Things That Tickled My Fancy on Christmas Eve

Yesterday cack and blick came over for the end-of-year visit. It was deeelightful. We ate mole and caught up on 6 months of news and laughed our butts off.

Today I had two different video appointments for a doctor procedure in January. Should be a small thing but they have to put me under in order to do it. Then I finished up a work project, sent an explanatory email to coworkers and made a big old batch of twice-baked potatoes.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, mrguy had chemo today. Scheduling is scheduling, and there you go. My joke was that Cancer Santa brought him chemo. Here's what that would look like:

In other news I very much appreciated this warning from the weather channel the other day.

A few days ago I made apple and otherstuff sauce from my own elder hoard: apples, pears, persimmons, allspice leaf. I have deemed it delicious. It also made the house smell really nice. I watched Shop Around the Corner (1940) while I cooked, and that was downright Christmassy. You know it's that backlot Budapest that made me want to go to the real one all those years ago.

It is excellent to have nothing to do for the rest of the day. I forgot to trim the tree, so I'm not doing that. I did put some solar lights on the three lumps of the topiary mugo pine, so we're not entirely unfestive. I am very much enjoying their subtle colored blinking.

OK, one more thing to like. I was going to take some shredding to the shredding place and they updated their holiday hours on the interwebs so I know that they are closed until Friday. So thoughtful!

Adrian Lewis-Evans

Many years ago, my sister worked with an English lady, Christine Coles, at a bank in our home town. Christine was chic and funny. She was the first person I ever saw wear midnight blue eyeshadow, and sheer dark hose. She was married to another Brit, who had an Austin Powers haircut but a tweedy English country look. It was the 1970s. They moved back to England with their cat, Fred Fanackapan, and got a divorce.

When my mom and dad and I went to England, Ireland and Scotland in 1978 we visited Christine in her new digs. She'd bought a great house that had been standing for centuries, and she rehabbed it in a Medieval / 1970s aesthetic, exposing some beams and plastering other parts. In a room that wasn't finished she showed us how the walls were stuffed with what you had around you, which in this case was horse hair and lavender. It was dreamy.

She took us around to see a friend of hers who had a pottery studio nearby. His name was Adrian Lewis-Evans. He wasn't in, but she happened to have a key to the studio. I saw a mug that I liked, so we took it and tucked some money under a different mug. And we took a business card, which is how I managed to remember the guy's name for so many decades.

When I went off to college, this mug was my favorite. It was barrel shaped, a mottled green, ribbed. And vast. But one day it fell from a height of one foot onto the floor of my room, which was cement covered with thin carpet squares. It broke in two and I really felt the loss. I kept the business card, which is how I managed to keep the artist's name in my head. Until a few months ago.

Could I retrieve that guy's name? Could I find one of his mugs? Both things happened. I now have a mug in a different shape. The handle just *slightly* tilts toward your thumb, making it a comfortable grip for lifting to your lips. And if you're carrying the mug you can put your thumb *into* the mug for an extra secure grip.

It makes me happy.

What? Genealogy Breakthrough

Today we cracked the code. Mrguy and I have been trying to figure out what happened to his grandfather's first wife for decades. Last week he picked up the search again, and today he had an out of the box idea. He researched one of his half aunts in a local paper that is only found in a local history library. It listed one of her survivors as a mrs somebody of Los Angeles.

I took that and found her in the census, under that name, with a grandchild whose name we recognized. It was her. Mrguy's grandfather was a traveling shoe salesman for a while, and his first wife divorced him for desertion. We learned this years ago while researching his second marriage. In the marriage application you had to confess your previous marriages and he stated clearly that he had been divorced. I asked for the divorce decree, and they couldn't find it. Thanks, Doug-who-was-going-to-call-me-back-the-next-day-a-year-ago-and-didn't. At least Doug didn't cash the check.

Anyhoo, we would have never known about his step-grandmother's next life if he hadn't found that obituary today. We spent the whole rest of the day doing genealogy.

I'm headed to the land of my birth tomorrow afternoon, to go to the funeral of that nice guy's mom. Such a lovely obituary. Really interesting. And I know obits. It got me thinking, again. So I spent the last half of the afternoon researching that nice guy's family. Sooooper interesting. On his mom's side they come from Ukraine in the early 20th century. Excellent Eastern European surnames. Fantastic job titles.

That surely cheers a person up. The ability to dive in and imagine the past, retrieve the information?

Love it.

December Blues

This fall I have been punching above my weight for so long that I finally snapped. I've given presentations, been interviewed many times on zoom, on the phone, on camera. With my colleagues I've given tours, pulled material from the archives for visitors. I participated in our company's Halloween, which is a big deal and stressful. And I was invited to submit a form for consideration for the top worldwide forklift association, which was stressful. I created an event that had many parts and was kinda a big deal also -- and I've had increasing feelings of discomfort in my department meetings, in which I blew up a few weeks ago, and I have felt responsible and awful ever since. This week, before I had a chance to talk to my boss about what has been happening, we had an offsite that included a personality test which I flunked, and had a conflict resolution discussion in which I cried. Recently, at the same time, on my off days and sometimes on my on-days I've had to have two hour conversation with my sister or all of my sibs about my mom's complicated estate. And our combined family business. Mrguy, who has cancer and has been feeding me every day and listening to his tear-stained wife. It's a lot. So today I'm going to concentrate on nice things.

I should post this in Calibri.