The Op Op Turns Twelve

Hi, folks, and happy anniversary to this blog! Twelve years of Opulent Opossumness! Through the magic of advance post scheduling, I’m able to write and publish this post, and have it go live automatically at 1 in the morning on March 3, 2021.

I’m actually composing this on January 2. I just edited the year in the line above, because (of course) I had typed in 2020. By the time this is live, hopefully that won’t be a problem anymore.

And hopefully, by the time this post goes live, a LOT of stuff won’t be such problems anymore . . . though realistically, I know that things won’t actually look more like “normal” until fall. Alas.

Why am I posting this so far ahead? Why not just type something on March 3? Because I always mean to write an anniversary post, and then something comes up and I forget it. In 2020, that “something” was the Coronavirus. No wonder I felt sidetracked.

Here’s what we were doing on March 3, 2020: Burning some random fallen branches in our firepit in our backyard. About a week before the Coronavirus started changing our lives.

And the year before that, on the tenth anniversary of the Op Op, I went around the yard and took pictures of my arugulas sprouting, my daffodils fixin’ to bloom, and my crocus blooming: in the snow.

As I write this, at 4:20 p.m. on January 2, it’s getting dark, and it’s snowing, big, fat flakes coming straight down, looking very pretty. I’m glad I don’t have to go outside for anything. Our life pattern has changed.

. . . Look, it’s not like anyone else is gonna take note of the Op Op’s anniversary. But I’m a little dismayed to realize that I missed the ten-year anniversary in 2019. Yeah! My first post was on March 3, 2009. Good grief! So it was an opportunity to say “cheers!” to myself, and I missed it! But then, forgetting it is no reason for me to chastise myself, either.

I could also chide myself for posting so infrequently of late that I pretty much missed an entire year of blogging, so the idea of counting years is problematic. However, here’s a little secret about blogging, or journaling, or keeping a diary, or whatever: just keep at it. If you falter and get sidetracked, who cares? It’s always there, waiting for you to pick it up and start recording again.

So, whatever: Twelve years!

Op-Op, Hooray!

Another Reason I Love Old Cookbooks

Oh, I do love me some old cookbooks. As in used cookbooks. As in well-used cookbooks. You know the type. The ones that open naturally to certain pages, because those were the favorite recipes. The ones that have stains and spatters on them.

Often, old cookbooks have special gifts inside: extra recipes! Sometimes, clipped out of newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, they’re handwritten—either on the pages, or on a separate sheet and stuck within the leaves of the book. Sometimes, they’re even typed.

This cookbook came from an acquaintance of mine—an elderly friend and work associate who, after her husband passed away, gave up independent living and had to downsize. They loved books! She was closer friends with my dad, and she offered this cookbook to him, and he gave it to me.

Did you know I didn’t yet have a copy of The Joy of Cooking? Anyway, I have one now—it’s the 1962 edition. Full of good information.

Anyway, here’s the part I wanted to share with you: It seems that, at some point, my friend and her husband were planning a party—probably more, but at least one—and she tucked candidate recipes into a nice little envelope labeled, logically enough, “Party.” What a surprise! I thought, “Oh, boy, I wonder what’s in here!”

Inside, she kept a trove of snacky-type recipes: a shrimp-and-dressing preparation, a cheese log with California walnuts, cheese and mushroom canapés, ham and cheese roll-ups, drunken meatballs (they’re simmered in a mixture of ketchup and beer; I can just hear her chuckling; the idea must’ve tickled her), shrimp and crab Louis, seviche, and a special pastry crust, for use in quiches, that has Parmesan, cayenne, and dry mustard in it. She'd clipped that one out of the paper using pinking shears.

And finally, the best one of all: a recipe for paté: PATE.

She typed it out herself; but then, apparently after she’d made the recipe, she added the final note. Anyone who’s used an actual typewriter can appreciate how the type wavers drunkenly at the bottom of a slip of paper when you get too far down, as the paper slides around, no longer held by the roller. This adds to the hilarity.

