Comment-Liking

(cc’d to baby name blog)

One of you mentioned the other day that you wished you could “like” someone’s comment, and I thought yes, that would be so fun, too bad it isn’t an option. Then someone else said it, and I thought, well, maybe I should just make sure that wasn’t a possibility, and I poked around behind the scenes in the commenting options area but there was no option for “likes”—too bad. Then someone said it VERY VEHEMENTLY and I thought “OKAY FINE I WILL CHECK FOR SURE” and I searched online and…found something. And I THINK, I THINK I have enabled “likes” on comments.

However. Beta testing by a helpful friend indicates you may need to be logged into WordPress in order to like a comment. Do any of you happen to know any way around that, and/or are you good at researching such things? (It took my maximum tech research effort to get as far as I have.) I don’t want it to be a feature available for WordPress Members Only, and may remove the “like” option if that’s the only way it can be.

(A note: I hope it is intuitively clear that I can never, ever, ever hit “like” on ANYONE’S comment, or else I will need to hit “like” on EVERY SINGLE comment, and one of those strategies is less work and less likely to go amiss than the other, so that is the one I will be doing. It will be UNDERSTOOD that Swistle automatically MENTALLY hits “like” on every comment.)

 

Follow-up: It looks like the comment-likes system is a WordPress Members Only club, so I am turning it back off.

Physical Ailment Discussion

Just now I was in the kitchen updating the list of chores the kids are supposed to work on today. As an aside: I’d started out letting the kids choose their own daily chores, since that would have appealed to me as a child. Only Rob and Elizabeth responded well to that system—which is interesting because they are both the Little Grown-Ups type of child, the kind who from infancy seems embarrassed to be considered a child, and would prefer to sit with the grown-ups, and so on. My other three are all the Babies type of children: didn’t mind being considered babies or treated as babies when they were in fact babies, don’t particularly seem to mind being considered and treated as children while they still are children, content to be told what to do and how to do it. The clear diagnostic line for me between Little Grown-Ups children and Babies children is this: Do I HATE to have to correct them and do I cringe at the idea of telling them no—the way I might if the other person were a peer? Or do I feel perfectly and automatically comfortable with both correcting and naying? With Rob and Elizabeth, I HAAAAAATE telling them no or bringing a mistake to their attention (LITTLE GROWN-UPS); with William and Edward and Henry, I don’t think twice about it, it’s super easy (BABIES).

Where was I? Oh, yes: so Rob and Elizabeth choose their own chores and do them without being told, and I write chores on the dry-erase board for the others, and I am still not tired of choosing which color markers to write with each time. After I wrote the chores, I stood there a minute, uncertain of my previous trajectory: how did I come to be in the kitchen, writing chores, when I remembered recently making tea and bringing it to my desk? After a moment, I gave up trying to figure it out and went to my desk/tea—where I saw an email confirming an orthodontist appointment. Ah ha! I’d gone to the kitchen to look at the calendar to make sure we had that appointment, and then I’d seen the dishes on the counter and put them in the dishwasher, and that had reminded me of the chores I wanted the kids to work on so I’d written those on the board. Then I’d stood there, wondering what had happened to my tea. I find this happens increasingly with age, as prophesied by our elders.

Yesterday I took a day off from keto and it was a glorious day. I ate one of the chocolate-chip cookies Elizabeth had made the night before, and some leftover Christmas cookies/bars from the freezer, and a grilled cheese sandwich, and ramen soup, and chicken nuggets, and garlic bread, and buttered toast with cherry jam, and the new Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie cereal which I was impatient to try and which did not disappoint, and some white cheddar popcorn chips, and quite of a few of the freeze-dried Skittles my sister-in-law sent for everyone’s stockings this year, and some fruit cups, and oh it was just great. But then I woke up at 2:00 in the morning with esophagus pains/spasms, and I took Tums and I went downstairs and took a few peppermint oil drops and made peppermint tea, and gradually I felt well enough to doze off in a recliner, though I kept waking up, giving myself plenty of time to wonder was it the FOODS THEMSELVES? or the overeating of those foods? or maybe the food COMBINED WITH my recently-renewed ability to drink coffee? I feel like my body is getting well into the long slow-but-escalating process of disintegration, and my first two prizes from the Aging Lottery appear to be Knee Pain and Assorted Heartburn/Esophagus Issues. And, like Nora Ephron, I am starting to feel bad about my neck.

