Pat’s Bits and Pieces: A quiet, snowy, cold Christmas this year

Although we had plans to visit family downstate on Christmas Day, Mother Nature had other ideas when she delivered the “storm of the decade” to the Midwest and the east coast over the weekend!
I sure hope it didn’t spoil your Christmas.
We spent our Christmas morning opening a couple of gifts we had, catching up on a bit of paperwork, and just relaxing here at home.
It wasn’t bad at all, and gave me a chance to work on my annual “Year in Review” for a few hours, which you can peruse in this issue, and it gave Jack a chance to get a start on our personal end of the year info we need for taxes.
Then we watched old Christmas movies on the Disney channel…
A new casserole I wanted to try was our Christmas dinner for two, but that wasn’t much of a success either, so we won’t make that recipe again and I’m never using wine in a recipe again either.
Jack said it tasted “funny.”
And we never did get that last package with six small gifts we ordered back on December 6th. I won’t mention the catalog I ordered from.
Those will have to be New Year’s gifts I guess – if they ever arrive. They were reportedly shipped on the 15th (guess it took nine days to put them in a box and take them to the Post Office) and are supposed to be here today, only 12 more days later, according to the (believe it or not) 26 (twenty-six!) tracking numbers I was given.
When I called for an update on the expected delivery, I had to ask the tracking operator I reached to repeat the number three times, and then go to the Post Office website… Guess I learned not to order from that company again! I just wish I could have found those few things close to home – I am a firm believer in “shop local” whenever possible.
That 26-digit number I had to jot down a bit at a time, reminded me of my first “real” job just out of high school as an operator at the General Telephone Company in Roscommon, and the crazy number memory games we played during training. To make a call back then you dialed zero and gave the number you wanted to reach to the operator, who had to plug in another line and dial it for you. The training and that summer job must have worked because I can still remember some family phone numbers from way back – 58 years ago!
But I still can’t remember what we had for breakfast yesterday….
Back to the Christmas/New Year’s presents story. If they arrive as promised, we will wrap them for our own “late delivery,” some by UPS (not the post office again) and a few in person when we actually are able to make a trip south.
We still plan to travel to visit family – when the roads are safe again. We didn’t get the volume of snow that hit in other places – the southern, and northern part of the state, but the roads in this area were icy and treacherous (I heard, since I haven’t been outside in over a week) and the wind’s drifting snow made it look like a lot more than what actually fell here. A funny fact – Our driveway is nearly clear, but Jack had to wade through a two-foot drift in front of the house or walk all the way around it, just to get to the garage – and his car this morning.
He just went to town to pick up a few things we ran out of. I hope the shelves are restocked again. When he bought eggs at the end of last week, he paid $7 for a single dozen, the last dozen, in fact, on the shelves in the grocery store!The result of inflation and a run on the store to “stock up” I guess.”
If the television reports a winter storm, people seem to automatically start hoarding… go figure.
Happy New Year to you all!