It shouldn't have been so hard

Note: This post is a little long. If you want the short version, here it is.  Our Christmas letter took longer to produce this year than normal. Read on if you are curious about details of this first world saga.

I have written a Christmas letter every year for the last 20 years and this year was no exception.
However, what should have a been a fairly simple process, did not turn out that way.

Sending out the letter is one of the early things we do for the Christmas season so I start thinking about it in November.  My thoughts are usually something like, "I need to work on the letter," but sometimes I come up with a clever idea for it. This wasn't one of those years, but I got it written all the same. And I got family pictures to include. So far, so good.

Then I checked around and found the best prices for making copies using stationery that I got on clearance last year after Christmas.  I got the letters copied and I was good to go. (BTW, I have found the local UPS store has the best copy prices in my area.)

And then the trouble began. First, I switched to address labels last year and had no problems printing them. But this year, for the first several tries, the addresses were everywhere but on the labels. Very frustrating, but eventually solved, when I found one more drop down menu that had a setting that I needed to change.The money I saved on the paper, I think disappeared with the address label fiasco.

But I powered on. I sat down with the printed letters to write personal notes to each person we were sending them to. About a dozen or two into them, I read the letter one more time to see what I had said and what I might want to say on that friend's note and found out that somewhere along the way a paragraph disappeared from the letter. ##$&*! I was not happy. I had already sealed the envelopes, so I just wrote on the back of them saying, "Alert: Copy error inside. #7 is missing. Oops!" I was tired and that was all I was willing to do.

I showed it to Ward the next day and he gently suggested, that since it was early, maybe we could fix it and recopy them. He was right. A few friends would have enjoyed the mistake, but most people would just be confused. So I started over.

I had various batches of leftover stationery from other years, so I decided I would print some of the letters at home. I fixed the mistake in the letter, adjusted the margins and after tests and samples, I started the printing. But things did not go well. The printer was acting up and so was I because of that. Ward came to help and even with his calm and knowledgeable advice, things were still a mess.  Because of hardware, software, and user errors only 4 out of 16 pages we were working on were good to use. I was ready to give up.

But I didn't. I began again looking for more holiday paper. That was easier said than done. Holiday letters are a dying breed, so many places that used to carry stationery for them don't anymore. However, I eventually found some. We adjusted the letter to the new paper, had it printed, and I began again getting them ready to mail. The notes were not as long as the first time and got smaller and smaller as I went along. But I finished.

In hindsight, perhaps we should not  have been trying to work on them when I was so tired and Ward was barely a day out from a surgery he had had.  He was on good pain meds and was still in the window where they tell you to not make any important decisions or sign any important papers. Who knew that could mean Christmas letters?

Anyway, they're all in the mail now and I've moved onto other things. But, golly. it shouldn't have been so hard.

Thankful Sunday, December 09, 2018

I am thankful sunrises.

Sunrises show up on my blog then and again, so you may have already figured out I enjoy them. This time of year, the sun rises around 6:30 am and I'm usually up to see it. The first thing I do each morning is look out the window to see what show the sky has for me. It's a routine, I'm really enjoying. So for the colorful sky each morning, I am thankful.

First light, yesterday

10 minutes later

Christmas Smiles

My mother, last Christmas

Tears flow easily these days. I miss my mother. I have always heard that the holidays are especially hard when you have lost someone, but I've never really experienced it like this. It's taken me by surprise because in my logical mind, I thought that I would be thinking about all of the special Christmas times I had with her and be sad. But logic is not necessarily at work here. It's not the Christmases I miss. I miss the emotional connection.

My mother had dementia and slowly left us over the years in many ways. It was discouraging and sad to watch, but no matter what her outward appearance was, I always felt a connection between us during my visits. Towards the end, she was usually quiet, often with a distant stare. But then I'd say something and there would be a little glint in her eye or a slight smile and I knew that she was communicating in the way that was available to her at that point in her life.  We were connecting and it made me happy. Before I experienced the last couple of years with my mother, I never would have thought that those difficult times would be the ones I missed the most. But for now, they are.

However life goes on no matter what the circumstances and this grief is not consuming my life. It's just a part of it. I am happily preparing for Christmas. I am ahead this year in many things and feeling more relaxed than normal. I am enjoying the Christmas lights and the Christmas music. I am having good times with my sisters and friends. Ward and I are having long talks and making fun plans.

With all of those things, I'm trying to live what my mother taught me up until the end of her life. She kept living even when it seemed to the outside world life wasn't worth it. So as I think of her little smiles, I smile, too. Through the tears.

A Fun Trip

The outside is covered in a mirror mosaic.