Oh, and near Christmas I used a bunch of Advent calendar beauty samples on my eye region (sparkle eye shadow, eye creams, face creams), so I don’t know which if any of them DISPLEASED MY EYE LIDS, but it was apparently SOMETHING, and they’ve been intermittently unhappy since then: they’ll be fine for awhile, and then there is a little recurrence of itching/pinkness, and the skin continues to look a little rougher than I remember it looking before—though perhaps that too is an Aging thing, and I just didn’t notice it until there was some itching to make me look closely. I am having another little recurrence now, so I am putting some Eucerin (the kind that’s like Crisco) around the area, because the roughness of the skin reminds me of eczema, and because I remember the pediatrician telling me Eucerin was the best thing to use on a newborn’s eczema, and eyelids seem about that delicate, and the Eucerin does make them feel better; and I’ve also been using some allergy eye drops when the itching gets worse. WHY SO MUCH FALLING APART, BODY. I am feeling like everything’s so SENSITIVE now: have to be careful how I move, have to be careful what I eat, have to be careful what I put on my skin.

 

Would you like to make some Physical Ailment complaints, particularly the age-related kind? My friends and I have noticed that, as we get older, we need to set aside a nice chunk of time during each get-together for that particular topic.

Possible Cat; Complaints About Those I Love

Elizabeth has found a 4-year-old shelter cat online and she wants us to adopt it. She is good at the kind of persuasion that works on my temperament type: she never seems like she’s pushing or nagging or whining, she just seems Really Cute and Happy about the idea and it makes me want to make it work out for her. This morning I said to Paul, “We should probably discuss that cat, in case we need to nip this in the bud,” and he said “I leave the decision entirely to you and Elizabeth.” Which, er. Probably means we’re going to get the cat.

 

My renewed efforts to take care of physical/mental health seem to have worked, to my relief. I would still say I am in an adrenaline valley, but I’m no longer worried that I’m getting sick. I’ve gone back to the rough checklist I had earlier in the pandemic, where every day I attempted to check off these things: exercise, email/letter, reading, blogging or working on blog-fixing project, chore…and there was something else, but I threw the chart away at some point, feeling like I had it down-pat, which was clearly a mistake.

 

I would like to make two complaints. But one is against Target, and you know how I feel about Target; and the other is against a book in a series I love, so we have to START with the understanding that this is like complaining about one’s spouse or one’s children: OBVIOUSLY there is a baseline of INTENSE LOVE, and this is just a SMALL COMPLAINT with the FULL KNOWLEDGE that the complaint is DWARFED by the…etc.

Okay, first Target. Many of us have remarked on how VERY MANY BOXES the orders sometimes arrive in. My assumption early in the pandemic was that it was a result of the abrupt and unexpected increase in online ordering, and they just didn’t have the right boxes or enough of them, and also that there were warehouse issues. But we are over ten months in, and if anything the box situation has gotten worse. Yesterday I received SIX boxes from Target. TWO of them were their typical Fairly Large boxes—capacity of, say, four to six large bags of chips. One of those largish boxes contained one single plastic plate, plus YARDS of plastic cushioning balloons. The other contained another single plastic plate, plus a tiny box of eye drops, plus YARDS of plastic cushioning balloons. A third box contained one (1) can of pears. A fourth box, somewhat satisfyingly, had exactly the capacity of the one bag of chips it contained. And so on.

Meanwhile, I am getting delivery emails from Target that say “Looking for a packing slip? We’ve got some ambitious sustainability goals. One small step? Skipping packing slips.” Okay, you saved one piece of paper per box and I agree that is well worth doing, especially considering how very many boxes there are, but WHAT ABOUT THE MILLIONS OF UNNECESSARY EXTRA CARDBOARD BOXES AND MILES OF UNNECESSARY PLASTIC BUBBLES?? I feel like I personally have wasted 1-2 dinosaurs, just with my Target ordering since last March.

