I Might Be a Crow, and I'm Okay with That

                 I'm dragging a bit today, not only because the wind was wild for the last 24 hours and Tiny refused to take a nap until three, but also because I decided at 11:30 last night that I needed to put all my earrings on the new racks I bought a while ago.  Earrings have become a favored gift for a lot of people in my life to give me, as they are always the right size, are easy to wrap, and are always appreciated.  I also love buying them for myself when I need a little lift and happen to be right next to the clearance rack at the discount department store.  I used up almost all the spaces, except for a couple spots next to the pearl drops with bee-shaped studs, which needed extra space, and I still have a good number of extras.  I have been collecting earrings for a few decades, and the highlights include:

--A large assortment of rhinestone danglies that can best be described as "designed by a drag queen who didn't get hugged enough as a kid."

--A pair of short dangles that are clear green single Lego pieces.

--A pair of short dangles with paper books.

--A pair of Deadly Hallows dangles.

--A pair of blue enamel squirrel dangles.

--A series of gold and rhinestone earrings that appear to have been inspired by the work of Erte.

--A bunch of quiet, simple dangles that help me to look like an adult when I need to.

                They look pretty all lined up, and I'm pretty sure the cat will have a heart attack if we have an earthquake--so many dangly sparklies!  I also recognize that I own about three pairs of "real" earrings--actual gemstones in legitimate precious metals--and the rest are precious to me entirely based on how I feel when I wear them.  Someday, decades from now, the girls will face this collection, along with my sizeable brooch collection.  Something tells me they will squabble over the ones that look like they belong to cartoon characters, while Fuzzy stands awkwardly by with the little box of heirlooms and real jewels, all neatly assigned to them, with stories attached to the boxes.  When you look at someone's costume jewelry collection, you are looking at a series of stories.

                There are the earrings that my mother gave me from the days when my aunts sold hand painted beaded earrings at outdoor markets in Ann Arbor.  There are pieces that I bought at the famous flea market next to the Santa Fe Opera the summer I met Fuzzy.  There are the earrings Fuzzy's grandmother gave me soon before she died that I once mislaid in a hotel in Las Vegas (the housekeeping department mailed them to me when I called about them--talk about great service!).  The brooches my mother bought for me on her Alaskan cruise.  The vintage scarab bracelet I wear on every job interview as a reminder that my mentors believe in me.  The bone pins from Fair with sayings that open conversations.  The brooch Kiddo made for Mother's Day in preschool.  The brooch I will someday build a Tudor ensemble around.  The cuff bracelet I selected from Fuzzy's grandmother's collection to wear on my wedding day that will someday be loaned to the girls so that she can be there, just a little.

                I tend to collect costume jewelry because it's small and personal.  It doesn't take up a lot of space, all things considered, and it's easy to travel home again having purchased it as my souvenirs.  If we ever move, the entire collection will easily fit into one small suitcase, compared to the dozen or so boxes that would be required for my books, or the couple dozen tubs of fabric.  Not every piece has a touching story, but do I really need more than "I think it's pretty, and I feel good when I wear it?"  Do any of us need more than that?

                We're all at home more now, so let's wear some sparklies, just for ourselves.  Just don't dance in long dangle earrings in front of your cats.  It might end badly.

Next Year in the Lego Land! Next Year in a Hotel!

                 There's a lot of Peppa Pig today, as it's Tiny's current obsession.  Poor Daddy Pig is pretty put upon in the first season, and we are trying to guess the pigs' ages.  Why do they all live on steep hills?

                I've branched out from fantasy real estate shopping to fantasy vacationing.  I pick out a destination, and then decide if we should drive or fly, what kind of hotel to book, and what sights to see while we're there.  I sometimes go as far as deciding what luggage I would choose to take and what kind of clothing would work best for the area.  It's fun, especially since we would have to wait on some of these trips even if we weren't in a pandemic, as some of these trips would be miserable with a young toddler.

                Fuzzy and I actually do have a short list of the trips we want to take in the next few years.  Fuzzy's mother was a travel agent in the '90s, so he has been to all kinds of locations, including Turkey, Greece, Central America, Paris and London, New York, and Hawaii (multiple times).  I have not been to as many places, though I am eager to catch up.  Having grown up in the Midwest, I have been to a few locations that Fuzzy is interested in, like Chicago, though my friends and I took them a bit for granted as they were right there.  There are also a few places on the list that he wants to see again with his children, having had so many wonderful memories of his own childhood visits.

                Nobody is quite sure what travel is going to look like this summer, or next spring.  I'm not certain when I will feel confident boarding a plane again.  We figure our first big trip after things get better will be the birthday trip we promised Kiddo last spring to Legoland in SoCal.  It should be a good maiden voyage--a few days in an outside park.  After that, there has been some discussion of Hearst Castle.  Hopefully, the first couple trips post-pandemic will not drown under our expectations.