Here it is. Read and enjoy.

Then, um, reread the first line.

Then, reread the comment at the bottom. And reread it again:

“This makes much more than anybody would ever want. I make half.”

Of course, you know what happened: she made the recipe as specified—once—and after the party, she and her husband were left with a pound and a half of liverwurst spread they felt they ought to eat, but probably ended up throwing out. (Ew, just the thought: spoiled liverwurst!) . . . Thus, the addendum at the bottom of the recipe. So deadpan: Much more than anybody would ever want.

No, I’m never going to make this recipe—I have better recipes for braunschweiger balls. (But Aunt Becky, where did you get this recipe, and why does it make so much?!)

But if I did make it, I would indeed halve the recipe!

Walking Among the Ghosts and Lichens

Here’s a new idea for you. What have you been doing for exercise this winter—this socially distanced, pandemic winter, when half of what we need, really, is to just get out of the house?

Well, we’ve been taking walks out at Riverview Cemetery—one of Jefferson City’s big nondenominational cemeteries with rolling hills, lots of big, mature trees, and curvy, winding paved roads. It dates back to the 1910s.

We first started taking walks there in early December when we went to decorate my peoples’ graves—we realized how ideal it was as a walking location.

You want social distancing? There are very few people there—most folks don’t get out of their cars, and when they do, they stay close to whatever grave they’re visiting (decorating).

You want safety and solitude? Unlike walking on city streets, there’s no one brushing past you, and no traffic or noisy mufflers roaring by. You want fresh air? No stinky black exhaust fumes. Cemeteries are quiet places.

And we’re not superstitious. Neither of us is squeamish about being at the cemetery—we’re always intrigued and interested, reading the stones, noting the fresh graves (“ooh, do you think they died of COVID?”), straightening up dislodged decorations, etc. Indeed, we think of cemeteries as nice places. A place were mortality and eternity walk together in harmony.

Once, we came upon about a dozen deer walking around among the tombstones. When they noticed us, they all ran into the nearby woods. I’m pretty sure that was on Christmas Day. Yeah, indeed. We went walking there after Christmas dinner.

And the lichens! Championship flavoparmelias, bright orange xanthorias, sinewy ramalinas, ruffly parmotremas, etc., etc., etc., on the stones and the trees. Gorgeous, amazing organisms that make you glad to be stationed here on planet Earth for a time.

I guess cemetery trees get just the right amount of open sunshine, combined with lower air pollution and little mechanical disturbance, to grow nice, big perfect circles of lichens.

Sue and I probably look like weirdos out there, peering so closely at the trees and taking pictures. So far, no one has complained about us or asked us to leave.

Taking walks in cemeteries? We can recommend it!

Please enjoy some of the pictures I’ve taken on our walks.

COVID Entertainments

Something about January makes me rather reflective. I guess it’s that the holiday busy-ness is over, and it’s usually always cold or grim enough outside that I don’t want to be outdoors, and that there’s not much yard work to do, anyway.

But before we got cooped up inside, watching TV and what passes for TV these days, we spent lots of time outside. Starting in March and continuing through October, we spend a lot of time in the backyard, enjoying each other's company.

When COVID appeared in the United States in March, it immediately affected big cities on the coasts. But while people in those areas quite reasonably freaked out and began to adapt to being stuck inside their high-priced urban apartments and missing contact with the zillions of big-city people they otherwise would see every day on their work commutes, at that time COVID wasn’t yet affecting us here in Missouri much at all. Naturally—just like cultural trends and fashion, the middle of the continent lags behind. Which proved deceptive—around here, most of us started taking measures in mid-March, but there was not much sign of the disease in our area. It really hadn’t gotten here yet. Hospitals kept up with cases. Only a few people had died. This probably fed the opinions of people who thought it was a hoax.

