Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female.

I hope your holidays were lovely or at a minimum, not complete shit. Either way – you got through it, so good job!

Year 2023 – if you’re reading this… I know you’re looking at the last couple years and maybe thinking, “I want no part of this” – but just hear me out. The bar is SO freaking low for you. Just hold off any new plagues, keep the weather extremes to a minimum, and stomp out the current plague. A mere three items on the to-do list. Bonus if you can get the Nazis to crawl back into the various caves they came out of.

As for myself for 2023, this is the week of contemplation of what I would like to accomplish next year vs. what I can realistically do… And let’s face, the gulf between those two is usually very wide and very deep. More than anything, I’d like to do a wee bit more than just surviving, cause I’ve been doing that since March of 2020, and it’s getting a bit old.

Though, I am looking forward to the navel gazing – it’s something I do enjoy far too much.

And since I have today off work, I think I will be giving myself the day off everything else, too, and just relax and eat and read and just quietly exist.

You have a wonderful day.

We had a very pleasant, low key Christmas here with all our brunch favorites and great presents ranging from the awesomely practical – a crab spoon holder – to the fun and silly – Lego Bonsai tree & a Hedgehog Chia pet.

Honestly, simpler-wherever-possible holidays are the way to go, and I’m glad I’m at a point in my life where I can do that. They’re easier to manage and as such – they’re easier to enjoy.

And I’m so very happy I have tomorrow off – any other year where I’ve had to be back at work on the 26th has been SO. HARD.

More than anything today, I am so very grateful that the power has held through this very nasty cold snap, which looks like it will start breaking on Tuesday. I suspect what has saved us is the lack of other weather on top of the cold – no snow or ice to bring down power lines.

Wherever you are, I hope you are warm and safe and had a good day.

Cold enough that my little car was very DANGER WILL ROBINSON, LOW AIR PRESSURE IN THE TIRES!! It was 11° out there when I went for coffee and one last trip to the market.

And the cable and internet just went out, so I’m working with a 4G connection with 3 bars until that is back up and running.

Because of this, I’ve also learned that the cable company has a default restoration time of 4 hours when their systems initially detect an outage. Cause there is no way that in the time it took for the cable to go out, and me to get to the web page that said all was well, refresh once to see yes, there is an outage, that they would know it would be 4 hours.

BUT IT IS MUCH BETTER THAN THE POWER BEING OUT.

I can absolutely deal with this, but I am realizing how much of my active and passive entertainment requires an internet connection, LOL.

But I’ve fired up the little emergency radio and we’re rocking out to DC101, static and all.

And suddenly the cable website says all is well again? But it’s not?

Ah well, hardly the end of the world. I’m home, we have power and heat and food, so it’s all good.

You have a wonderful and warm day.

You know how nice and calm and relaxed you’ve felt this afternoon? You know that was cause you put on your headphones and got the housework done and off the list, right?

You like this, right? You enjoyed being able to just sit back and make origami stuff for the tree, and finally put the wreath together and generally have a nice afternoon.

You could do this every day!

Here is the wreath:

Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying. (Still one of my favorite dumb holiday jokes.)

Did an hour of “headphones on” time and the kitchen and living room are to a state of “certainly good enough for now” and I’m pretty pleased with that. And I swear, my mood is lighter and my brain is certainly calmer – SO WHY DON’T I KEEP THINGS IN SHAPE ALL THE TIME?!

And because I got that all done, I can just kick back and enjoy the rest of my day. WHAT. A. CONCEPT.

Had a nice big salad for lunch, and now I am going to relax on my cozy sofa, read the 2023 Burpee seed catalog cover to cover, and make origami animals. Might wrap a few gifts.

But more than anything, I am going to do it all with zero guilt, cause I got stuff done today. Go me.

You have a wonderful day and STAY WARM!

Well done. And we’re gonna need those lighter days, cause it’s gonna be cold as fuck.

