Holidays 2021

Holidays

The holiday season has come and gone and we have entered 2022.

To decorate the house for Christmas this year, I only put up our tree. I am also in the midst of packing for our move and for our long trip to Florida. I didn’t want to get too many decorations out and have to deal with them again later.

Florida

We decided to postpone our trip to Florida by 2 weeks. We had planned to be leaving today, but we pushed it to January 17th. This way, we have a little more time to pack and we will be in Wisconsin on our closing date on the 10th.

The plan is to get our stuff moved into the new house so we can have our current house on the market while we are gone. Hopefully that can work out!

Celebrating

We celebrated Christmas this year with each of our families. We spent Christmas Eve with some of Jeff's family and Christmas Day with most of my family.

I was really anxious before getting together with my in-laws, due to the Omicron variant. My sister-in-law works at the school in our subdivision, which is horrible with covid protocols. They like to pretend it doesn’t exist. My sister-in-law and her class were put on quarantine in September because she and many of her students got Covid. She is fine now, but her exposure made me nervous to be around her.

Unvaccinated people were not allowed at my in-law's Christmas, so one of Jeff's nephews wasn’t there. That made me feel a little safer.

I painted some custom Paint-by-Numbers for some people's Christmas gifts this year. I mailed a few of them and got very positive responses.

I gave one to my parents and 2 of my nephew to my sister. I was a little disappointed, but not surprised by their responses.

Painting of my parents

My dad didn’t say much aside from asking why I gave Mom buck-teeth. My mom wondered why her nose looked so big. My sister had the most positive response, but then suggested I try other methods. She wasn’t trying to be rude.

My family is not good at giving compliments. Myself included. I’m also not good at receiving compliments either.

Stephen was very excited about the paper in his gift. Guess I didn’t need to get him real gifts

My nephew (4) and I were playing around at Christmas and he almost said my name. He has never said my name, at least not to me. He said, “Hey Larry”. Since there was no Larry around, I assume he meant me. I was surprised and asked him if he had said my name. He went quiet after that. Typical response from him.

I was both excited and humored by “Hey Larry”. I was excited he got so close to saying my name. I was humored that it used to be what people called me growing up so they could piss me off. I may end up being Aunt Larry…

New Years

2021 had to give the world one last shitty thing and let Betty White die. She was 2 weeks shy of her 100th birthday. Goddammit. Not that I ever met her, but damn she was awesome. Along with her long career, she had no children and loved animals. I hope I am able to make a difference in the lives of animals in some way.

We stayed home for New Years Eve. We weren’t invited anywhere, nor would we have gone anywhere anyways.

Limbo

We are just in a bit of limbo this week while we pack and wait for our closing date to come so we can start moving stuff into our new house. We will do that for a week and then head to Florida until April! It’s gonna be weird.