 

Okay, second thing. I love this series, and this book, but it is driving me a little bit up a tree:

(image from Target.com)

Magic Lessons, by Alice Hoffman (Target) (Amazon)

This is the prequel to Practical Magic. And I am glad I have it, and glad to be reading it, and now I want to re-read the rest of the series. It makes me wish I were a witch. And it was published in 2020 and I think it has real 2015-2019 vibes, with some nice pointed content about how, generation after generation, the people who consider themselves the most moral are going to be the ones doing some of the most evil in the name of morality, and men are gonna men and some of them are going to blame/punish women for it, and unjust judges are gonna judge, and humans are gonna human, and so on.

HOWEVER. It is driving me nuts in two ways. One is the Lofty/Legend/Fairytale/Portent tone/phrasing/wording, which might have been just the same in the other books and I just don’t remember it. A lot of “for” used instead of “because,” and a lot of the pronoun “one,” and verb choices such as “vowed”: “He vowed that such-and-such, for he was a such-and-such man who such-and-such, and when one is that kind of a man, one…” Tiresome.

The other complaint is that it is RIFE with errors. RIFE. Some of the errors involve spoilers, so I can’t list them. But there’s one that is not a spoiler so I will tell it to you. A young woman wants to avoid love, and in addition to her thinking that to herself (“vowing” that to herself) MANY MANY TIMES, there is a whole paragraph about the various measures she takes to protect herself from it. It uses these exact words: “to protect herself from love.” NOT THREE PAGES LATER it says about the same young woman: “…but in all this time she had not once thought to protect herself from love.” EXCUSE ME BUT SHE HAS THOUGHT IT AGAIN AND AGAIN IN THE ENTIRE BOOK SO FAR, IT IS IN FACT ONE OF THE MAIN THEMES OF THE BOOK.

And there are LOTS MORE OF THOSE. There is one part where I can picture the author and editor both noticing the issue but not being able to fix it without spoiling something later in the book, and I can see their conundrum—but it really needed to be fixed, or else left out. It CAN’T be the way that it is without creating a little paradox that undermines one of the recurring themes of the book.

 

One more complaint, this one about Paul: the sounds he makes while eating have gotten worse with age. And/or with me being trapped in the house with him all day every day for ten months.

 

Okay, I am done. Feel free to complain about any of your darlings.

Slump

Yesterday and today I have felt logy and exhausted, which of course is worrying in a pandemic. I have a cousin who tested positive for Covid-19, and she said the first two days of it all she felt was extremely tired. So it springs to mind. And it was about a week ago I had to take Edward into a hospital for his Remicade infusion, and we were there for several hours breathing hospital air, so it is good to keep in mind as a possibility.

But I think it is more likely this is a sudden decrease in anxiety/adrenaline that my brain/body is interpreting as depression and exhaustion. I think I’ve been running on stress for awhile, and my body isn’t sure what to do for energy now.

Also, I think in my relief over the inauguration, I may have abruptly stopped alllll of my stress/coping supports. I haven’t been careful about taking my vitamins. I haven’t been careful about food. [Clarification: I mean, haven’t been eating enough of it. Initially I left it deliberately vague since there are many ways to be uncareful about food and it’s more relatable if we can each imagine our own way—but now I am more concerned about making sure I’m not feeding into (ha) the idea that the only way to eat uncarefully is the way that results in gaining weight.] I haven’t been using the lamp that mimics sunlight.

Also-also, are you too finding that you suddenly have so much more free time and mental space, now that you don’t have to constantly worry about the president steering our airplane into a mountain? Until the last week, I had been worrying about going back to work someday: I originally got that job in part because of feeling like I had way too much time on my hands; but since the pandemic began and I stopped working, I HAVEN’T been feeling bored or like I had too much time. I didn’t know where my time was going (TWITTER DOOM-SCROLLING), but I felt like I was easily filling it (TWITTER DOOM-SCROLLING). I was also spending a LOT of time planning/monitoring groceries and supplies, and that need hasn’t gone away but it has abruptly dropped in urgency, so then I don’t spend as much time searching for out-of-stock things. I am finding myself with more time than I can fill. (I realize this is not a sympathetic complaint right now, as many people are trying to work from home and care for small children. Try to think of it as me listing a symptom, rather than as me complaining that my heaps of diamonds keep scratching up my furniture.)