I think I may not have to leave the house again until after Christmas, though there is a bag of baby potatoes I may need to replace because some idiot didn’t put them in the pantry on Sunday after purchase cause they were going to be roasted “right away” and they’re going green… But at least that’s not critical.

Yesterday was a hot mess of a day. On the way to the bakery, the low fuel light came on in the car – usually I fill up once a month and it’s usually only down to 1/4 of a tank at that point, but I guess that I have driven more this month? What was very unnerving was the fact that I’d not even noticed that the levels were getting so low.

Hit the gas station. Got to the bakery. Got to the grocery store where I discovered they are already taking down Christmas stock AND PUTTING UP VALENTINE MERCH. ON DECEMBER 21.

Put together the cookie tins, couldn’t find the ribbon I’d had in my hands not even a week prior. Neasrly threw something across the room. (Found it. Bought two more spools when dropping off cookies for the vets office.)

Ordered dinner for pickup. 20-25 minutes to pickup. As I’m driving down the road 12 minutes later, get a text, “Your order is almost ready!!” I’M NOT THERE YET!!!!

Get dinner, get home, discover one container leaked all over the place. (Somehow, NOT on the seat of my car at least, which I will absolutely take.)

Then got a notification that an item I ordered on the 12th, which was supposed to arrive yesterday, is now arriving on Saturday. (Supposedly. It still hasn’t shipped.) I didn’t question that it wouldn’t ship immediately when I bought it, because it’s the holidays, more orders, it takes time to get them in boxes and out the door. Now I realize – Amazon didn’t have it in stock in the first place.

It’s not the end of the world by any means, but it’s not something I can find in store anywhere locally (I checked) nor can I get it online from another retailer in time. Lesson learned there!

I don’t think Amazon was being sketchy – I think they legit were “Yup, that stock is gonna come in on the 17th, it will be sorted into the right spots in the warehouse by the 18th, and we can get it out on 2 day delivery on the 19th.” But, Just In Time inventory is shit, and you’d think the pandemic would have taught us that by now.

By that point, I wanted to just hide under my bed until the new year.

But today is another day – and with slightly more light, so we’ve got that going for us.

The ADS-B Exchange site… I am just totally fucking fascinated by it.

One neat thing you can do is filter to only see military aircraft.

I have decided that yesterday a flight I caught in a little plane was a CIA flight. Dynamic hex callsign, which means you can’t really look up the registration, took off from a farm in Maryland (I hit up google maps – it’s an LLC property with acreage and what appears to be some crops, and definitely a damn landing strip mowed into a field) and landed at the Army airbase 10 miles from here. That or some general is flying himself to work.

And today? I shit you not, I am sitting here drinking my coffee and watching Air Force One on a training/maintenance flight doing loops around Joint Base Andrews. How neat is that?

Oh, and how did I figure out it was AF1? I googled “What are Boeing VC-25A used for” and this was the answer: The mission of the VC-25 aircraft — Air Force One — is to provide air transport for the president of the United States. The presidential air transport fleet consists of two specially configured Boeing 747-200B’s — tail numbers 28000 and 29000 — with the Air Force designation VC-25.

And here we have tail number 82-8000…aka 28000.

Like I said, very easily entertained.

Or do we just go to bed now, sleep for 18 hours and try again tomorrow?

Stopped for a second Starbucks on the way out and about because unexpected peopling requires caffeine and caramel syrup.

Got back in the car, saw that I needed to empty the little trash basket in my car, pulled the bag out, dropped it in a trash bin and discovered I had no more leftover grocery bags to use in the little basket. Realized if I tried to wait until I got back home to replace the bags, there weren’t any grocery bags cause I’ve been very good about using my totes, and I would forget anyway.

So, into the market next to the coffee shop, grab little garbage bags, remembered we need more tissue paper and small festive paper plates, and found a cute hot chocolate/mug combo for little bro, cause he does enjoy his hot chocolate.

Off to Kohl’s! Successful return! Found good replacement item! Also may have snagged a good pair of sweatpants that were very marked down. And a fuzzy throw because it’s not Christmas unless someone gets a blanket that is immediately claimed by the cat.

