hiking/walking over 12 miles that first day, although some of those steps happened because we decided to take the scenic route back to the hotel after our sad excuse for a fancy dinner and we got lost. Like, really lost. Like, walking by a graveyard in the dark and not knowing where we were, LOST. 

I blame Larry. I wasn't interested in the scenic route after sundown, myself.

Let me point out that this was the first time Larry and I have gone on a trip by ourselves in, oh, 29 YEARS. When we mentioned this to our offspring, I could sense each of them thinking, Yeah, I'm never having kids. All in all, it was very novel to go on a trip and not be worrying about keeping even one child or adolescent happy. Relaxing, even. I could definitely get used to it. 

But I'm choosing the food next time, for sure.

Dare To Repair (Or Maybe Just Call Someone)

So I woke up last Thursday morning and found Larry messing around in the laundry room where the magic Verizon box is and swearing quietly to himself. NO INTERNET. Thus started a 4-hour ordeal of his being on the phone with Verizon, trying to troubleshoot the problem, before they agreed to send someone to our house later that day.

These wifi thingies were all glowing an apocalyptic red Thursday morning

In the meantime, the rest of us wandered around the house, bereft and confused, but still too cheap to run up the data charges on our phones. Guys, it turns out we use the internet A LOT. ALL THE TIME. CONSTANTLY.

So, after we endured 4 more hours of living as though it were 1999, the repair guy came to the door and was treated as the conquering hero that he was. We all had to wear masks while he was in the house, which believe me, was no problem. Heck, we would have held our breaths if we had to. JUST GIVE US OUR INTERNET.

Which he did. Whereupon we all heaved a sigh of relief, put away our checkers and our whittling knives, and resumed a happily internet-dependent, 21st-century existence.

But somewhere in the middle of that - I guess while Larry was on the phone with the Verizon help line -- I heard him saying, "I have to set up a new PIN?" and I thought, Oh, no, not that.  You see, Larry -- security conscious as he is -- usually chooses passwords and PINS that no one (i.e., moi) can ever remember. 

And yes, we do try to write them all down, but we can never find the darn list when we need it. Look, I never said we were the most organized couple in the world, all right?

Anyway, Larry came up the stairs shortly thereafter to where I was busy sitting on the couch, missing my internet, and said, "Our new Verizon PIN is ****" (those are numbers, I'm just not telling them to you,because well, duh). Ever the optimist, I tried to make some sense of the 4 digits he chose, but I couldn't. Important date? Someone's phone number? Our old license plate number from the first state we lived in, which happens to be the only plate number stuck in my memory? No, none of that.

Me: How the heck am I supposed to remember 4 random numbers like that?

Larry:

Me: Well?

Larry: It's the date we met.

And that's how I lost a whole bunch of marriage points in one fell swoop. (Although, as a friend later pointed out, I'm still way ahead because of all the points I won from the bagel-slicer incident.) AND I had to watch Larry act insufferably smug for the rest of the day. 

But I did have my internet, so I couldn't complain. Much.

In other news, I became seriously delusional at some point last week and decided that, in true Rosie the Riveter fashion, I was perfectly capable of stripping the old caulk from our kitchen sink and replacing it with new caulk. So I went to Home Depot and bought some tools and implements of destruction, waited until Larry went to bed (I was trying to surprise him, in a good way), and commenced my operation.

These are much harder to use than they look

People, it took me almost an hour to dig out all the pieces of rotting, moldy caulk, even with that handy-dandy tool pictured up there. But once I did, I thought, Hey! Now I just squeeze this stuff out of the tube, smooth it, and let it dry. Easy!

[Narrator: It wasn't easy]

In one corner, I managed to get that nice, smooth professional look of freshly applied caulk. The rest? Well, it looked like a 5-year-old had done it. And the more I tried to fix it, the worse it got. It reminded me of the time my parents left me with a sitter and I got Silly Putty stuck all over the bathroom faucet and I finally gave up trying to remove it and went to bed. It was all gone in the morning, and no one ever mentioned it, much to my relief.

So, hoping for a similar miracle, I taped off the sink and went to bed.

Back right-hand corner looks good, right? RIGHT?

Unfortunately, it still looked pathetic in the morning, but Susie had helped a little by leaving a note for Larry: "Mommy worked really hard on this, so say it looks good."

Larry said it looked good. But he was shaking his head a lot all morning.

The Ties That Bind

 Today? I cleaned out the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen. It had been bugging me for months, what with it jamming on the doohickey that spreads out crepes and the oversize pizza cutter my kids insisted on buying, so I tackled it. I did a darn good job, if I do say so myself:

I will absolutely need ALL of those rubber bands some day

But while I was cleaning it out, I found a zillion (more or less) twisty ties and plastic thing-a-ma-bobs that are used to close bread bags. I was throwing them away as I scooped them out, but it suddenly occurred to me to wonder where they came from. I mean, I have never made a point of saving one of these things myself. As you can see in the picture, we have those handy-dandy bag clips from IKEA that we use for everything that needs sealing. Yet, those twisty ties had been sitting in my drawer, unnoticed by me, because I (like everyone else my age, most likely) grew up in a house that had a drawer holding twisty ties. 

Maybe, in the back of my mind, I believed they were a naturally occurring phenomenon in kitchen drawers?

Later, all 4 of the at-home "kids" happened to be in the kitchen at once, eating breakfast or lunch or something in between, because really, who knows anymore what meal they are eating, as time has no meaning in this age of corona. I seized the moment to get to the bottom of this mystery: "Hey," I asked. "Which one of you is saving these twisty ties from the bread bags?"

They all denied having done any such thing, which means - stay with me here - Larry is the culprit. What's more, if he is the one doing it, that means he has been saving them for the past 30 years of our lives together and I NEVER NOTICED.

What's up with that?

"Why do you think Dad's saving them?" I asked the not-kids-anymore human beings at my table. To which question they responded - literally - as one: "Because that's what old people DO."

Okaaay...so that's another theory: Larry hasn't been saving these things for 30 years, it's just a habit that naturally developed once he hit age 50 or so. It's like your knees starting to get stiff or suddenly having eyebrows that attempt to grow all over your face. Suddenly, you find yourself tossing bread ties in the junk drawer like the self-respecting almost-senior citizen that you are.

This idea is disturbing. Also, just as FYI for my kids, we're not THAT old. Not saving-bread-ties old. I'm not, anyway. 

The rubber bands don't count, dammit.