Happy Caturday, fellow Cutetropolitans! We hope you’re feeling good after the holidays. Reader Jecsea brings us Hattie Perkins, who just wants the house to herself again.
You’ve probably been wondering what Mrs. H.P. has been up to during the pandemic lockdown!
Waiting. For me go back to work already, for cryin’ out loud. Not a fan of work-from-home.
Happy Boxing Caturday to our neighbors to the north. And east. Had a quiet Christmas, just dinner at my parents’ house, hung out for a while, then home. It was actually kinda nice. Weird, but nice. Or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for a big crowd, anyway. We weren’t supposed to be doing a lot of gifts but my parents gave us some cash, and my brother gave me a Target gift card. Will use some of it for headphones to go with my phone (since Apple stopped including them shortly before I got it). Don’t know if I want Apple airpods or something else (I wasn’t going to spend the money but now that I have all this extra…). And a USB-C charger because Apple also doesn’t include the charger, because everyone has chargers, right? Sure, but they’re not the kind that go with the cord it comes with. Sneaky, sneaky.
Bit of news…Olive and Mabel are moving! (Well, moved, I guess. Though I’ll admit the video’s title scared me for a second.)
I totally agree with Miss Hattie. Working from home was fun for a little bit and I almost hate to say it … but I miss my office. And people. Zoom meetings and get togethers just aren’t the same.
Yesterday was a good day, surprisingly. I usually get all mopey about Christmas since it’s just me and hubby, we never had kids. So no big family gatherings like when I was a kid or my friends have, and of course no travel this year. But we had our friends and their kids over (7 in total) plus my nephew surprised us with hosting a Zoom family call so got to see all the kids and say Merry Christmas to everyone. Also talked to my uncle back East. He’s about to turn 85 and is still moving around pretty well.
Then the weather cooperated and we could eat outside which was nice. I didn’t receive too much in the way of gifts – a couple trivia books, a nice scarf from our friends and hubby gifted me a foot spa. It’s the kind that vibrates, and bubbles, and heats the water so it’s just aaah. Sure beats sticking your feet in a bucket, lol.
Not much going on today, just finishing up the second load of the dishwasher right now. May do a load of laundry, and may be able to persuade hubby to take a drive out to Anza Borega State Park. Otherwise need to go get a few things at the store. Having people over made me discover I’m lacking in several serving items like a gravy boat and large platters. We gave away the majority of it since we generally go out and don’t host big holiday dinners but now it would be good to have just in case.
Hope Santa was good to everyone and have a nice weekend.
Lilypichu’s dog, Temmie, is so very, verrrry cute
https://www.instagram.com/lilypupchu/?hl=en
We ate a turkey roll yesterday, the kind with stuffing in the middle. It didn’t sit well with me so I had a bad night. No boxing day sale in stores today since we are in lockdown, it’s not a lost to me because I never go anyway since I can not deal with crowds but I feel bad for the merchants.
It’s snowing and very windy so I won’t be taking a walk today, instead I’m doing laundry and will be reading Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein, I’m sure I read it before but I don’t remember it and got it yesterday for 0.99 for my Kindle.
We had roast beast, with peas and mashed potatoes and gravy, and crescent rolls. Ice cream and homemade (by my mom) cookies for dessert. Very simple and easy.
Hope you are feeling better today. I started reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig a few days ago. Need to do some cleaning and stuff.
What a winsome puss.
Our Christmas was, like everyone else’s, quiet, just the two of us. I had delivered cookies to a whole slew of neighbors. I made so many different kinds this year, the most intriguing being a double chocolate chip with orange flavoring and zest. Yum! We don’t exchange presents anymore though a few friends left things last week which I’ve forgotten to open. I’d best do that soon! I miss having a real tree – I love the balsam scent in the air. Our living room is on the second floor of our house and we’ve gotten too creaky to get a tree up there anymore.
Murray, do what we do. We have a four foot artificial tree, and I miss the fragrance of real tree, so I gather a few branches from the ground, and use scissors to cut the green part in small pieces. I put them on a saucer under the tree, and voila! All the fragrance, none of the trouble. Add a bit of fresh orange peel, and I swoon.
I have a few small trees around and I wanted to do as you suggested but I didn’t see any tree lots where I could pick up some branches of frasier or balsam! Don’t know why there were so few tree lots!
