psocoptera

A nice big finish for Disepiphany: yesterday I tested every pen in our annoying corner cabinet and pen and pencil rack and found a whole bag's worth of dried-up pens and broken-in-half pencils and such to get rid of (does Staples still have pen and marker recycling? we'll see) and then reorganized everything. We still have a ridiculous amount of everything - every year the kids have new marker and pen and pencil sets on their school supply lists, and then they come home in June with half of it barely touched - but fingers crossed that I can now get the things I actually use in and out of the cabinet without a bunch of other things diving out with them.

And then also, awhile ago J (big J) gave me a very exciting gift of exotic sausages (like some from game meat), not knowing that I have a pretty serious phobia of prion disease and don't eat game meat any more. I wrestled with it for awhile but finally acknowledged that even if I could make myself eat the sausages I couldn't make myself enjoy them, and while I felt bad Rejecting A Gift and Wasting Food, those are exactly the kind of rules you get to break in the Disadvent season. (I don't even believe the first one is a good rule but it was in my family growing up - like, oh, you hate that new clothing item? you'll be wearing it anyways - which I suppose was only supposed to apply when I was a kid, but my guilt did not get the message.) J, who is awesome, and kind about my anxiety, did not give me shit about it and is pleased to get the freezer space back.

And tomorrow I get the rest of the ornaments off the tree and the tree goes out to the yard to hang out until townwide tree collection. Happy Disepiphany!

Excavated a bunch of old "special" clothes of mine (my favorite ball dress, a silk blouse, a dress I wore the first time I went to Europe, a vest I mostly wore to Rocky Horror, a velvet skirt that was my grandmother's from the 50s (real velvet, heavy, rich, there is nothing like this in the modern world)) from where they were stashed and handed them off to J to try on. It was fun to see her in everything (she did a little fashion show, like she had done with the previous batch of more recent stuff), although also poignant. (While it is entirely reasonable that J, a few months from 17, fits into stuff I wore in college or my early 20s, while I, a couple years from 50, do not, I do sometimes miss being young and strong and thin and able to dance and occasionally dressing up in fun sparkly clothes and trying to look good, now that I'm old and limping and do not do that. That's mostly fine - the carousel of time mostly helped me escape from the not-great parts of my 20s into a much happier life, so, net positive there, and also it's hard to imagine my present self into the kind of femme presentation that younger self was still playing with - but, still, one does sometimes still feel the banal angst of middle age, what can you do.)

As generally happens the disadvent season petered out or was overtaken by the holiday season, the arrival of my parents, etc. I did finally get J to try on some old clothes of mine, many of which she thought she would keep, which doesn't get them out of my house but did get them out of my closet. Maybe we'll even manage another batch for disepiphany!

Last year's divvying up of the family ornaments took an unexpected turn when the entire tree fell down, raising the temperature three steps and removing eight plants. No, sorry, that's Deimos Down. My mom has always loved big Christmas trees and if this was maybe going to be the last time she was hosting the whole family she wanted a really big tree, so it was like eight feet tall and unbelievably packed with what was still only a mere fraction of the ornament hoard. Most of which were (naturally) on the front facing the room and not on the back facing the wall. I think the stand just couldn't handle it. My sister and I were sitting across the room and had just enough time to make horrified faces at each other as it suddenly swayed forward and fell. Happy Christmas Eve!

We cleaned up the water and broken glass and took all the ornaments off and stood it up again and wired it to the wall and redecorated with only non-breakable ornaments, Christmas was saved, yay. (I thought maybe we should get rid of it before it could strike again but this was unpopular.)

And at the same time, we conducted a confusing and occasionally fraught process of "ornament shopping" in which first my sister and I and then my kids were to pick out all the ornaments we might possibly want, even from among those back on the tree already, even favorites of my moms, and set them aside, and then my mom would pick *back* out the ones she didn't want to give up yet but note down which we wanted, and then we would pack up what we were taking.

