I am still testing negative for Covid, so Paul and William are still isolating. I don’t know what the guidelines are, since we seem to be working with old ones from a couple years ago, but my guess looking at the last missive from my workplace on the topic (from 2022) is that if I am negative on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I can then go to work wearing a mask on Monday—especially if I can work mostly in the stacks, and not be near other people. I will consult with my two bosses on that.
In the meantime, having Thursday and Friday off has been a tremendous boon. I am using almost all my time to work on Christmas things. I’m trying to focus on one giftee at a time; yesterday I focused mostly on William. When I was pretty much done with his shopping, I turned my attention to my niece, and spent some delightful time researching combat boots (it’s an item on her wish list) with the help of Henry who is a couple of years older than my niece and has friends who wear combat boots. It was QUITE fun: one of his friends was sending link after link, and we were sending links back, and now we have narrowed it down to…let’s see, eleven pairs. Today I will attempt to narrow that down further, and then pick another child to shop for—probably Elizabeth.
Whenever I get tired of paging through online shopping options, or when I start feeling chilly from not moving around enough, I go out to the barn and fetch a box of Christmas dishes, or the Melissa & Doug Countdown Tree, or a couple of decor items. Because of this effort, this morning I am drinking my coffee out of a Christmas mug and feeling happy about it. FURTHERMORE: it was a Christmas mug I have not seen for YEARS, because I had for some inexplicable reason tucked it down into the corner of the wreath box?? Probably what happened was that I was putting away the wreaths and noticed one more mug in the dishwasher, and just added it in—not knowing that the following years I wouldn’t bother with wreaths. (This new house doesn’t work with them the way the old house did.) I found it this year only in a last-ditch effort to find the Christmas tree skirt we apparently lost in the move. I dug my hand down into the wreath box feeling for velour, and found china.
The mug is a Stechcol (a brand I often find myself picking up admiringly when I’m at HomeGoods or Marshalls), and I remember choosing it on a shopping trip with my mom: there were four different designs, and we stood there for awhile ranking our favorites and deciding how many we would each buy. I think I bought two, but I’m not sure: I might have only bought one; I might have donated the other one if it seemed too similar (I am always TRYING to cut down on the number of mugs I have) (while also constantly buying new mugs); it might be tucked down into the corner of a DIFFERENT box of decor.