Our midwestern numbers started their steep climb in the summer and fall. I’m still amazed at how many supposedly practical, hard-headed, no-nonsense midwesterners didn’t watch and learn from the people on the coasts. I mean, looking over at someone else’s test is only illegal when you’re in school. But in everyday life, looking over your shoulder at others just common sense. Even though we had low numbers for so long, it made good sense for midwesterners to take precautionary measures: With so many people not following guidelines for one reason or another (or, despite all reason), it wouldn’t have taken much for an infected person to hop on a plane or drive into Missouri and start infecting people willy-nilly.

So, Sue and I have basically stayed away from folks since March. We wear masks when in public. We do go out for groceries and other needed purchases. We also get groceries and supplies for my folks and deliver them. (And we wear masks when we visit my parents.) We go to doctor and dentist appointments. We go to haircuts—though there have been some postponements, as our salon has had times when it could not be open. We initially made a point to spend money at our favorite local restaurants a few nights a week, getting carryout, to help them economically. For example, we bought wine from Vines on a carry-out basis.

But our restaurant patronage, even with carry-out purchases, has dwindled as the local government has never placed restrictions on restaurants or even bars, and there are plenty of people in this city, swallowing rightwing propaganda, who think COVID is somehow a hoax. With so many of them around and going to restaurants and bars unmasked, we opt to just stay away. Apparently the leaders in this city think that the best way to keep restaurants and shops in business is to have no restrictions at all; instead, it’s “do what y’all are comfortable with,” and then businesses just close temporarily whenever they find out someone in there had the ’rona. (“Oopsie.”) I guess that’s a plan, of sorts.

But it really just means that people like us, who really do not want to get sick, or to carry and spread the disease to others, are uncomfortable going into most places in town, even for the five to fifteen minutes we may have to wait when our pick-up order isn't ready on time. Some groceries, for example, insist on masks; others don’t and thus attract more than their fair share of anti-maskers, potential virus spreaders. You have to look carefully at the signs on the doors, to gauge the degree of danger within a business.

So we’ve decided we can’t feel responsible for the success of local businesses. Apparently, they are getting plenty of customers without us. I would feel better about shopping and dining out and getting carry-out—and I’d be more likely to do so—if most people around here took the virus seriously. Or if a local ordinance made it so that everyone was required to wear masks, meaning that business owners could shrug and say, “Well, we all have to do it, so please wear a mask.” But whatever. The lackadaisical people might finally have to change their attitudes and behaviors once the new, more easily-transmissible variant becomes widespread this spring.

I keep thinking the same grim notion: that people around here, and in other small-town, hinterland areas, simply will not take the disease seriously until someone they know dies from it, or until the dead are stacked like cordwood in the streets. The bad math of the anti-maskers often goes like this: “99 percent of people who get COVID don’t die from it, so what’s the problem?” I say: Bad math, because in a town the size of Jefferson City, 1 percent of the population is 430 souls. In the United States, 1 percent is some 3,282,395 people, dead. And the notion of “surviving” COVID is problematic, as many people who don’t die from it nevertheless suffer long-term, possibly permanent health effects and disability as a result: strokes, lung conditions, migraines, etc. And you know that if the insurance companies have their way, they would like to return to the days when they could zap you for preexisting conditions—oh, they’d be happy to sell you insurance, but at a higher rate, or a policy that won’t cover the very things you need—and having had COVID would be a reason to dock you.

So, our lifestyle has changed. With us eating out less, I’m cooking much more. Spring, summer, and fall, we enjoyed grilling and eating in the backyard. Many evenings, with the firepit. It was fun.

And I’ve perfected my pizza-from-scratch making—booyah! We’ve been saving a lot of money on food, since we’re mostly eating from scratch. We also save a lot on beverages, since restaurants have such a tremendous markup on those. We’ve both lost some weight—it turns out my cooking must be fairly healthy, or else we eat smaller portions than we would at restaurants. It’s certainly not because of more exercise.