I still check Twitter, and when I see some minor outrage that is being blown up into a huge outrage (I think because there is a sudden drop in huge outrages, and a lot of other people don’t know what to do with that new situation either), I can just…stop scrolling Twitter. I can listen to the NPR news update once or twice a day, but don’t have to leave it on afterward to hear someone explaining how potentially dangerous and democracy-destroying the most recent action by the president is. If I start feeling stressed about the former president, I can snip that right off at the root: he’s just some terrible person with no connection to my life now.

Anyway, today I am taking some steps. I got up and made a good hearty breakfast, and took my vitamins, and used my sun lamp. I am writing some posts. I will do some chores, perhaps. I will read a book. I will try to keep warm, because once I get too chilly I don’t want to budge. I will find some things to do. I will look forward to getting back to my library job.

Grocery Shopping Report

Grocery shopping day! The last time I went was before Inauguration Day, and I could see/feel a LARGE CHANGE in my attitude from one trip to the next. Last time I was thinking, “What if the government collapses, and the violence and the pandemic continue on year after year? Should I be stocking up on more flour/yeast/beans? What is the right amount of canned goods for an Armed Insurrection?” This time I was relaxed: “This won’t go on forever! The end is in sight! I do not need another flour, because I have plenty! Soon there will be cleaning supplies again, so I will not worry about it!”

And, like a dove-fetched fresh-picked olive branch showing that the flood waters were indeed receding, there were small cans of Lysol disinfecting spray! and ABUNDANT paper towels filling not only the shelves but part of the aisle floor! and BRANDED HAND SOAP!

We still appear to be experiencing the national Grape-Nuts shortage, but I feel that’s survivable.

They had some little Hickory Farms sausage/cheese holiday gift sets marked from $10 down to $3, and I stood there frozen and indecisive until I gave myself a little shake and said “IT’S A MATTER OF THREE DOLLARS, JUST BUY ONE.” Ditto for NEW! Pretzel Pop-Tarts. Yes, it’s obviously a big lifestyle decision, but let’s not stand here breathing the air for any longer than necessary.

I had a mask panic on Twitter the other day, and several people advised wearing TWO masks: the disposable non-surgical kind first (I have a box of those left over from my days as an in-home elder caregiver), with a cloth mask over it. I tried that today, and it worked well: I didn’t notice a difference in how well I could breathe, I only noticed I felt a little more humid/itchy around the edges of the mask. Well worth it.

There was a guy wearing his mask fully on his neck in this The Year of Our Lord 2021, 11 months into a pandemic. I considered making a faux-panicked remark (“Sir!! Your mask!! It’s slipped!!!”)—but my assessment was that anyone blatantly not wearing a mask in January 2021 knows what they’re doing and is hoping to pick a fight.

 

I CRAVE YOUR GROCERY NEWS.

The Twelve Days of Inauguration

I had heard here and elsewhere of the idea of starting a fresh (ideally clearance-purchased) Advent calendar two or three days after Christmas (depending on whether it’s the kind with 24 doors to open or 25, and depending on whether you want to open the last door the day BEFORE or the day OF), so that it could be a new countdown to the presidential inauguration. While I didn’t see any clearanced Advent calendars THIS year, I did have one I’d purchased LAST year for $3 and then never used. It had bath salts and bath…spheres (not bombs, really, but a little round ball to put into the tub), which I don’t use, but it also had hand lotions and hand scrubs, so it seemed worth the $3-down-from-$30. Why was I telling you this story? OH yes, because I used that as my Inauguration Advent Calendar, and it was a nice idea, and I’ve set aside the bath salts and so forth for a giveaway later because I am sure someone else would enjoy those.