                One of my friends moved this summer from New York to Utah with two smallish children--I admire her fortitude.  I'm not sure if they would have done it this way in normal times, but they rented an RV and loaded it up with what they would need for the first few days before the moving van arrived, plus all the food they would need.  They made the trip into a sight-seeing voyage with the kids, showing them lots of natural beauty throughout the United States without having to stop at public bathrooms or restaurants.  I suddenly totally wanted that vacation--no security lines, lots of room for luggage, no hotel neighbors, no hasty runs to shady rest areas (There is a rest stop in Nevada that has guaranteed my distrust of Nevada rest stops for the rest of my life.  Shudder.), no three-fast-food-meal days.  It is really appealing.  I'm sure there are drawbacks that I will only discover when I actually do a vacation that way, but I think I like the idea for our next Midwestern trip.  At the very least, I'd like to rent one of those vans that has the televisions for the back passengers, so we don't have to hear about how looooooong the trip is every fifteen minutes.  Also very appealing.

                Our current list includes Chicago, New York, Washington DC (preferably without historic insurrections, thanks), a southwestern tour of Utah Shakes in Cedar City and Santa Fe Opera with side trips to Albuquerque and Zion National, and a theatre trip to Oregon Shakes.  We imagine museums and shows and seeing local friends and all kinds of things. 

                When I was in an undergraduate historical design class, one of our assignments was to create presentations about major international cities, with an overview of important historical architecture and cultural notes like the best districts for accommodation, interactions with the locals, and a few useful phrases.  We joked that we were planning our professor's retirement, though I'm not sure how she would have utilized knowing how to say, "Where is the nearest gay bar?" in Spanish.  I'm idly considering assigning Kiddo to plan a trip to a different city each month.  It'd be interesting to see what she would want to see in these places.  Will she have us seeing the Field Museum and Navy Pier in Chicago?  Will we make it to the Metropolitan Museums in New York?  I'm hopeful that it wouldn't be a series of fast food chains and malls, but one can never be sure.

                Travel.  I'm hopeful it will happen again soon.  Safely.

The Latest in Fine Luxuries

                I am hopeful for the new administration.  While I know that I won't agree with everything they choose to do, I am confident that the needs of the entire country are being weighed in decisions.  May wisdom guide their choices.

                Tiny was up again in the middle of the night, but eventually got herself back to sleep.  She then proceeded to sleep in an extra couple of hours, which made the rest of the day disjointed--not tired enough for a nap early enough for her to go to bed on time--that kind of thing.  I ended up just letting her snooze in her high chair at afternoon snack time for about twenty minutes.  She didn't go nose down into her cheese cubes or anything, and she woke up on her own, so I'm taking that as an indication that she got what she needed.  Perhaps this is enough of a reset that she will glide into bed on time and wake up again at a reasonable hour.  I doubt it, but there's always room for positivity.

                This year, my sister requested that I fix her quilt for Christmas.  She had reached the end of her crafty skills and was now at a loss as to her next step.  It arrived in November, and I started reviewing it for work.  She had removed all the yarn ties and cut out the batting, so I carefully seam ripped the backing off.  Then I repaired all the thin spots, restitched the split seams, and darned the ravelled edges.  Then I bought and prewashed some new, heartier backing fabric and some batting.  Then I hit the freaking wall.

                My largest surface was 25 inches smaller than the narrowest measurement of the quilt.  This quilt was bigger than the biggest quilt I had ever managed to shovel under my machine, and I was worried about damaging the quilt top while wrestling with it.  I tried to research professional quilters and could not manage to get a grip on how to get started.

                At this point, I was wallowing in my special blend of self loathing and inaction, and I was mentally wording a loving apology to my sister for my failure.  A friend from Fair posted her magnificent quilts she had made for her family this year, and I kicked myself a little.  Why couldn't I do surface quilting like that?  I swallowed my pride and messaged her for tips.  She messaged me back with the contact information for her fabulous quilter, who did wonderful work and had great turnaround.  Her secret could be my secret.  I was back in the game.  The quilter, Melanie, was friendly and helpful, and she answered all my questions, not even letting on how kinda dumb some of them were.  Nice lady.

                Last weekend, I pressed the backing fabric, carefully folded all the layers separately, then jammed them into a large flat rate box.  Seriously.  My mother prides herself on being able to fit tons of stuff into a flat rate box, and I'm pretty sure she would be rather impressed.  By the end, I was having Fuzzy hold the box in place while I lashed it with more tape.  I used a lot of tape on that box, but it fit, so it shipped (dammit).  These are the packages the Postal Service most likely despises.  It was at least somewhat square still, but it was definitely considering rounding out. 

                I wanted to put a little note on it that said, "I make really pretty stuff, but I'm also not going to send this in a different box," but Fuzzy implied that a note would just add to the wacky that was going on here.  I'm definitely getting myself one of those vacuum food sealer thingies the next time I have mad money.  You know, for the good of humanity.

                After she left the package alone for a few days to allow any germs to dissipate, she called me today to confirm quilting designs and such.  Apparently, the batting popped out like a jack-in-the-box as soon as the tape was cut.  I'm still relieved that it made it in one piece.  I thrilled to the picture on Facebook of my sister's beloved quilt all smoothed out and ready to go.  This is going to be beautiful, and I feel so lucky.  She is pretty sure that with all the new work, this quilt should last for the next fifty years.  Whoo-hoo!

