It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ...

Some of our neighbors have already put up Christmas lights, one house on November 1st. I'll be lucky if I'm not still shopping on the 24th of December, but it's in our nature to wait until the last minute. One thing I've come to rely on is our Christmas Excel spreadsheet. We have all our friends and family listed and what items we have gifted them with along with an approximate price. I think I have spreadsheets for the last three years. It reminds me a bit of a scene from the Sopranos where Carmella is writing the amount of their wedding gift in a special book so that when their daughter Meadow gets married they'll know if she was shorted. Our list isn't designed for tracking what the rest of the world is doing but just reminding us of what we've been doing. We have a lot of friends and it can be hard to keep track of it all just in our heads.

Perhaps this year, we'll give everyone sheep and goats and llamas care of Heifer International. I keep threatening to, but always opt for gifts that can be easily put in boxes with paper and ribbon. Last year, though, the catalog came in the mail and nearly broke my heart. There was a quote from a man saying, "If I die my family will grieve my passing. If our water buffalo dies, my family will starve." Holy crap, someone get this family a water buffalo immediately!

So don't be surprised if this year at least a portion of your gift goes to some foreign country in the form of livestock. And maybe one day I can get organized enough to coordinate a Gift Ark.

We need more power capt'n!

We had a .05 second power outage this afternoon and it seems to have killed the two most expensive UPSes in our house. Rich's super cheap UPS is working fine, while the UPSes attached to my computer and sound equipment as well as all the entertainment equipment in the living room are toast. I've tried resetting the breakers, resetting the UPSes, crawling around unplugging and plugging things behind large pieces of furniture and rolling around on the carpet all but throwing a tantrum at the unfairness of it all but nothing has brought them back from the grave. I've locked both UPSes in the upstairs bathroom to wait for their batteries to drain (and think about what they've done) so I don't have to listen to their annoying beeping every 30 seconds. I hate buying UPSes because they're expensive and no fun. But what I hate even more is replacing them less than six months after I've bought them. Sure, they may be under warranty, but I might like to use my computer or the TV before they get around to shipping us new ones via UPS ground. I'm trying to remind myself that even if the UPSes are a lost cause, they were a lot cheaper than anything hooked up to them. But it doesn't make it any more fun.

I'm off to cook dinner and knit, since they're two things that shouldn't require a backup power supply.

Edit (10:05pm): I successfully made a roast pork tenderloin for dinner and have started the first three rows of my very first knitted sock ever. But most importantly, I went upstairs to check on the UPSes and they were happily glowing green lights again! They are all hooked back up now and humming long nicely. It's like found money to not have to replace them.

finding joy during sad times

My parents and I have just returned from an all day trip to bury my aunt. Flossie died Thursday afternoon and the funeral was this afternoon in Carolina. It's funny how sad occasions like that can be an opportunity for relatives to reconnect. Uncle Bill was very distant during the entire proceedings, but that's understandable given the circumstances. I always think of my mother talking about her daddy's funeral when she was 19. Everyone at the wake was hugging and talking and my mother couldn't understand how they could all be so happy - didn't they know her daddy just died? But now we were the ones at the funeral and reception talking and hugging and reconnecting and I'm sure Bill was in another place.

Daddy always says that if Mom dies first, they may as well dig two holes at once because he won't be far behind her. They say that when you marry someone, you shouldn't choose someone you can live with but someone you can't live without. I know that's true for my parents, but I also hope for Bill's sake that he can hang on after Flossie's passing.