I don’t feel as desperate these days for Something To Encourage Me To Get Out of Bed, thank goodness. We’re less than a week into the new presidency and I wake up every morning, feel the familiar dread of the last four+ years, and then remember that Tr*mp is just some guy now, and he doesn’t have any power over us anymore, and that the new president is already more than three days into an actual plan to combat Covid-19 so maybe someday I can go back to work and the kids can go back to school and people can stop dying of this.

Still. That was 50ish days of opening up a little giftie each morning before my shower. A person could get into the habit. Which is why it was VERY HAPPY to discover/remember that last year I ALSO bought the Target 12 Days of Christmas calendar on clearance. And so I opened Door 1 on the day after Inauguration Day, and I am doing The Twelve Days of Inauguration. I realize that I should have opened Door 1 ON Inauguration Day, as one would open Door 1 on Christmas Day—but I didn’t discover/remember I had the calendar until the day after, and also I feel like Inauguration Day, like Christmas Day, already had enough stuff going on and didn’t need a little bonus giftie; and also, when I woke up on Inauguration Day things weren’t celebratory yet: the day after Inauguration Day was the First Morning Someone Else Woke Up in the White House. So I am just barely able to get over the feeling that I should have opened Door 1 at, say, lunchtime, and proceed from there. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE EXACTLY RIGHT IN EVERY WAY, SWISTLE.

Inauguration; Enough of Us

I was so worried that Something Bad Might Happen yesterday, I couldn’t write any posts, because I winced to think of us talking happily/optimistically, and then having Something Bad happen and those happy/optimistic things still posted, and anyway now that yesterday is over I feel like MomQueenBee stretching out in a comfy position that doesn’t hurt anymore, and also like Mimi Smartypants done throwing up but still shaky and weird and not able to do much. I’ve seen many other people remarking on the phenomenon of how all of us are MARVELING at things that ought to be normal: a non-combative, accurate-information-giving press secretary; a president who takes the actions available to keep the country’s citizens from dying unnecessarily; not having to wake up flinching about what latest terrible/revolting thing the president might have done/said while we were asleep.

I could hardly believe that the inauguration happened, and that no one died from it. And then the man who was president yesterday morning was suddenly No Longer President, and there was no longer any chance for any “Oh, whoops, actually he still is” to happen. He didn’t manage to collapse the government/country. And as many, many people are reminding us, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen (and in fact it’s MORE likely to happen, now that it’s been shown how close even a bungled/inept/unsophisticated attempt could come)—but it didn’t happen THIS time. (*gif of Moira Rose saying “Let us CELEBRATE that”*)

I appreciate our new president’s urge to have unity, even though I don’t think it’s possible/reasonable to unite us all; it’s just that I appreciate having a president who WANTS that, instead of a president who wants us to fight to the death in a gladiator ring for his entertainment. But we CAN’T unite with certain viewpoints, when those viewpoints are not just Different but Inherently Wrong/Bad. And so what I REALLY appreciated was the much-less-emphasized part where he mentioned the concept of Enough Of Us. That the reason the United States has pulled through other really bad situations was that ENOUGH OF US wanted to get through it. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought slavery was great, actually—but that ENOUGH OF US thought it was wrong and we shouldn’t have it. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought women shouldn’t be able to vote or own property or leave their abusive husbands—but that ENOUGH OF US thought women should be legally equal to men. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought that God hates people who are gay or transgender, but that ENOUGH OF US thought that people are people, and love is love, and that that’s not an appropriate use of the concept of God, and so forth. And now: not that we UNITE with those of us who have shocked us over the last four years with their cruelty and bigotry and violence and selfishness, but that ENOUGH OF US want to live a different way. (IF enough of us DO.)

Chantilly Perfume

I have a long and, if we are to draw any conclusions from Paul’s glazed-eyes reaction to even the brief summary, rather boring story to tell!

I recently bought myself several Demeter Fragrance Library samplers on sale. I have been trying them. Yesterday I tried a scent called Fuzzy Sweater, which reminds me of some of the perfumes I wore in high school. The one that came floating to mind was Chantilly, though I don’t remember what it smelled like so I can’t really say if it DOES smell like Fuzzy Sweater; the name Chantilly was just stored in the same part of my brain that categorized Fuzzy Sweater as a High School Perfume.