                I think that sending quilt tops out to be quilted is my new favorite luxury.  I know I can't do it with every quilt I make, but it's definitely in my plans for some of them now.  Unexpected luxuries are such a wonderful thing.

                If you're feeling like you need to have some quilting done, message me.  I can get you in touch with a nice lady who does good things.

How to be Nice to Your Tax Preparer in a Useful Way

                 Today's post is kind of sponsored by America's Tax Service, of Martinez, California.  They didn't give me money or anything, but they're really nice to me every time I show up there.  Michelle and the rest of the office are wonderful people, and they do good work on taxes.  If you're local, you should see if you can score a spot on their client list.  Do it early, as they are quite popular.

                I started going to a professional tax preparer a few years ago entirely because she was across the street and my boss at the costume shop used her service.  It was a miracle.  My refund went up more than ten times what it cost to hire her, and it was so much less stress.  She seems to like me, too. though that might have a bit to do with the chex mix I deliver to the office (Seriously.  Who knew that butter baked with carbs would be so powerful?) and the tiny people who come to visit the office with me (Tiny's big brown eyes have made her so many new friends in the last two years).  I'm pretty sure that the other thing is that the organization of my tax stuff means she just plugs totals into boxes on the form instead of going through piles of receipts or shoeboxes labelled "Important Papers--Do Not Trash."  The fact that I roll through her office in early February with the stuff probably helps, too.

                It's no secret that I fear being a burden to people, and the tax office is no exception.  I work very hard to make sure that Michelle and her other professionals only need about an hour to do my taxes.  Here's my current system:

1.  Buy an obnoxious, eye-catching file folder at the after-Christmas sales.  I've had cartoon owls, giant neon damask, polka dots, stripes, you name it.  Wave it around in front of your partner and introduce it as this year's sacred tax file.  Every piece of paper that comes in an envelope labelled "Important Tax Documents" goes into the file--1099s, W-2s, interest statements, donation letters, etc.  Toward the end of January, review the file for missing stuff, and start making calls.  1099s slip some people's memories, especially if you are their first or second contractor.  If they file them late, they have to pay fines, which sucks, so dropping a reminder around the twentieth is not a terrible thing.  Print out all those PDFs that the bank sent, too.

2.  Spreadsheets.  On a typical year, I have spreadsheets for mileage (with bridge toll), business expenses, donations, childcare, medical expenses, and non-1099 income.  Since most of my expenditures were on the same credit card this year, I will just print out all my statements, then highlight the pertinent charges in different colored highlighters, then enter the information in the Excel.  The process sounds daunting, but once you have the receipts, statements, and calendars lined up, it will take about three evenings.  I keep them pretty simple, with columns for date, vendor, description, and amount.  For the mileage, I have columns for date, location notes, bridge tolls, and total miles.  I keep a sidebar of the mileage for my most common round trips to Pink Depford, Renaissance Fabrics, and the Cow Palace.  Total everything on each sheet before printing them out--if nothing else, they are an amazing reality check on what is happening with the gigs.

3.  Have everything before walking into the tax office.  One time, I forgot one form, and Michelle had to refigure a bunch of stuff for me at a busier time.  If I am trying to make someone's life easier as they do something wonderful for me, I need to make sure I have my stuff together.  If it helps your situation, put a list on the inside of the file of all your employers (I anticipate four W2s, one or two 1099s, up to three interest statements, one mortgage statement, a couple statements from the retirement accounts we rolled over this year, and that chart that shows we all had health insurance for the whole year.

4.  Walk into the tax preparer's office as early as possible.  All your year-end forms are supposed to be sent to you by the end of the year, so there's very few reasons to not have your tax filing ready to roll by Valentine's Day.  With the delays this year, I'm relaxing my plans to having things filed by the end of February if possible (though I haven't seen a single W2 yet!).  If you've never experienced filing this early, I highly recommend it.  The office is basically empty--you actually get to chit chat with your preparer and her colleagues.  Everyone's in a better mood, because they're not working crazy overtime and no one is asking them for ludicrous favors yet ("If I swing by April 14 at 8 pm, it'll still file on time, right?").  Your refund comes through a lot faster, because there are fewer people in the queue, and you get that vaguely superior feeling of saying, "Oh, I filed the taxes over a month ago!" when your friends complain about needing to get their tax stuff together.  I'm not vaguely superior at all, by the way.  The truth of the matter is that I file as fast as I can because I know that if I let it sit, the folder will go missing, or I'll lose track of my receipts, or Tiny will make classy toddler art out of one of the W2s.  If it's ready to go, just get it done.

5.  Answer the emails and texts from the tax preparer immediately.  If Michelle can't move forward until I send the girls' social security numbers, it's in my best interest to find the numbers and send them as soon as possible.  She shouldn't have to chase after me.  If I just take care of it immediately, I don't have to work as hard to remember to do it, and I need that memory space for high-priority stuff, like where I put my now-overdue library books and whether my children have enough socks for this week.