Indeed, reviewing the past year, I realized we’ve watched more TV than usual. Which is to say, we watched TV. Ordinarily, from spring until fall, I listen to Cardinals baseball radio broadcasts whenever it’s convenient. It’s the soundtrack for summer evenings. Like, while doing the dishes. Or working the crossword and Cryptoquip. This year, I really missed the baseball broadcasts. Summer just wasn’t the same without it. Then, when we did finally get a baseball season, it was weird. That fake crowd noise! But at least we had some kind of season. I have a new appreciation for the ability of professional sports to deliver us from the tedium or pain of our daily lives.

So what did we do? We don’t get cable, so everything we watched was online: YouTube, Facebook videos, Netflix, or whatever. So here’s some of what has entertained us.

First on the list was the Metropolitan Opera! With its live performances closed because of the pandemic, the Met has been offering nightly broadcasts of its years of archived HD performances. These are beyond cool! The first one we watched was La Fille du Régiment, on March 20, starring the energetic coloratura Natalie Dessay in a hilarious comedic role, and Juan Diego Flórez as her love interest, a charming Swiss villager capable of singing multiple high Cs. The live performance was in 2008, but we didn’t see it then, so it was all new to us! They’re still showing these encore performances—a different opera each night, and each one is available for viewing for 24 hours. Check it out on the Met’s website.

Another source of entertainment was a variety of our favorite musicians who have been posting regular or occasional house concerts on Facebook. These are fun and sometimes . . . interesting. We’re so used to hearing pop musicians via professionally engineered recordings, or in concerts with full bands where professional sound technicians work to perfect what booms out of the speakers. But here were these musicians, in their living rooms or music rooms, sitting alone with their guitars, sometimes reading off of music, telling stories, and occasionally squinting at their devices and responding to live comments . . . suddenly looking like real people negotiating their video devices, instead of being completely polished, shining icons. It’s refreshing. Some of these we’ve watched were Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls, and Cris Williamson. I think it really takes a lot of guts to offer such casual performances, often from their own homes.

Of these, perhaps my favorite has been Lucie Blue Tremblay, a French-Canadian singer-songwriter who’s a legend in the women’s music genre. Bonjour, Lucie Blue! She has become a US citizen and, per her website, “In the summers you can find Lucie and Pat managing their new guest house ‘The Princess & The Sea Nova Scotia’ as they live life deeply and gently in a wonderful fishing community on the Bay of Fundy.”

Their live Facebook events have been really fun. In the first of these that we saw, in midsummer, Lucie and Pat were simply walking around the pandemic-empty tourist town of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, stopping in shops and showing us the sights, playing a song or two, say, in a mostly empty ice cream parlor or in a local park. Keeping people’s spirits up—including ours.

On the flip side of these casual, and I’m sure they would all admit, less-than-professionally-engineered performances, we’ve also seen some very slick, well-rehearsed and well-engineered performances by Sue’s favorite performer these days, Brandi Carlile. In case you didn’t know, Brandi and her family, and the three men who are in her group, and their immediate (and interconnected) families, all live more or less in a compound in the Seattle area. Thus, they basically have a bubble in which they’re all able to interact with each other with few restrictions.

To raise funds for charitable causes, and to provide money for their idle road crew, who would otherwise have plenty of paying work traveling to all their concerts, Brandi and co. have had a series of live pay-per-view concerts. They basically play one of her albums as a single concert. I think we’ve seen all of them. There was even a live “Still Home for the Holidays” Christmas concert broadcast from her living room. As I understand it, in their compound, they have a bona fide recording studio that easily doubles as a stage for these programs. Nice lighting, videography, and sound. The music is polished and rich; they can be together as needed to rehearse. But since it’s live and informal, there’s a fun sense of spontaneity. We’ve enjoyed these a lot. We’ve even watched a few twice!

Other entertainments we’ve enjoyed have been on Netflix, which we finally broke down and subscribed to. We tried hard not to binge-watch The Crown, once its new season was finally released. We watched a lot of old movies—Sue’s a big fan of Joan Crawford. Sue subscribed to Criterion, so we have a plethora of nifty old classic movies to watch. And on Netflix, we watched several old Star Trek shows; for instance, we looked at the (generally humorous) Lwaxana Troi episodes of Next Gen and DS9; then we watched all the Vic Fontaine episodes from DS9. All quite fun and diverting; we didn’t watch any of the episodes about dysfunctional, evil, orange-colored authoritarian aliens hell-bent on destroying the universe.

