So … I have questions about this rock theme …
Nelia to Joseph
Joseph to Nelia
Luke to Chris
Chris to Luke
Christina to Ramona
Ramona to Christina
Funny how it worked out like that
Luke to Aleah
Nelia to Joseph
Chris to Nelia
Christina to Luke
Aleah to Ramona
Ramona to Chris
Joseph to Christina
There are years where it seemed that this blog only existed for coordinating Christmas.
Well, we did a little better this year, but then it all kind of unraveled. And here it is, two weeks before Christmas, and this is the first organizational post. Oops.
So – here is the plan, as I see it. I’ll amend the post as people correct the plan, which is either keeping things simple or revisionist history. Your choice!
*** The editing has begun. Comments that no longer make sense will serve as guides towards reverse engineering the original post.
The plan
The activities
Christmas Eve gift
(GASP) We skipped this last year?   Well, Mom says I can have it this year, either by right or fiat.
OK, so we’re doing lots of games this year.  Therefore, the Christmas Eve gift will be white elephant.
Oh, no; not a white elephant exchange.  That would be far too pedestrian.  It has to be a white elephant. Or as close as you can get – white, or elephant, or near to both.  No price point, but this is just for fun, so keep it reasonable.
Not drawing names. Also, no wrapping.   If you want to do some decorative presentation, ok, just as long as the gift is not obscured. I have a game concocted for this, too.  Mild hilarity will ensue.  Prizes will be awarded (hint: they’ll all be whitish elephants!)
Christmas gifts
We are not drawing names this year.  Gifts for all the people!!  However, all the gifts are given jointly; ie, Luke & Nelia jointly get something for everyone individually.    Each family unit gets gifts for 4 people …. each individual ends up getting 2 gifts … urgh; I feel like I am doing this horrible job explaining this. Everyone knows what I’m saying, right?   I think this is what we did last year.
The food
Say which you’ll bring in the comments. I’ll attach names.
Standard lunch munchies:
Dinner – I haven’t decided how formal or informal this is.   Informal might be more relaxed and more fun. But there is something rather delightful about the formal dinner experience. Anyone wish to voice a preference?
Food
Drinks
Dessert
I fell off the wagon (again), but I am back on. I started with Carrie on June 1 so it has been 10 days. So far I am doing OK… not fantastic, but OK. The one day I ate too many blueberries, I got back on track the next day.
Ramona is encouraging me to exercise. I need to, I know. Even in a chair you can do upper body exercises and I could do thigh lifts, just not much to do with my knees… though I guess a daily plan for moving my knees would be a good thing. I can’t straighten my left knee any more and I know if I had kept moving it, even without weight bearing, I would probably still have full range of motion.
One of the things I have run across in youtube videos is the claim that you can actually turn arthritis around with your diet. The main thing is no sugar or any empty carbs which I am doing. I keep thinking I should start taking the Shaklee joint support pills again. They have helped me in the past so I know they would do me good. There are a lot of supplements I should be taking and hope to do so soon. It’s going to take determination and right now I am concentrating on staying on my eating plan.
Well. We have finally, actually, verifiably closed on the ranch. It now belongs to someone else. It no longer belongs to us.
According to the notes in my calendar, there were 10 rescheduled closing dates, and the final closing was 2 months and 1 week past the initial date. These 67 days have been quite difficult.
There was just the surface difficulty of selling to people whose lawyer was very comfortable edging over to the gray areas of ethics. We were told this is perfectly normal for real estate, for them to put “are you actually an idiot?” clauses into their paperwork. Because maybe you actually are an idiot and would shoot yourself in the foot. And this is why we had a lawyer of our own. And it’s also why we were just sick of the whole thing after about the first week in.
Personally, I dislike the ‘sure, it’s unethical, but it’s not technically illegal’ style of doing business.
But there was also the emotional difficulty of digging really really deep into the GLO archives and doing all the legwork to run down the details of this deed and land survey all the way back to the 1860s. Because every new discovery was a “Happy would have loved this” moment. Before, there was no reason to chase down all the GIS folks in the office and ask if they were familiar with interpreting historical deeds. There was no reason to ask all my work friends if they knew anyone in rural real estate. The level of effort was certainly beyond what you’d do for mere curiosity. And yet, when we got to where we were over that steep learning curve, and were finding details … Happy would have loved all that stuff. And we would have loved sharing it with him.
It was hard enough just selling the ranch. The ethical irritation and research workload and emotional sucker punches did not help.
So … yeah. It’s sold. And we’re happy. But it’s not a perfect happiness.
Today I was thumbing through a color book and found a note from Aleah that this was the picture she wanted to color and to please save it for her. It made me smile and linger on that page.
It is still saved for you Aleah, and I hope someday you are able to color it. I would love to color with you.
The faire was a hit.
I should post photos, but it’s a pain to get them from the phone to the computer and I’m not really sure how to get them from the computer to the blog. So there are no photos.
But Eleanor’s dress was really lovely – green with puffy lace sleeves and a lace inset down the front. Looking, perhaps, an awful lot like this, in dark forest green and ivory.
We were going to do fully matching outfits, but with the ranch sale I didn’t get the fabric selections even started till super late, and Eleanor was resistant to trying on any dress that was not already lovely … so it was decided to just make a just-for-a-fitting dress a full dress (hers) and to make it out of things that we had at hand (dark green satin).