                This year, I am sending all my tax stuff to Michelle in an email to cut down on in-person interaction, per her request.  If it doesn't all fit, I will send it all on a thumb drive.  They won't get to pass Tiny back and forth for baby cuddles while checking the paperwork, and there's not likely to be much time for chit chatting when I go in to sign the papers.  It's disappointing, because I enjoy everyone over there, but I'm hopeful that next year will be better. 

                Until then, let's do what we can to make each other's lives better.  I know we have it in us.

More Secrets of Better Living!

                 The existence of a naked mole rat implies the existence of a fully dressed mole rat.  I sincerely hope that the dressed mole rat is dapper.  Bonus points for spats and a topper.

                I tidied up the sewing room again this weekend, and it was easier than I expected.  Once I started folding the fabric in the mound on the floor and putting stuff away, it all became a lot easier.  It took some time, but I feel pretty good about the feeling in there now.

                I've spent a lot of time this year cleaning and organizing, and I've learned a few universal truths from it.

1.  Stuff that isn't put away takes up twice as much space as stuff that is put away.  Example:  When we get lazy about putting away the towels after the laundry is done, the stack lives in a laundry basket on our bedroom floor.  The shelf in the linen closet for towels stands empty, since we're not putting something else there, as the towels are totally going back there at any moment.  Hence, the towels are not only taking up the space where they belong, but also the space where they are being temporarily stored.  When we put them away, the temporary storage is freed up.

2.  You could make that into a cool craft/put it into a scrapbook/sell it on Ebay/etc, but will you?  When?  Our lives are overstuffed with possibilities, and we only have so much time on this planet.  Edit the projects and release the excess.  The fifteen jelly rolls (sets of strip cuts for quilt piecing) that I found on sale last year are still around, but I did get rid of a lot of "maybe-someday" stuff.  I haven't missed any of it yet.

3.  It's only "worth big bucks!" if you can find the right audience at the right moment.  Our house is little, so we have to be careful about what we hold onto for resale.  I have no doubt that there are people in our lives who sniff about how foolish we are to let potentially valuable stuff go, but I know my limitations.  I have no problem letting someone else do the research and prepare the item for sale and list it in the right place at the right time.  I also have no problem letting them profit from it, because they, after all, did the work.  In some cases, it has been pure Kismet, too, like the 1960s sheath dress pattern I found ordinary and not too difficult to recreate using flat patterning techniques that I sent off to a friend who specializes in vintage sewing patterns.  She was over the moon, because it turned out that the pattern was from a designer who would do special painted panels to go with the pattern for a unique design.  Guess who had the panel pictured on the pattern.  Kismet.  The pattern would otherwise have sat in an overflowing file cabinet for a decade or so, or it would have been donated to an overwhelmed thrift store, which would probably have trashed it.  It's not your duty to glean maximum profits from everything you own, and the resale value of an item is a weak argument for its continued presence in your home.

4.  It's okay to be a different person than you used to be, and to shed the trappings of the old you.  The stroller that was just perfect for Kiddo is way too big for my trunk, and, due to current conditions, we are not taking Tiny for long walks through the mall to get some exercise in climate controlled surroundings.  It was a trooper, and we are grateful to it, and it has been sent out to find its next adventure.  Meanwhile, the stroller we bought from a friend who was moving out of town fits our current needs and takes up less space in the garage.  Win-win.

5.  Be honest about the tenure of an item, and make your purchases accordingly.  If we only want to see something once, we usually borrow it from the library.  If it's on a killer sale, or we just can't wait, we'll recognize that the DVD is close in price to what it would have cost to see the movie in theatres and pick it up.  Sometimes the movie stays in the collection to be viewed over and over, and sometimes it gets loaned out to all of our friends, and sometimes it goes into the box to be sold at the used bookstore.  No answer is always right, and being honest about how long books, movies, music, toys, and magazines get to stay in our home has offered us a lot of freedom.  Through the years, we've developed a system of watching a trailer and deciding if the movie is a see-in-theatres, a DVD buy, a rental, a borrow-from-the-library, or a wait-for-streaming.  Feeling a craving for some random show or movie?  Hit JustWatch.com to see if it's on any of your streaming services, then check the library website for a free borrow there.  Less stuff is less stuff.

6.  Every piece of furniture you own looks nicer after you've removed the random pile of stuff from the top and dusted it.  All that furniture you scored from your parents' basement and garage sales can look amazing after a minute with a dust cloth, and even better with another couple minutes with some scrubbing around the handles.

7.  If you don't recall buying candy that is in holiday packaging for a recent holiday, it will not be a pleasant snacking experience.  Let it go.  It's clearly over a year old, and you forgot you had it--that should tell you all you need to know.  Don't ask me how I know, because I think you can guess.  It was not a rewarding moment in my life.