Then, of course, we enjoyed a lot of miscellaneous Christmas programming on Netflix. I’d kind of forgotten how fun TV can be.

Any videos watched on a device can be watched on a laptop, and anything can be plugged into a screen, so we watched a lot of non-programming programming together, too. Chief among these were the offerings of Virtual Railfan on YouTube. Our default is the live webcam from the Amtrak station at La Plata, Missouri. VR keeps adding new webcams, so there’s always something to enjoy. Fort Madison, Iowa, was new this year, for example, and it shows not only the train tracks but also boats, barges, and bald eagles on the Mississippi, and the turning bridge over the river. Plus, every few days, VR posts “grab bag” videos that compile the most unusual and interesting moments from all the cameras: bears crossing the road late at night in Revelstoke, British Columbia; cars that crept too far forward at intersections getting “knighted” by railroad crossing gates in La Grange, Kentucky; and a bewildering variety of executive, heritage, and anniversary locomotives, “meets,” “races,” “power moves,” “slugs,” unusual cargoes, rusty old boxcars bearing logos of “fallen flags,” railroad employees waving at the cameras and giving horn salutes, and more. The chat is well-moderated, cordial, and informative. Thousands of people tune in to VR to watch trains, chat while waiting for trains, and forget our troubles for a while.

Well, wherever you are, I hope you’re well and staying entertained. Stay safe, my friends!

Ukulele Fun

So, what have you done in the past year that you had no idea you’d be doing?

We have been playing our guitars and ukuleles more than we’d imagined. Especially since, until November of 2019, we didn’t have any ukuleles except for the lame, cheap soprano uke I’d gotten in college (or whatever) and never changed the strings on.

But in November 2019, Sue got me a sweet little tenor ukulele. It’s even got built-in pickups and outlet for an amplifier (ha ha ha ha) as well as a built-in electronic tuner. The latter is rather handy.

Sitting around in our house, and in our backyard, has been rather conducive to playing some occasional chords on the fretted instruments. It’s been very relaxing and pleasant, and very old-school.

Sue, especially, has made great strides in her guitar and ukulele skills. She’s been working from YouTube instructional videos as well as downloading exercises. She’s been plugging along at a steady pace with her practice—the logical, compound-interest plan—and she’s gotten really pretty good!

For Christmas, I got her a nice little baritone ukulele. It’s tuned just like the highest-pitched four strings of a regular guitar.

As for me, I have more theoretical background, more of an overview of how it’s supposed to work, how to go about staying in tempo, and which chords usually go together . . . but that doesn’t mean anything about my ability to actually perform. In that department, I rely on the finger and strumming patterns I’d learned in high school.

The fun part is just relaxing and tuning in to each other’s chord patterns and musical ideas. Just going with the flow. Kinda like how we’re all coping with the pandemic, if we’re lucky.

Shameful, What I'm Doing

You can take the word shameful two ways, as in “I should be ashamed of myself,” but also as “I am shameful—full of shame—and I’m trying to make amends somehow.”

It’s not as if I haven’t meant to post blogs these past few years; I have, in fact, prepared all over the place for them. I’ve taken pictures and made videos. I’ve even written entire posts . . . then simply failed the last, critical step: the posting.

Blogger has gotten stupider to use in the last ten years. You have two ways of posting, as plain text, where you can edit codes yourself (“HTML view”), or in the semi-convenient “Compose view.” Neither has ever been completely convenient, but now the Compose view is bananas with the extraneous codes that it adds (after using it, peek at the HTML codes, and you can hardly find your actual text anymore!). Meanwhile, the HTML view no longer provides simple niceties like automatically transforming hard returns into paragraph breaks. Not that I can see, anyway.

