Mornin all. It’s about 2h since nellie signed off her Saturday and I’m up early to start my Sunday w y’all. Shift change!
It’s now about about 90 minutes before sunrise as I start typing, having been up about 30 minutes. Caffinatin’ is going well. At 5am it’s dead dark outside, 78/26, humid, dry, but the wind is howling and has been all night. Mixed with thunder in the wee hours. No balconatin’ for me; wind’s just a bit too much to enjoy. That temp will probably be the high for the day. It’s solid overcast, but the huge winds will finally push our several days of rain & gloom out so sunshine can return. That’s the good news. The less than good news is upcoming coolness.
Been a couple of days since the last LSL update, so here goes.
Fri got up early for bodily fluid draws, had breakfast at nicer-than-Denny’s, then home after some minor retail. Come noontime I went to lunch w my pal while Her Ladyship did library volunteering all afternoon. We went to a Mom’n’Pop Brazilian steakhouse. Nice folks, and lots of varied meats and accessories. We’ve dinnered there before but this was my first lunch there. Unfortunately he had to get back to his office, so the whole thing was both cut short versus our norm and was rushed within the time we had. Good convo but overall the experience was lacking due to time stress. Good news was we didn’t have time to drink excessively either, so there’s that. Oh well; next week. We’d tried for dinner the previous two nights, but his biz is just going nuts, and both nights he had to cancel so he could irk late. His biz is not holiday-seasonal; just volume has exploded of late. Nice problem to have. But …
I spent a few years in his spot, owning / running a biz that had outgrown my ability to deliver work and manage and lead, but wasn’t quite big enough to afford a full-time professional general manager, nor could we hire (at any price) enough high quality workers that I didn’t need to be on the shop floor supervising too. Crap place to be; you’re juggling too many plates, doing a poor job at each hat you wear, and the whole thing will crash if you stumble or take a breather. I’ve stood up many a dinner date on short notice during those years; so no hard feelings towards my pal now, but boy howdy is that a feature I don’t miss of a phase of life I sometimes do, but mostly don’t.
On the way home from that protein-heavy lunch I decided to round that out by ODing on carbs at a Mom’n’Pop NYC Italian place that makes awesome strombolis. If I subdivide one stromboli into 4 meals it’s not too wretchedly excessive. So I ate half, came home, and was in a carb OD-induced stupor until bedtime 6 hours later. Should’ve eaten less of it and immediately had a nap; that would have been smarter. But dayum was it tasty. Such was Fri.
Sat was a mostly lazy day: the gray and drizzle and rain was unremitting. Blech. Come evening we had a Xmas / etc., party to go to. The one we’d bought gifts for the gift exchange for last weekend. Grab a wine bottle from our small stash then stop off at the groc store for some snacks to share for the evening. Most snack-to-share parties are waay heavy on carbs and sweets, so I/we try to bring something from the low carb and healthy end of the spectrum. We chose dolmates, feta-stuffed olives, plus baked parm “chips” for some crunch. Then off to zip up the freeway in the dark & rain. The party was in the clubhouse of an older HOA-based housing development; very common around here. Decent venue; nothing opulent, but functional and plenty spacious.
20-some people all told, and food for about twice that many. We knew about a third of the folks at least slightly; the rest were new to us. It’s the sort of club where folks are instant friends though. Convivial, if decidedly gray haired. There was much talking of how in-person clubbing hasn’t really recovered from COVID and may never.
Post-snak n yak it was time for the gift exchange. With stealing of course. We started with a pretty pile of nicely wrapped packages, plus some fun-looking gift bags. The price limit in the invite as $10-20, but a few people obviously ignored that part a bit.
By luck of the draw Her Ladyship went first, and drew a turned wooden salad set: big bowl and serving spoon & fork. Which nobody stole, so it came home with us. I ended up going third and picked the 6" roughly cubical package wrapped in a newspaper color comic book page. Cute idea. It was a small hand-turned wooden bowl about the size of your outstretched hand with an inset metal lid & turned knob. Good for holding your car keys, or a few wrapped candies. Turns out one of the party-goers had made it himself; he’s quite a woodworker, this thing was beautiful and would have sold readily at any art /craft fair.
By the time the exchange was done, I’d been stolen from 3 times and ended up opening the most gifts of anyone and also drew the final gift. I lost the home-made turned bowl, a set of blank notecards & envelopes with assorted Monet paintings on them, and a bottle of decent Chardonnay. I always tried to pick modest-looking packages, but somehow I kept coming up aces.
The most-stolen gift was a no-name set of Bluetooth headphones. Kinda funny to see all the oldsters scrambling for that one. Runner-up in the theft department was a gift box of Baileys Irish Cream and two branded glasses.
My final gift I got to keep was a 4-pack of Founders Brewery imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels and a package of gluten-free pretzel sticks. Turns out that Founders Brewery is in Grand Rapids MI, about 40 miles from our dear shoe’s house.
Best comment of the night was after somebody got a hefty hardback book which was an SF novel. The couple of immediately previous gifts had been electronic gizmos that triggered some bewilderment about what they were and how to use them. As she proudly displayed her book to the crowd some wag commented “You know how to work that thing?” Turns out she’s a retired English teacher. Got a good laugh for that one.
Anyhow, soon enough it was time for everyone to pack up the leftovers (the organizer was smart enough to have brought a supply of disposable containers and big ziplocks and the remaining food quickly disappeared), clean up a bit, then we all launched off separately into the still-spitting rain. Twas fun.
I’ll post this now and come back to comment on the last days’ reports of all and sundry.
And never ran a business, but I’ve seen other folks that got ground down by it, sounds like you made the right career decision.
Never send an amateur in to do a pro’s job; it ain’t pretty.
)
I apparently didn’t catch her dad’s Covid from Harriet eating lunch with her at school a few hours before he became symptomatic and tested.
last year when my youngest son (her little brother) came down with it just as he and his fiancée were about to get on a plane in Ann Arbor to fly here for Christmas. Got to spend his few days of long awaited vacation being sick and sequestered away from all friends and family. Literally happened just hours before their flight, to the vast disappointment of all. Could be worse-it could have happened a week from now instead and I wouldn’t be able to spend 
) for me still being able to do that-grandma just has to be a patient grown-up and model making good choices. I still have to get over to their house to do all their wrapping-my daughters dominant arm is strapped down in an immobilizing brace and it’s damn near impossible to wrap two kids worth of Christmas with one hand and in secret from two said kids-I can do that while they’re in school and preschool as long as I do it by Friday. That’s fun to look forward to-I kinda like the wrapping frenzy when it’s for kids. I’ll just put on a Christmas music playlist on my iPad and pretend I’m a young mom again, frantically wrapping at 3am. We brought my daughter home from the hospital as a newborn on Christmas Eve-that was the year everyone’s presents got stapled into brown paper grocery bags. She was the real gift that year. And every Christmas since if the truth be known.
! Just one cat now and yes, she’ll get over it. And I’ll enjoy that cranked up iPad 
. YouTube even has some flickering fireplace videos to accompany that-the best ones have a blissed out golden lab snoozing in front of the fire.