8.  If you have a stock situation (like my fabric stash, or costume storage, or a book case, or a clothes closet), make it a pleasant shopping experience.  As my professor in grad school pointed out, if you cannot locate an item, you might as well just throw it out, as it is not useful to you and therefore is not earning its rent.  If you can't shop the stuff you already own, you will go shopping for new stuff.  I can attest to picking up fabric and supplies I know I already have, simply because it will take too long to find it.  You can save yourself a fortune by knowing what you have and storing it in a way that makes it easy to locate and to remove from storage (Ever had to throw your body weight against a rack of clothes to fish out one piece, breaking a few hangers in the process?  Just get rid of something already!).

                My house is far from perfect, but I'm getting to the point that I have legitimate floor space and a running clue where individual items are located.  It doesn't seem like a huge step, but for this mother of two with a crafting passion that is only rivaled by her adoration of free stuff, it's amazing progress.

Discovering the Mysteries of the Frozen Deep

                 The fridge is finally acting up to the point that we are giving up and replacing it this month.  I ordered it a couple weeks ago, but the earliest delivery date was the end of the month.  We're pretty excited, because this one is a little bigger and has a dedicated drawer for cheese, which is nifty for those of us who have just dedicated one of the crispers to that for the last decade and a half.  Cheese is pretty important to us, apparently, between slices for sandwiches, cubes for Tiny, shreds for quesadillas and burritos, and sticks for snacks.  That page of the enchantment book that explains how to entice women using cheese?  They can get all of us in a package deal.

                My original plan for the transition to the new fridge and freezer was to borrow Fuzzy's mother's big catering coolers and just set everything in there.  If you've never seen the coolers caterers use for transporting food, suffice it to say that you need two people or one really tall person (that would be Fuzzy's father) who just wants to get the damn thing done to pick it up.  You could store a body in one, if you choose to murder the short and the flexible.

                Fuzzy did not have that plan.  He thinks we should just eat as much as we can out of the freezer ahead of time, so that the coolers we have will do the job.  Plus, we will have less stuff to jam into the freezer to start.  He totally had a point, so we are going with his plan. 

                I have eaten so much won ton soup in the last two weeks--I might think very hard the next time I see a bag of them at the Costco.  We've also been enjoying the stuff that had gotten a bit forgotten in the back of the freezer, and we are likely to have two tator tot nights next week.  I'm also going to have to make a big chicken vegetable soup, because I clearly bought vegetables having forgotten that I had already bought vegetables.  My personal menu may consist entirely of chicken, carrots, peas, and corn the last week of January.  It's not the worst thing that could happen.

                Everyone has their quirks.  One of mine is panic buying food.  I tend to buy more food when I'm nervous or worried about the future.  It's a side product of spending my formative years in a place where it sometimes snows in amounts that can be measured in feet.  In our last year in Cincinnati, Fuzzy once convinced me that we didn't need to go to the store the night before a snow storm, mostly because he was tired and didn't want to deal with the crowd.  His parents made it through the storm before we made it to the store, and I got to field a lot of "Is there any..." questions while he was at work.  His father and I ended up going to the little convenience store, though I can't remember if it was the one with the homeless guy out front who loved me because I always apologized for not having cigarettes to give him or the one that had the shooting out front that one time but had a better selection and actual lighting.  Fuzzy has not fully lived it down, but he now lets me do what I like when it comes to preparation.  After the stores restocked this spring, I slowly built up a supply of non-perishables and frozen items, just in case.  I'm still nervous eating all this stuff now, but I'm hopeful for the next few weeks and, by extension, the next few months.

                I'm looking forward to the new fridge.  The setup gives us a better chance of keeping it organized, and the process of switching will probably save me from my stubborn habit of hanging onto condiments that are "perfectly reasonable" (translation:  expired but not really expired).  Hot tip:  If you sound like a crazy hoarder explaining why your decade-old mustard is still okay, it's time to spring the buck and a half for a new mustard.

                Happy new year--may your future be as thrilling as discovering your fridge has a separate cheese drawer.

The Not-So-Secret Society of The Reproducing Wrapping Paper

 

                Last week, I watched one of those PBS specials where Suze Orman tells an audience of people who mostly already adhere to her books what to do with their retirement planning.  At this point, most of the debt is under control for me, and we have started investing and saving in earnest, so I was now watching it for all the other advice, about estate planning, insurance needs, and so forth. 

                I suppose at this point, it's time to do some real planning for our estate.  It will be a pretty simple will and trust situation, so I imagine that if I get on this, it shouldn't take too long to do.  Both sets of our parents did all of this again a few years ago.  It's pretty straightforward, as neither of our families are fraught with drama or anything like that.  My mother has implied that it's basically what we'd expect.  What my siblings and I joke about is whether or not she has added a codicil to the will concerning the reproducing wrapping paper.

                Back when my parents were newly married, my father's mother worked in a department store, sometimes at the gift wrap counter.  When the counter management decided to switch out the wrapping paper designs, she scored a couple rolls for Mom and Dad.  One was a gold Greek key design, and the other was red, green, and silver snowflakes.  They didn't have much, so they were happy to have the paper, and started to use it. 