I don't think this would have worked at all if my sister and I were inclined to drama - we would have had to do pick one at a time, or do something like the bit in Cryptonomicon with the furniture in the parking lot. But she's the chill one, and I'll fight about plenty of things but not ornaments. There were definitely some I wanted to see *one* of us keep, but might as well be her as me. Maybe five I really, truly cared about: the cloth star that hung between my parents' stockings the Christmas my mom was pregnant with me, the cloth pegasus that hung over my bassinet, the cornhusk doll my mom made when I was a baby of a woman holding a baby, the goofy mylar ball from the drugstore that in my memories is the first ornament I ever picked out for myself when I was like five, although my mom says that's not true, and - I don't know, something else. None of those were at all in contention because they've always been understood to be mine. We had maybe one real moment of conflict where my sister was like "and I'm taking this" and I was like "I think J likes that" and my sister was like "I've liked it for FORTY YEARS" and I was like yup right carry on.

Between me and the kids, we ended up with like five or six shoeboxes of ornaments to bring home. More stuff for me, but less for my mom. She was also supposed to then get rid of the ornaments nobody particularly wanted but as of a year later she has not, and apparently ended up packing a lot of them back away with the good ones she wanted to keep. Two steps forward one step back, I guess.

I have so much to say about ornaments that I made two false starts back in January and then gave up. (They were the third long story of the three long stories, which nobody but me remembers but is still an open to-do list item.) I still want to try to say things, but maybe broken into enough small pieces to not be a tl;dr-sized wall of text.

Packed and mailed the holiday baking.

Yesterday was all, uh, advent and no disadvent - Christmas shopping including tree but also groceries and school supplies and picture wire and replacing lost winter gear and three boxes of dish detergent from the only store around that still carries a dish detergent I don't hate (it's all pods, pods, pods now, and I guess I've become the dad from Strictly Ballroom, "it's all video, video, video". anyways.).

Today, however, we put up lights on the tree and in the living room and also got rid of all the spare bulbs and fuses and warnings/instructions for lights we don't have any more, and also threw out two broken strings of outdoor lights that were in the garage. And also we had two strings of lights we'd never used because the colors were creepy and unpleasant (a blue and a purple, which I had bought as colors of holiday lights I like in general, but these weren't good implementations) and it occurred to me that I could send them with Q to see if the LARP people had any use for them, as people who sometimes want creepy lighting effects on purpose, as I have seen in some event photos. He has been instructed to emphasize that I don't want them back.

I did a bunch of going through of stuff today but none of it actually left the house yet. But I have a disadvent question: awhile ago, J's employer sent him an award certificate and a big glass trophy for - this cracks me up - Humility. The certificate is in a perfectly functional frame we can use when we have some suitable picture, but what's he supposed to do with the trophy? I mean, he's not going to put it on the mantel, right?

About once a year the fancy windowshade by J's desk breaks and we invoke the warranty and replace it. We had been keeping the old ones thinking they might be useful for spare parts somehow but given that this has now happened several times and they always break the same way and it's not a way we can fix, it felt like time to give up on all three broken shades. Eventually we will fall off the warranty and we'll have to decide if we want to actually pay to keep feeding fancy windowshades to the demon who only eats the left tendon of fancy windowshades (or whatever the root of the problem is) or if there might be a lower-cost or lower-waste solution, but that is not today's problem.

Back in the early pandemic I acquired a whole bunch of books from friends who were cycling a lot of books very quickly, since, hey, why not, more options for things to read. In fact has become clear that I'm never going to read most of them since I would prefer to spend my reading time reading a) ebooks from b) my own to-read list. But I still struggle with the sense of lost opportunity in getting rid of them, so I keep culling them in small passes rather than one giant abandonment. Partial disadvent credit today because I picked out a bag of ten to donate to the library booksale or whatever, but haven't actually gotten them out of the house yet.