Friday bullets - December 3, 2021

It's difficult not to love a day with sun and 53 degrees on December 3. 
  • I drove to pick-up our semi-annual bulk order today. It's not quite the same without my good friends along, but my children were excited to see the makings of hot cocoa mix. It was also a smaller order than usual. I think this is due to having generally fewer people at home combined with having bought quite a bit at the beginning of the whole pandemic thing. We are still working through some of that. We certainly weren't going to starve!
  • Christmas is coming and I'm suddenly finding myself not feeling terribly motivated about school. This happens every year. Some years I am sensible and realize this is going to happen and adjust the school plan accordingly. I guess I was more optimistic about my outlook in December when I was planning this past August because we still have another week of so of school to work through. It is going to be a slog... for me, not my children.
  • Christmas is coming and I'm realizing I should probably start thinking about getting some gifts. What happened to the years when I diligently prepared and was done with my shopping before Thanksgiving? I want to be that person again. Well, I want to be done with my shopping to be more exact. I've decided I don't actually enjoy shopping (I think it's the whole spending money-thing) which makes acquiring even modest amounts of gifts for my family feel a little daunting. 
  • Today when I was bringing in the horses so they could have their dinners, instead of walking into her stall as she normally does, Java decided to walk through the tack room and out the people door. We were kind of impressed she fit through. She frolicked for a moment then realized she was out all by herself and headed back towards the barn. There are some perks to having a buddy sour horse.
  • I think we are officially done with interviews. Phew.
  • In the creative writing class I'm teaching, we taking some of December for me to read Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This is mainly because I love reading Dickens out loud and because I am convinced that the best thing one can do to become a good writer is to have good language in your ear. Every time I read A Christmas Carol out loud I find something that I hadn't noticed before. Yesterday I fell in love with this bit, 

    "The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated mind could count, and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much;"
            This could very well describe some of our family dinners. 
  • I was correct in that the third turkey we cooked wouldn't last the week. The very last of the turkey was eaten today at lunch time as was the rest of the cranberry-orange relish. It all very nearly came out even which is extremely satisfying.
  • We are very much enjoying having TM home. He has been enjoying sleeping and eating what he wants and playing with his dog and taking people places. I'm not quite sure how the younger six managed to entertain themselves while he was gone.
  • The sunsets recently have been very pretty. Here is a picture that J. took of the one tonight.
  • I shouldn't go into craft stores. In just about every other store I can avoid impulse purchases. Craft stores? Not so much. Wednesday's impulse purchase was a knitting book called Magical Woodland Knits: Knitting Patterns for 12 Wonderfully Lifelike Animals by Claire Garland. Did I need to know how to knit lifelike woodland animals? No. Did anyone in my family need a lifelike knitted deer? No, though L. did indicate interest in the knitted badger. Do I have time to add yet another project into my life? No. Do I own the yarn needed to make knitted woodland creatures? No. And yet, there was the book right next to the empty bin which was the whole reason I went into the store in the first place. I should just never go into craft stores or fabric stores or knitting/fiber stores. 
And that's about it. Other than TM coming home, it was really a pretty low key week. This is not a bad thing at all, just not a lot of blog fodder. Have a good weekend!

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