                Fast forward about five decades.  Mom still has these two rolls of wrapping paper.  We have not been sparing of this stuff--every big gift has been disguised with it.  Classroom doors.  Bulletin boards.  Hallways.  Dad has wrapped gifts for all the officers in his groups in it (Greek key with curling ribbon in the organization's signature color?  Perfection for all those Masonic groups!).  Mom has always been a big proponent of saving the wrapping paper and using it again, but she didn't really do that with the reproducing wrapping paper.

                Mom swears that all this hard use is finally making a dent in the wrapping paper rolls.  We're pretty sure that one of us is getting the rolls in the will, because the rolls easily have another several decades in them.  She seems a bit offended when we joke about this wrapping paper, but I think it's one of the things that make our family smile as a group.  There's always a couple presents in the Christmas package in the reproducing wrapping paper, and we all know that a little part of our family history is under our tree.  It has outlasted every house we've had together.  It's outlived our father, and it has followed us as we've created our own homes. 

                It's funny how a couple leftover rolls of paper from a now-defunct department store has now connected three generations of our family.  My children never had a chance of meeting my paternal grandmother, but every year, they receive gifts wrapped in her thoughts for her son and his bride.  We are never all together at Christmas, but we all see the paper there in each other's pictures, and we know that we are still together in our way.

                We are wacky and frugal and believe in using what we have, and we are us.  You won't always get the newest and the shiniest things from us, but know this:  if you ever receive a present from us wrapped in fifty-year-old paper decorated with gold Greek keys or red, green, and silver snowflakes, you are in the club. 

I Was Supposed to Get Participation Trophies?

                 Another meme popped up last night about millenniasl that made them sound like overgrown teenagers.  Can we please recognize that, while the generation has its faults, it is also not 20 years old anymore? 

                I am forty years old, and depending on the article, I am either a Millennial, or Generation X.  My peers and I from the class of 1999 ride the border between the generations, and at least some of what is true of both generations applies to us.  We identify mostly with Generation X, and that is especially true for many of us if we were raised in rural areas or were youngest children.

                My mother was born in the first wave of Baby Boomers.  She remembers the Detroit riots in the '60s because she was there.  She remembers where she was when Kennedy was shot.  She remembers watching the moon landing as an adult.  One of my friends jokes that she is old enough to be my mother.  I remind her that she is old enough to have birthed me, but she is totally not old enough to be my mother.  I'm a youngest child in a family with four children, and we were all spaced out so that the older kid was at least a bit independent before the new baby arrived.  I grew up surrounded by the last decade of Gen X.

                My older siblings are all firmly in Generation X.  One of my sisters had a crush on both Scotts Bakula and Baio, and would refer to the afternoon reruns of Quantum Leap and Charles in Charge as the "Double Scott Double Power Hour."  Our (metal!) disc sled is still spray painted green from that time my brother was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for Halloween, back when they were only comic book characters.  Both of my sisters have high school pictures that feature gloriously fluffy hair, and my mother had a constant vigilance for curling irons that had been left plugged in (no automatic shutoff for a few more years, and you know that shutoff function is shifty).  I tagged along, and absorbed what I could, envying one sister's glorious Strawberry Shortcake figurine collection (If you can smell this sentence, you react with glee when they card you.), and hoping along with the other that the next leap would, in fact, be the leap home.  I somehow managed to not actually watch any of the Star Wars movies all the way through, but, through incidental contact, knew enough to laugh at the jokes in Spaceballs.  We had walking newspaper routes and sold Girl Scout cookies door to door, and nobody thought we were ever going to be abducted as we meandered around the city, only returning home when the street lights came on. 

                Yes, I did own a cell phone before I owned a car.  To be fair, though, I had a BA before I had either of them.  Hell, I had a MFA before I owned a car.  I just lived within walking distance of school, embraced the city bus system as a dear friend, and (in grad school) mooched rides off Fuzzy, who didn't seem to mind a bit.  My first laptop came into my life in the middle of college, and my first iPod showed up under the Christmas tree in 2007. 

                When I was a kid, cable TV had about thirty or so channels, not that it mattered much when Dad was the master of the remote and mostly tuned into classic movies and sportsball games.  I had Home Ec and Shop classes in school, though the discussions to end them were already happening, and I have the world's saddest apron (Did you know that if you press quilter's cotton too much, it eventually scorches yellow, and that backstitching really matters, because your ties will fall off at some point?  I do!  I did!) to prove it.  Those classes were in a quarterly rotation with Typing, which was taught on both electric typewriters and computers that had black screens with green writing by a man who wore red plaid polyester pants with absolutely no irony.  We were told that we would need to be able to type in the real world, and that ended up being totally true.  We were told that we needed to be able to type with 100% accuracy.  That was only true that summer that I worked as a secretary for the fire department and had to type out tickets on carbon triplicate forms (I twitch at the memory still).  The computer in the back of our other classrooms was for trying out BASIC programs from our math textbooks and for playing Oregon Trail every chance we got.  We died of dysentery a lot, though no one explained what it was.  I still idly wonder if my grocery order is going to get me over the mountains.