And as it turned out, speaking of things we had at hand, I have these simple green dresses that were the underdresses for my two more complicated outfits, and wonder and glory, they still fit. So I wore one of my green dresses, and then put all my chain mai`lle on because .. you know .. sparkly. But since I had jewelry, there was a raid to my costume jewelry box, and Eleanor picked out a wonderfully beautiful necklace too.
So we went. Rain, thunderstorms, cold and all that predicted weather aside.
We had a lovely time. Eleanor romped, she played in the dirt, she scuffed around in her lovely dress (sigh). We rented a wagon for her (good call!) and she sat in it and waved to the passers by as we went. She saw pirates and fairies and horses and goats and a mermaid and everyone was lovely to her. She played with lots of other kids, and they were all good kids too.
People complimented us both together, seemingly universally amused at the princess and her mother/lady-in-waiting trope.
People complimented my hair and my chain maille. One person, who worked at the chain maille shop, apparently (he talked to Joseph) recognized the style and knew who made it. That was cool.
The rain was tedious but not awful. The weather was a little cool, but we were all in layers and adequately prepared so that was no difficulty. The crowds were very light, possibly because of the promise of awful weather, so that worked out well.
And we picked up some fun stuff, had a delightful time, and Eleanor is still asleep.
Wooo!
I have been watching videos about health and nutrition and learning so much that I did not know before. Sadly, after a few weeks I forget almost every detail, retaining only that I need more of this or less of that.
Tonight I watched a video about Iron. It was interesting. I am sure you have all seen them put Total in a blender and then pull out iron shavings with a magnet. What I did not know is that iron shavings are the most common way to enrich our food with iron. He showed us that he pulled what looked like a quarter of a teaspoon of iron shavings out of one of those little individual flavored packets of oatmeal. He said that there are iron shavings in baby cereal.
They refer to these iron shavings as food grade iron.
We cannot metabolize metallic iron. Our bodies can only use iron that comes from plants. Iron shavings are not only adding nothing to our nutrition, they are destructive to the digestive system and cause damage which is leaky gut syndrome. I want to pull things out of my cabinet put them in the blender with water and run my magnet around to see if I can pull out iron shavings. If I do, I will add what products gave me what result.
And the other thing I learned is that even when they do not use actual iron shavings to enrich our food they are using metallic iron. Plant derived iron is more expensive.
And the saddest thing is that we don’t even need that much iron. The speaker said that almost everyone has too much iron in their bodies and the level that most people think of as normal is actually too much because it is based on what is average instead of what is ideal. Labcorp lists normal iron as 30 – 400 ng/ml. The actual healthy range is from 15 to 25 ng/ml.  (Do you remember your levels, Ramona?)
Too much iron is destructive to other nutrients because it is an oxygen hog and robs them of the oxygen they need. (Actually, I think I got that last bit from a video I watched earlier about minerals in general.)
The speaker said to stop using anything packaged because almost everything that comes in a box is enriched with unusable iron, usually in the form of shavings. He said that even if it doesn’t say it is enriched with iron, if it has the word enriched or fortified, it has iron.
Think leaky gut.
So last week I wore sandals to work.
Ten years ago I never would have done this. My toenails were not something enough, my feet were not something else enough (or too much something), my sandals were not another something. Who knows.
But, laundry day came and went and went some more and it was sandals or .. I don’t know. Maybe snow boots.
And instead of agonizing over it, there was a shrug and ah well, I will wear sandals and whatever it is that is or isn’t something enough is just everyone else’s problem. At which point you think smugly to yourself about how wise and beyond all that you have become.
But then, later that afternoon, I was sitting in a coworkers very well-lit office, and I had my foot crossed up over my knee, and I looked down and it was just the right focal length and the right amount of light and … and ew. Dry skin, some cracking, all kind of whitish and terrible looking. So I put my foot back down on the ground where it belongs and looked at it again and … eh. Just a foot.
So I wonder .. just how much of this wise ‘I am no longer bothered by appearances’ is simply that my eyesight has slipped just enough to be kind about these fine details?
And yet .. I did wear sandals. The people who might care about such things said merely, ah, those older women who no longer care about such things. Nothing particularly bad happened.
Though I was very happy to come home and see that Joseph had already tackled the laundry. Because otherwise I would have had to.
It’s been a while.
Finished class, you know. One would think that would give me all this time to write. But instead, once freed, I’ve run away from all things computer.
So. Class was so intense. It’s odd – it’s like as soon as I was officially in a class, the intensity meter jammed onto full. And the very hour I was out of class, that same meter just snapped back off. Very odd sensation.
We are ~still~ not finished with this ranch business. Though the back & forth has led us to all kinds of interesting byways. Just discovered this resource – http://gisweb.glo.texas.gov/glomapjs/index.html. You can look at the original land grants all across Texas. We’ve found some from before Texas statehood. It is all very interesting.
We had a perfect, lovely Easter. We ran errands, did gardening, put an Easter basket together (without discovery!), found eggs – and went on a crazy sugar high that somehow never turned into a raging sugar crash. Not sure how that worked. But it was just a lovely weekend.
And I am very excited about the yardwork we got started. We’ve been making all these flower bed plans. We’ll think of something, do it, learn from it, do something else – over and over. Well, there’s some threshold with this one where we had a plan, knew what materials we needed and how to construct it, had the tools and the necessary parts and all that kind of stuff. So it seems like a big step up from our previous plans. Like all the other things we’ve done to date are done knowing beforehand that they’ll need to be re-done as we figure out what we’re doing. But although we’re making plenty of mistakes, this (probably) won’t need to be redone. This one will stay.