So now that I’ve been coding it mostly myself, posting takes more time and it feels more like work. Fortunately, there are still buttons for uploading links, images, and videos, but anyway . . . This last step—putting the content online—has been irksome enough that I’ve gotten way behind in posting.

So, while I have some time without yardwork, and no big work crunches, by golly, I’m posting some older material. To mess up everyone, I’m posting them retroactively, dating them on the actual dates I composed them, and would have posted them, if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked by other things first. So they’re suddenly shuffled into my blog as if they’d always been there.

I can picture people checking my blog, rubbing their eyes, and going, Hey, where’d that post come from?? I didn’t see it before! Am I losing my mind?

If you want to find these new, but older posts, you’ll just have to scroll down and look for something you hadn’t seen yet. Hint: anything posted as 2018, 2019, and 2020 might be “new.” Another hint: these new/old posts may go back at least as far as August 2017, when we had the big eclipse!

So, I am ashamed of myself—so much so, that I won’t hesitate to alter history by making it look like I’d been posting all along. Maybe then, I won’t feel like such a slacker.

Long Overdue Update: Good Riddance to 2020

Hi, folks, you’d think I’d dropped off the face of the earth, huh? It takes a message from Blogger or Google or whatever telling me I need to show some activity on my blog, or it’ll, like, disappear or something. So, here is a post.

Really, honestly, I should have been posting every damn day this year, considering that my original intent with this blog was to cheer myself up. I certainly needed it this year—me and everyone else, except perhaps Jeff Bezos. Back in November 2019, I told my doc that I wanted to try lowering my dosage of antidepressant—a dosage I’d been on for years, with no problems. I certainly picked a hell of a year to halve it!

The most recent grief has been the death of Lorie Smith, owner of Vines on Broadway, about which I've blogged. After a nearly year of pandemic-hampered business, she had to temporarily close, since the weather got cold and her customers could no longer sit outside in the fresh air. We hesitated to go very much as the year wore on, as so many people there were maskless. And the virus numbers were going up around here. And she was having heart trouble. So Vines was closed for over a month. She died soon after undergoing a procedure intended to fix her arrhythmia; apparently, the procedure led to blood clots in her brain, at least one of which was inoperable. She was only sixty. I’m devastated by the news; I’m still in shock.

I believe that at least 75 percent of the people who stepped foot in her business wished they could be the proprietor of such a cool place. I know I was envious. One of my friends walked in there for the first time and within two minutes of meeting Lorie said to me, “I have a big girl crush on her!” I’m hoping against hope that at least one of her many, many friends or family will find a way to continue the business, and keep her dream alive. It was very successful . . .

 

I could go on and on and on about how much Lorie and her business made our street, our neighborhood, our town much better. She influenced and improved everything and everyone she came in contact with. So much of Vines on Broadway was her. 

I have come to associate her, and Vines, with many of the fun things in life. Things like kicking back on a nice patio with a glass of wine; fixing up a nice, inviting patio to begin with; enjoying cordial, convivial conversations; noshing on attractive, tasty snacky-snacks; warmth and coziness and candlelight in the winter; chillin’ in the misters on the patio in summer . . . even friendship itself. Her disappearance from the world makes me afraid to face these otherwise very pleasant things; I feel as if those things will all come with a pang of emptiness and grief—if we ever even have them again. (When will we ever feel comfortable sitting close again?) If Lorie had been a grouch, or snotty or snarky, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. But she was faultlessly kind and good-natured, with an easy, ringing laugh that still echoes inside my head and heart. Even though I only knew her for a few years, I can’t imagine how there can be a world without her.

 

And that’s only the most recent loss. The past year has felt jinxed. Sue’s mom passed away in December of last year, and we can’t help but feel she was lucky, in a way, to have left the world before the pandemic changed everything. Living as she did in a studio apartment in an assisted-living community, she wouldn’t have had company for months; the loneliness would have been excruciating for her (and nerve-wracking for us). And the nurse assistants and other staff would have had to wear masks around her, and with her hearing loss, she wouldn’t have been able to understand much of what people were saying. And then, also, she tended to suffer badly from respiratory ailments, when she got them, so . . . it’s almost like she knew, somehow, when to go.