                I didn't meet up with the internet until I was a sophomore in high school, and it was different then.  You didn't have to know what you were looking for, because Yahoo! had a list of topics that you could start with and narrow down from there.  It meant that there was a lot more incidental exposure to new things than nowadays.  I cried real tears when they got rid of the Broadway section, and I had to figure out a new way to find out about new shows.  I got over it--hooray for Playbill.com!

                All this to say that so many of the things that are defining characteristics of the Millennials just didn't seem to apply to me, even though I was technically in the generation.  I watched the planes hit the Twin Towers from a dorm room on a TV that I owned (a hand-me-down from my sister, who had bought it from a hotel that was upgrading.  She got it for a bargain, due to it having no remote, so I was also offered the yardstick with a pencil eraser attached to it that she used to change the channel.  You whippersnappers have no idea how awesome buttons on the front of TVs were.), and when the economy crashed in 2008, I had a house and a mortgage and the world's smallest retirement account to worry about.

                That was around the time that I started to see a lot of discussion about how different the Millennial generation was in the workplace and in the classroom.  There was usually a pretty strong sense of condescension in these discussions.  Apparently, if you were born in 1979, you could be counted on to be able to learn something from a written description, to stay in an unfulfilling job for more time, and to be well behaved.  A year later?  All bets were off.  It sounded like malarkey to me, because it was.  I've only interacted with a few egregious examples, and they were all born late enough to be possibly influenced by what people who needed a topic for their tenure papers said about them a few years earlier.

                Most Millennials I have met are hard working and respectful, though I'll never forget the day I worked one room over from a young woman who sniffed that she supposed that the employer-provided health plan was somewhat acceptable (I was paying for my own and my family's, and would have taken it in a second), and then proceeded to make a phone call to HR to explain that no one has paper checks any more, and HR was just going to have to catch up with the world and figure out how to make the direct deposit work without one (If she had removed her head from her ass, she could have contacted her bank to request a few checks printed in-house, or just spent the ten dollars for a few books).  This, my friends, is what the world thinks Millennials look like.  This kind of attitude is actually pretty rare in my industry, and it's the best way to tell the difference between the adults who were on their own when the economy fell apart and the adults who were still having all their bills paid for them.  If you have ever seen a date on a calendar after which you cannot figure out how you will house and feed your family unless something changes, you interact with the world differently.  A pretty big amount of smugness disappears, and hustling is not just a hashtag, but a way of life.  Fuzzy and I hustled hard for almost a decade, sometimes surrounded by people who assumed his parents paid our bills (nope).  It has fundamentally changed how we view work and our finances.

                I really don't feel like a Millennial, and the media description of a Millennial has not been updated to reflect the growing up that most of the generation has done.  Can we break the description down into categories instead?  Can we admit that the description of a Millennial is really the description of a kid fresh out of school who has been told that they should be at the front of the line for merely existing, not of a growing, changing group of people?

                For now, you kids get off my lawn.  Little punks.

Living Through History Sucks

                 I had a chunk of time pretty early this morning, so I had three-quarters of a pretty good post written and ideas to polish it up and finish it.  Then the day, as it was, got rolling.

                Almost twenty years ago, I was finishing my Theatre History I homework on Greek or Roman theatre while letting the news run in the background, so I could know what the weather was going to be like for the rest of the day.  It was just about time to put the work down and run down the hall to take a shower when Matt Lauer turned to the camera and said there would be a special report after these messages.  I was rooted to the spot, because special reports were something that just jumped into programming, not something that was previewed.  It turned out that the news team needed a couple minutes to figure out what was going on.  I was on the phone with my father as we watched the second plane hit.  I had called him because I knew that he had turned off the television news the minute my mother left for school and was sitting in our light-filled living room at home, enjoying whatever bestseller the library had secured for him that week.  He told me to make good choices and hung up, ready to call my mother.  I took my shower and returned to a message on the machine:  "Turn the TV back on.  This has just turned into a Tom Clancy novel."

               Today, I had pounded out a goodly bunch of loosely-connected thoughts about triplicate forms and red polyester pants when Tiny woke up.  We had breakfast and played and had started some Sesame Street, when I settled onto the internet to check in on how the confirmation of the electoral votes was going.  People were discussing Arizona's challenge and how long this was going to take.  And then the new developments came out--the Capitol was being stormed.  The Capitol was breached for the first time since the War of 1812.  There were people who were possibly armed looking for anyone in the offices.  The entire building had been evacuated. This had just turned into a Tom Clancy novel.

                I couldn't turn on any news networks or even NBC/ABC/CBS.  Kiddo tends to lounge in the living room during school breaks while eating her snacks, and the tidbits she'd pick up would terrify her, which she would immediately convey to her entire class.  I like her teacher too much to make her come up with an improvised lesson on insurrection with parents breathing down her neck about "left-leaning teaching."  I kept just watching what was going on via the internet.

                My growing concern about what was going to happen between Labor Day and Inauguration Day this year has not been a secret.  I'm still terrified, but it gives me a lot of hope that Congress is still meeting (in an undisclosed location) and that Twitter is finally suspending the calls to arms from our current incumbent.  It has become clear that something has to give.  We have to hold people responsible for the choices they are making. 

                The original post for today will go up tomorrow.  It will be less political than this one.  Be safe.