That led to a feeling of nostalgia for Chantilly, and also curiosity to remember/know what it DOES smell like. I remember it being inexpensive (anything I wore in high school was inexpensive), so I looked it up, thinking I’d buy a bottle for $10-20ish and have the fun of trying it again.

Well. WELL. It turns out, the whole topic of Chantilly is fraught. FRAUGHT! You can find message boards online where people are discussing their STRONG and VARIED opinions, as well as confusion in the face of other people’s opinions! Some people RHAPSODIZE about [one particular scent note] while others claim to be unable to perceive anything except [other particular scent note], and then there is further discussion about whether those particular scent notes are GOOD or BAD; there is also an entire sub-topic about whether it is An Old Lady Perfume, and what does that mean anyway (and I mean ACTUAL ANALYSIS of what it might mean, in terms of the various elements of fragrances—not just huffiness).

And gradually I became aware of another issue, which is that people might be talking about DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF CHANTILLY. If I am following the saga, the maker changed at Some Point. I wearied of research before being able to discover WHEN this happened, but interestingly, the bottle shape I remember is right in the overlap between makers. That is, there are bottles made EARLIER by Houbigant that look very different from the bottles made LATER by Dana, but in the middle there is a particular bottle shape that (1) was used by both, and (2) is the bottle I remember. It looked like this:

(image from Amazon.com)

So! WHICH KIND DID I USE, HOUBIGANT OR DANA?? Furthermore, in the same part of my brain where I store the memory of Chantilly, I store a vague feeling of disappointment. Such as: I’d tried the sample bottle many times in the store, then finally bought a bottle, and felt it wasn’t as good as the sample. And/or: I bought a small bottle to start, loved it, finished it, bought a new bottle, and it wasn’t as good. That kind of feeling. And yet I DID wear Chantilly for years, so it wasn’t THAT disappointing. But still: maybe the sample/first bottle was Houbigant, and the bottle I bought / second bottle I bought was Dana!! Depending on which of those memories, if either, is accurate!

I started poking around on EBay, which is a great place to buy old perfume and also a terrible place to buy old perfume. The prices vary wildly! Shipping varies wildly! With or without box! What percentage full! Etc.! And I am sure the site is just PACKED with fakes. Like, WOULD someone have a new-in-box bottle of Chantilly from decades ago? BUT MAYBE THEY WOULD! Sometimes people receive perfume as gifts and never use it! Or sometimes they buy ahead: I myself have a new-in-box bottle of Charlie that I bought YEARS ago on clearance for when my current bottle of Charlie is empty, but that day may never arrive! (Though I am wearing Charlie today, because now I am in the mood for perfume I wore in high school.) Plus I have several new-in-box bottles of various L’Artisan perfumes that were being discontinued, because I knew if I didn’t have another bottle waiting I’d hoard what remained of my current bottle. And there is the concept of Old New Stock, where apparently a bunch of stuff is found in an old warehouse! But also: I would expect fakes to be new in box, so perhaps I should stick to the partially-used bottles which seem more likely to be real. It’s not as if I am going to keep the box! (But on the other hand it’s so appealing to have it!) You can see how all this easily absorbed over an hour of time.

What I did was, I just kept putting candidates in my cart until I felt tired of browsing. Then I sorted them into two heaps, Houbigant and Dana. And I tried not to overthink it, but did overthink it a little anyway, but no matter, because I felt happy with the decision: I ended up ordering two used/partial bottles of matching sizes; one has the box and one does not; both had free shipping.

I am excited for them to get here! I hope they don’t smell exactly the same and also not good!