She always was very intuitive, with a strong faith in her ability to sense things that are not physical; maybe her departure from this plane was an example. Who knows.

And we had a rough summer, traveling three times to Ohio (despite the worry of COVID) to go through things at Sue’s mom’s house. The lifetime accumulations of two people. Furniture. The antique railroad lantern collection. The kitchen treasures. And on and on. As if all that that wasn’t going to be difficult enough, we experienced some shocking interpersonal strife with one of the family members, and because of that, our final trip there—for just a few days, solely to be there when the movers came—really felt like it could be our final trip there.

In September, we lost Patches, the original Opulent Opossum. She had lived with us for seventeen years and was probably eighteen. In recent years, we had made every accommodation for her sweet, elderly self. She had become deaf; and she put the “cat” in cataracts; she also had that old-cat kidney disease, so each morning we puréed special canned food with extra water, just for her. I burrowed my face into her neck and hummed little tunes, like the cadences of my speech, so she could feel the vibrations of my voice. She would purr in response, and burrow her head against mine. She was a good friend, for a long time, and I still miss her.

As I review this stupid year—a year when every trade group’s cheesy annual convention theme was gonna be “2020 Vision,” dontcha know, and a year about which we’ll all be seeing reviews cleverly headlined as “Hindsight 2020” in the coming weeks—I’ve actually been okay, for the most part. I recently saw a thing about how Gen X people like me are perfectly prepared for lockdowns and solitude; how we effectively trained for this from a young age, how we know how to wait and wait and wait, and how we know many ways to entertain ourselves and survive on whatever’s in the cupboards.

But I’m basically lucky in other ways. I’m lucky I don’t work in at a job that requires me to interact with people all day, or even work in an office place among other people (don’t get me wrong: I’d still love to have benefits, like group health insurance). I’m also lucky that this freelancer lifestyle is something I’d already gotten used to way before everyone else had to adjust. Lucky that my major client still wants my services. Also, lucky I’m a pretty okay cook. Apparently, the food I fix is healthier than what we get when we eat out; I’ve actually lost weight this year, without even trying. It certainly isn’t any increase in exercise.

So, this is the end of the calendar year, but it’s certainly not the end of this merry-go-round of pandemic and the political mayhem that will no doubt persist for the foreseeable future even though we will be getting a psychologically stable new president.

Tomorrow night—December 31, 2020—we’ll be eating as many good-luck foods we can find. Pickled herring, mutzens, hoppin’ John, grapes, you name it. We’ll make an outrageous amount of noise at midnight, to frighten away the evil spirits that have pursued this year. I feel like building a huge, round-eyed Jagannath icon and carting it down High Street, with fireworks going off on all sides. Take that, 2020! Good riddance!

 

In reality, the plan is to make our mutzens first thing in the morning; let them cool a bit for transportation, then drive them to my uncle and aunt’s house and to my parents, along with a bunch of goodies for a New Year’s Eve party: some decorations for them to hang up, some Prosecco to sip at midnight, stuff for a veggie plate, including some dips, some black and green olives, samples of nice cheeses and sausages, pickled herring, shrimp and cocktail sauce, crackers and sliced baguette, and so on. A party to-go!

Then, Sue and I will come back home and let the weather do whatever it wants to do. For a long time, it was looking like it might snow on New Year’s Eve, but that seems unlikely now. Anyway, as we did at Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’ll have our own festivities, just the two of us, and we’ll make phone calls to the people we wish we were partying with.

Should you wish to do the same, on New Year’s Eve, the appropriate way of greeting someone you’ve just called is “Hey! This is the neighbors! Keep it down over there!”

This post has already gotten too long and has said too much that I ought to keep to myself. But whatever—as long as the whole blog doesn’t disappear into nothingness.

Because that would really bum me out, too.