Telling Our Story a Few Lines at a Time

                 Midway through 2019 (Remember 2019?  Good times.), I ended up with a diary in a mixed bag from the thrift store.  It was completely blank, so I figured I might try it out in the new year.  It's a five year diary that gives you a few lines each day--low commitment.  I could write for a few minutes each day about what happened that day, and in five years, I could see how our lives changed.  I managed to keep it up for the whole year, with only a few dry patches.  It's fascinating to go back through it now.

                At the beginning of the year, my major concerns were getting Kiddo back and forth to school on time and getting Tiny to nap at the right time to get some work done.  We traveled to the mission Kiddo was assigned to learn about just how cruel a white man with a Bible to hide behind can be.  Tiny was developing nicely, seriously considering taking some steps.  One of my annual goals was to do more weekend tourism, so we visited the Wincester Mystery House.  Most of the mystery is that the house got heavily renovated after the earthquake by someone who was getting a bit batty. 

                By March, I was fretting about Kiddo's anxiety and getting the shows done without losing my mind.  I wrote about how much I would enjoy getting a break when the shows would open, and wondered what work I would find after that.  Then the narrative turns to national news and finding ways to keep everyone safe and sane. 

                I've restarted the book with the second year, and it feels like the person who started it is a few light years away.  We will never be precisely those people again.  I feel like this year has taught me how resourceful I really can be, and has allowed us to slow down and take better care of each other.  For this, I cannot feel the rage that so many of my friends show to 2020.  It has not been perfect, nor has it been ideal, but it should not be wiped from our memories.  I am hopeful that 2021 can give us another chance at many of the things we missed in 2020 and that we can find ways to heal the damage that has been caused this year--by politics, by the pandemic, and by the shutdown of the economy.

                It looks like we're in for more shenanigans this week in national politics, and I don't know if there is a clear solution.  I can only hope that our elected officials recall the part of the oath they swore that related to upholding the Constitution rather than the special interests of their individual party.  May the right thing happen safely.

                In other news, I finished my first book of 2021--Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh. Highly recommended. 

Getting Clever in the Least Dangerous Way Possible

                 I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but there's a good chance that the lid for your biggest sauce pan most likely fits your smallest frying pan.  I mention this because I was remembering this nugget while fretting about needing to eat the chicken breasts out of the freezer soon.  This week's frozen stuff fit in through sheer determination, and as we are getting a new fridge in the next few weeks, we should probably have less stuff in there.  If I put a chicken breast into the frying pan on low heat with the lid on, it defrosts and cooks without drying out.  Then I throw in some sauce and cheese and pretend that I am making good nutritional decisions. 

                I'm discovering that most of my life hacks result from curiosity and a love of hitting buttons.  For example, did you know you can get stamps from most Wells Fargo ATMs?  I learned this from wondering what was on the "more" menu.  I was wondering what could possibly be on that menu, as the front menu already had "deposit," "withdrawal," "balance inquiry," and "transfer."  If you select it, the ATM will charge your account for the sheet of stamps and will spit it out in the same spot as your cash.  They're the boring flag stamps, but they will make a letter go to the address you put on the envelope, so that's worth something. 

                I've been passing this tip on to all my friends who don't feel comfortable going into the post office or the customer service desk at the grocery store (they offer them there, too.) right now.  You can also order them on usps.com, and the selection is pretty fantastic--the older designs will usually run out last on the website.  When I bought holiday stamps to put away for next year, preventing the runout that happened this year, I could select from lots of themes, including Renaissance art, Christmas carols, and modern festive art.  I just keep all of them in the decades-old gallon zippy bag that lives in my desk drawer with every bit of postage I have.  If I have them scattered around my house, I can continue to live in a never-ending lie that I surely have a few more stamps around here somewhere (This is almost never actually true.), and that I am just not looking hard enough (I totally am.).

                My other favorite mail-related life hack has been majorly handy this year, too.  When I was working regularly at Renaissance Fabrics, I noticed that the flat rate padded envelopes shipped for about a dollar more than the flat rate envelope (exploring the drop down menu on PayPal...).  On a whim, I tried them out, and I have become obsessed.  You almost always have to order them from the postal service--most counters don't have any, but they are totally worth it.  I can fit up to eight yards of silk taffeta or two yards of light weight wool in a flat rate padded, and it has a chance of landing in the receiver's mailbox, rather than their porch--much more secure.  Wins all around. 

                I have a theory that there is some kind of tear in the time/space continuum somewhere in these things.  That's the only way I can explain how much stuff I can jam into them.  It's magical.  If I'm sending a lot of loose pieces, I throw them all in a plastic bag first, just so the recipient can be sure to get it all out on the first try, but otherwise, the envelope contains everything nicely, and it is pretty close to waterproof.  If I follow my sister's example and get one of those food sealers that suck all the air out of the bag, I could probably send small quilts and stuffed animals in padded flat rates, too.  I should look into that.

                I should probably eat down the freezer before I start looking into that, though.  There's no room left for anything more, and I should probably use the food sealer for sealing food once in a while.