…Sigh. While proofreading, I took one more stab at finding out when the switch from Houbigant to Dana took place, and found there is also apparently ANOTHER switch to New Dana. Which is unfortunate, because I see the Dana bottle I bought is actually New Dana, but feel too worn out to find out if that matters or not—and yet, certainly the kind I used was NOT New Dana—but very likely New Dana is a name change ONLY, and there was no change to the formula. (Although…”New”…maybe that specifically means the fragrances were updated.) I tried to get myself interested in starting the whole process over again and buying a Dana bottle, but then noticed that I’ve been neglecting to take into account whether the bottles were eau de toilette or eau de cologne or eau de parfum, and I don’t remember which one I had in high school ANYWAY. Since I remember it being cheap, it was probably eau de toilette—but maybe THAT’S the solution to the Memory of Disappointment mystery: maybe I tried a sample of eau de parfum, then bought the eau de toilette.

…Okay, I forced myself to persist, and I now have a THIRD bottle of Chantilly on its way to me, a Dana-not-New-Dana one. For heaven’s sake. If they all smell the same and/or I don’t even like the smell anymore, we will have to do a giveaway!

More Miscellaneous

Let’s just keep distracting ourselves with chatty things.

Julia asked if we could have another stranded-mail check-in, and I’d like that too. I’ll go first. The package I sent to Paul’s sister on December 11th finally arrived several days after Christmas. Something I ordered for Henry on EBay arrived in the week after Christmas, too, and I could see from the postmark that it had been mailed December 8th. We got lots of Christmas cards after Christmas, many postmarked weeks earlier (the record was the one postmarked December 9th that arrived December 31st). I don’t THINK I had anything completely lost in the mail, but on the other hand I don’t keep very good track of such things, so I can imagine suddenly saying “Hey, whatever happened to…???” And of course I don’t know how many Christmas cards might have been lost.

Speaking of suddenly thinking of something, I suddenly realized I’ve been focusing so hard on January 20th, I wasn’t remembering Valentine’s Day. We don’t do MUCH for Valentine’s Day (I put dinner on heart-shaped plates, and I buy myself a box of chocolates because I have given up on making that happen any other way), but I do always buy the kids these giant Hershey Kisses, and a pandemic year is not the year to accidentally forget a tradition. I was able to order them for Drive-up, AND they were 50 cents less if bought that way, AND this week is 20% off all Valentine candy, so that was good timing.

(image from Target.com)

I wish there was a way to say “No reply needed” on letters to representatives/officials. Or rather, I know there is a way to say it, and it’s by saying it, but in my experience they don’t HEED such instructions. I needed to write an email recently to a bunch of people in charge of our school system, and now emails are coming back to me saying the things that they have to say when they get input from a parent, and I am wishing we could SKIP IT. One email said the things and ALSO promised to reply at more length later on, and PLEASE DO NOT. And last time I wrote a letter of this sort, someone CALLED ME to say the things they are required to say, and that was the WORST.

MISCELLANEOUS WHATEVER

If the response to yesterday’s post is an indication, it seems we are Here For a mix of OH GOD IS THIS THE END OF OUR COUNTRY AS WE KNOW IT, complaining about the “””cleaning””” methods of our housemates, and discussing recent purchases—which is basically the current contents of my brain, so good, let’s continue as long as we’re here.

I am gradually learning which things work better to order for pick-up and which work better to order for shipping. This morning I received two of Target’s LARGEST shipping boxes, and they weighed so little I thought they might be empty. It turned out each contained ONE of the two windshield wipers I’d ordered. To be fair, the wipers were not available for pick-up, which is why I had them shipped. And I could see why it would be a good idea to package the somewhat fragile and spindly windshield wipers separately from, say, heavy crashy things such as jars of peanut butter and cans of beans. But surely the pair could have traveled companionably together? Well, it feels like the wrong moment in history to make little constructive criticisms of shipping facilities.