And honestly, all I want to do now is sit and eat peppermint bark and watch this Korean feudal era soul shifting drama.

So, it may be time to readjust expectations for the day and maybe rather than doing ALL THE THINGS, just get the new slipcovers on the sofa. I have at least gotten them out of the shipping box, so that’s a start, right?

We’ll see…

As Christmas stuff has been coming in, I’ve been parking it upstairs all in one spot (go me) and I thought I’d been checking the boxes, but I missed one and opened it up today and FML, it is not at all what I actually ordered for little bro.

And a replacement wouldn’t be here until the end of January.

And it was just a cool stocking stuffery thing, so it’s not the end of the world, but, DAMMIT.

Guess who is going to Kohls for returns today? Hopefully I can find something vaguely similar there, cause they do usually have a decent amount of stocking stuffer things.

I did at least look around to make sure there weren’t any other unopened boxes with any other surprises and it all seems OK, so at least there’s that.

But I’d just taken off my socks and put on my headphones…and I did not want to go back out into *flails arms* all that today.

Looks like 8:30 is going to be my wakeup time this week, and I love it cause I am a) waking up refreshed, naturally, and b) it feels ridiculously virtuous to wake up before my 9:30 “weekend” alarm, LOL.

And waking refreshed was extra important this morning because Starbucks mobile ordering was down system-wide this morning and I had to actually remember my order when I went in. (And of course, I have a high maintenance order…Trenta cold brew, with whole milk, and 4 pumps of caramel.)

JFC, Twitter. They’ve rescinded the link ban, and EM has put out a “should I quit?” poll, which has come out with a resounding “Get Out” result. Imagine 10 million users telling you to Fuck All The Way Off. LMAO.

I’d love to think that the users made him this miserable (and we certainly have) but I suspect that he met with his Saudi investors in Doha during the World Cup and they told him to GTFO. But, who in their right mind would take the job? I’ve unknowingly walked into some disasters, but this whole debacle has been so public and visible, I don’t even think you could trick someone into taking the job.

This week I learned something interesting – Sinex saline spray is an “over 18” purchase. Confused the hell out of the cashier, too, as she was scanning and suddenly going, “Wait, did you buy medication?” I guess cause it has some kind of propellant in it? I mean, I am kinda of addicted to being able to breathe through my nose.*

I’ve pretty much decided I’m not going to do the big bake this week – maybe some mini quick breads, but that’s it and I’ll do my part for the local economy with getting tea cookies from the Swiss Bakery. So, that trip and one more stop at the grocery store for the Entenmann’s cheese danish and we will be holiday ready! (Why not get a nice danish from the bakery? Because the danish has to be an Entenmann’s, because it just does.)

Well, we’ll be holiday ready from a fridge & pantry standpoint. The living room and kitchen both look like they’ve been hit by a tornado and I should probably do something about that before the weekend rolls around. If I sit on the couch and think really hard about it, do you think the rooms will magically clean themselves? Maybe?

I have my lovely Tody app at the ready, but I’m so behind on EVERYTHING that it’s showing 89 tasks due/overdue…so I should probably pause a bunch of those so I stop looking at it and becoming totally paralyzed trying to contemplate what to do next…

I’m still fascinated by that ADS-B Exchange flight tracker website and trying to figure out why a German military Airbus A-400 just took off from Dulles airport and is currently flying over West Virginia. (And I wonder why I don’t get other things done. BUT IT’S INTERESTING!)

So, the plan for the day is to have a bit more coffee, put on my headphones and cleaning music, and go to town around this house until I collapse.

You have a great day!!

* Three tests in the space of a week tells me it’s not covid, it’s just fucking winter, a house full of dust, and not enough humidity. I have also passed the Yankee Candle test. Protip: Don’t be dainty with it. Put a kitchen towel in your lap and squirt that stuff up your nose til it overflows. It’s just saline, it won’t hurt anything to overdo it.