This weekend is a weekend at home. Yea! It seems since August, I have been gone at least every other weekend. Too much for me. It's hard to get traction on the things that need to get done at home when we're gone.

With that being said, here's one of the places we went recently with my father-in-law and his girlfriend, The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. We have visited here before, but I never get tired of going. It is a totally fascinating (some would say quirky) place. All of the works are by untrained artists who are doing the work more for the process than the product. We particularly wanted my FIL to go because he has made several things very similar to works we saw there. The dream would be to get some of his things exhibited. But that's a big project for another time.

To make things simpler, we did all the driving. A lot driving, but some of the best conversations happen in the car. :) As hoped everyone enjoyed the museum, especially my FIL, who by the end, was relating to some of the artists because he could tell they probably enjoyed making their creations as much as he does making his.

Here are a few pictures from the day. No flash allowed, so some of the pictures are kind of dark.

This is Fifi, the mascot of the museum. She goes to a lot of parades.

This entire wall was filled with quilt "squares" made from neckties.

This was in the OCD room where everything had a lot of detail. 
This room was my favorite.

If you look closely, you can see that this mosaic was done with Maxwell House coffee cans. Also notice the cafe coffee station in the background.

This is in the main lobby.

Don't remember the details of this one, but it was interesting to me.

They had a display of mostly wooden mechanical toys. Ward and his father were especially happy that the insides were exposed so they could study how they worked.

There was everything in this dino sculpture except the kitchen sink.
 It reminded me of an eye spy book.

A closer look at the above picture.

This sculpture outside the museum was moving all of the time.

You can walk through this creation.

So many more things to show, but I think this was enough to give you an idea of the fun we had at that day.

Note: If you go to the link above to a previous post about this museum, you'll get a little better idea of the philosophy of it.

And Then There Were Two *

Last Friday, our cat, Lucky, died. It was time. He lived a good 18 years.

We got Lucky. with his sister Lucy, as a young kitten from one of Theo's classmates. When Lucky, a black** kitten, was a few weeks old, he followed his mother out a door that closed on him before he was all of the way through. His family thought the slamming door had killed him, but no, Lucky had other ideas. When he came to us a few weeks later, he was a healthy, playful kitten that we named Lucky because of the good luck he had already had in his young life.

It was soon evident that he was the dominant cat over his litter mate Lucy, a sweet gentle girl. Three years later he remained the top cat when the other two cats, Leo and Annie, came into the house. Despite constant challenges from Annie, Lucky remained in charge. No need for swats or growls to keep the others in line. A stern look from him was all that it took.

As part of his leadership role, he was a leader in the food department. He was the one who got to eat first and the one who opened the food bag for the others. He could tear a hole in a new bag of food in no time flat. Then the others got to enjoy the spoils of his efforts. We tried to put the food away as soon as we got it, but he was amazingly fast at this trick.

He also got first crack at the prey that ventured into our house. He didn't bring the dead mouse or mole to us as many cats do, he hid them under one particular rug in the basement. The same rug that he did his trick of laying on his side and running around the edge of it. We don't know what all of that meant in cat behavior, but I guess he did.

Lucky was also a relaxed cat who enjoyed a good lap to purr on and a pat from anyone--stranger or not. Even the vet. That was until he had some medical problems that needed invasive procedures. After that, the the vet was not his friend. In fact, sometimes it took two or three of the most experienced people at the vet's to help Lucky with what he needed. Can't say that I blamed him. I wouldn't have been very happy with the people who poked and prodded me for no good reason that I could understand. But he and I survived as well as the other cats whom he hissed at for several days after they had been to the vet.

He was also our adventure kitty. All of our cats were indoor cats. They were curious about the outside, but happy to watch the show from a window. A door left open by mistake might get a cat creeping outside, but never a dash. So we couldn't figure out how and why we would occasionally find Lucky outside meowing at a window to come back in. He seemed happy, just ready to come inside for a little warmth. Sometimes he had been out all night and we didn't even know he was out there. He helped us figure out one time that we had a torn screen (maybe he tore it), but other times we never figured out how he made it out. But he always came back.

I have 18 years of stories to tell about Lucky, too numerous to tell all of them here. Let me just say that there is an emptiness in our house now that wasn't there last week. Lucky had a good long life that we are very grateful for and he will be missed.

*We now have two cats, Annie and Leo.

**On first glance, Lucky was a black cat. But a further look revealed more. Each one of his hairs was black tipped, but the rest of it was light grey often giving him a curious look. The vet called him a tabby because of the stripes on his tail and officially a Domestic Short Hair. We called him Lucky.