I would like to make a spousal complaint about Mr. Thistle, aka Little Miss He Absolutely Did Not Do Whatever it Is I’m Mad at Someone for Doing, Even If He Absolutely Did. Here is an example. I keep a roll of masking tape in a kitchen drawer; I use it to label containers of leftovers. It is WELL-KNOWN that that particular roll MUST STAY IN THAT DRAWER OR MOTHER WILL LOSE HER MIND. I will buy ANYONE WHO ASKS a roll of masking tape OF THEIR VERY OWN! TWO rolls! But leave MY masking tape in that drawer, because when I am drearily cleaning up the kitchen after drearily feeding everyone yet another meal, I am in NO MOOD to go looking for that tape. Anyway, the other day it was missing, and I made a loud and extended remark about it. Paul said he personally hadn’t seen or used that roll of masking tape in months. MONTHS! But that he would be happy to let me use HIS roll of masking tape, which he keeps in his desk drawer, which is why he would NEVER take mine. He went to fetch it, and then there was a little pause, and then he said that actually he had TWO rolls in his drawer, so I could HAVE one. He said this magnanimously, even though it was IMMEDIATELY clear to BOTH of us that he HAD taken my masking tape, and then had accidentally returned it to his desk drawer—and, since I use masking tape nearly every day, it DEFINITELY had not been “””MONTHS”””.

It’s eight days until Inauguration Day. Today Congress is requesting the Vice President and Cabinet to please declare the President unfit for office and have the Vice President take over. No one really expects that to work, but it would be nice to have them on record as declining that offer. Tomorrow begins the Impeachment process. IT’S EIGHT DAYS UNTIL INAUGURATION DAY. CAN WE HURRY THIS UP A BIT. PERHAPS GET STARTED WITH IMPEACHMENT WHILE WE’RE WAITING FOR THE VP TO IGNORE THE REQUEST. PERHAPS CONSIDER WORKING OVER THE WEEKEND. ETC. There are pretty intense concerns that the inauguration will not be safe, and that state capitals will also not be safe.

Meanwhile Covid-19 is cropping up closer and closer. At first I was hearing about it happening to more distant connections: Paul’s aunt’s husband’s brother, for example, or a childhood friend’s mother-in-law. Now my cousin has it (not the racist one I finally had to unfriend—this cousin is one of my dearest friends), and her husband has it, and a different dearest friend’s daughter has it, and Elizabeth’s friend’s sister has it.

I have been getting hives again, and although I will need to get this officially checked out when it’s safe to do so, it’s pretty clear they’re stress related. Around Election Day: HIVES HIVES HIVES EVERY DAY HIVES. After the Election was called: NO HIVES. Christmas stress: HIVES AND HIVES! After Christmas but before attempted coup: NO HIVES. Attempted coup: HIVES. I’m taking a daily Zyrtec, and also take benadryl before bed when I have any active hives.

Also, awhile back my OB/GYN recommended a B-complex supplement for handling peri-menopausal symptoms (she says it’s also good for adolescent symptoms, and said at one point she put herself and her teenaged daughters all on it for everyone’s safety), and I ran out of it and needed to buy more, and I chose this particular formula SOLELY because it has the word stress in the name. (I take half a tablet, because of only half believing it will help, and because those are Very High Doses of B vitamins, and they’re not particularly cheap. I double-checked with the Target pharmacist the first time I bought some, and he said it wasn’t dangerous to take so much, it just makes for very expensive pee.)

(image from Target.com)

I also bought this Sleepytime Extra tea, which I keep forgetting to try in the evening before bed:

(image from Target.com)

When I used to work in a pharmacy, a co-worker and I had a stretch of finding work Very Very Stressful (corporate was dramatically cutting staff hours, so that most of our shifts were now frantically busy and impossible, and of course customers reacted by being frustrated and upset with us all day long, which we couldn’t really argue with because we WERE failing to meet reasonable expectations, but on the other hand it’s pretty stressful to have people mad at you all day long for something that’s not your personal fault, and we were crying pretty much every day and making hysterical plans to quit), and we asked our pharmacist boss if the valerian root supplements we stocked actually worked or if it was just woo-woo herbal lies, and he said oh, no, valerian root was a real thing that actually did have an effect, and so my co-worker and I each went out into the store, each bought a bottle, and each took a capsule on the spot, and it became a running joke, and where was I going with this story that no longer seems worth it? Oh, yes: that the valerian in this tea might actually work, though probably it would make more sense to buy a bottle of valerian root capsules and swallow one or two with a cup of better-tasting tea (even the capsules taste/smell TERRIBLE, so I don’t have high hopes for the flavor of the tea).