I hope you’re feeling better, Duckie. Your day sounds very restful.
Yesterday was a very relaxed day. Today promises to be more of the same.
Got several new books for Christmas, and I intend to turn the tree lights on, make a big pot of tea, put the fire DVD on, and READ. Hubby has to work (pooh), but Duckie will keep me company as she continues to kill a bird toy.
Have a good weekend, all.
We had a TON of snow! ❄️ ❄️ Woke up cmas morn with about 4” on the ground and more coming down. It was beautiful! Had to drive in it to my sister’s about 30 mins. Very lonely on the roads at 7.30 am!
I hadn’t seen my sis or her kids since Halloween. We wore masks and stayed apart, but it was a great day. The stuffing I made was the best its been in years—don’t know why—but I’m glad I saved some here at home. 😉
The only bummer was we couldn’t see our dad.☹️ Hopefully we’ll get to Zoom this weekend.
Hope you all had as good a day as I did!👍🏼😀🎄
I feel you, Mrs. Hattie Perkins! This is a Christmas like no other. Usually I travel to the States and spend blissful hours at my parents’ house, working on New Year’s cards, doing cross-stitch, cooking up a storm, and genuinely enjoying the holidays. Now I’m in Vienna with my bf, zooming with family and friends and still cooking to relieve stress. I’ve got everything for my New Year’s cards but I am lacking inspiration. Chalk it up to lockdown, which started up again today until Jan. 18. This is getting old, y’all!
My dad and I had a nice but quiet Christmas – it’s been just the two of us for many years as my mother died in 1988 and I was an only child. However, we had a bit of drama this morning when I went into his room to help him get dressed and found him sitting on the edge of his bed with a huge blood-encrusted wound on his forehead. Apparently he fell out of bed, bashed his head on the nightstand and couldn’t get up for twenty minutes! On closer inspection the injury turned out to be nothing more serious than a scrape, but he’ll probably have a spectacular bruise within a couple of days.
On Christmas Eve I observed my Yuletide tradition of listening to an audiobook version of A Christmas Carol read by Anton Lesser, one of my favourite actors, and reading along with an old hardback version I found at my grandparents’ house in the late sixties. It being my custom to have several books on the go at once I also made a start on David Kaczynski’s Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family. It’s desperately sad stuff – I know from personal experience what a nightmare it is to deal with a mentally ill family member who refuses to be helped before they hurt themselves or (accidentally) someone else, but when said family member is a serial bomber who doesn’t understand why he had to be shopped to the FBI…On a lighter note, the cover features a photo of the brothers in which young Ted has a budgerigar perched on one shoulder. My dad, unable to read the subtitle, pointed at the photo and asked “Did he grow up to be Steve Irwin?”
Very glad the scare turned out to be just a scare
If your Dad passed out from his injury, please get him checked ASAP to rule out a concussion.
He’s adamant that he didn’t pass out at all, and hasn’t mentioned any vision problems despite watching TV for most of today. If there’s any doubt in my mind tomorrow we’ll certainly be going to the hospital, which fortunately is only a few streets away from our house.
Alice, looking after an elderly parent is no picnic! We had my mother with us for 12 years and she had various events – TIA’s, falls, drug reactions. It’s so hard, so I do feel for you.
Like you, too, I usually read The Carol but this year listened to an audio version with a very good reader whose name I can’t remember. A friend of mine recognized him as having read other books she really liked. It was such a pleasure. don’t know if I mentioned this before (I probably did, years ago) I was involved in a restaurant in Philadelphia called “The Dickens Inn” the original being in St. Katherine’s Dock in London. Cedric Dickens, great (great?) grandson of Charles D. was on the board and we became friends. He even dedicated a little book to me! I treasure having known him – he is, alas, no longer whinnying with us, to borrow from my other favorite Christmas story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.
I hope your Dad is OK. Fingers crossed.
Happy Boxing Day, everybody! How fitting that it falls on Caturday!
Mrs. Hattie has the same expression as my Scorpius, whose basement I invade every working day. My other cats would love it if I worked on the main floor, but I wouldn’t get much work done! Years ago, when my Beano was very little, I took her to work, but she kept butting her head against my hand for petpets. I couldn’t get anything done.
Had a quiet day yesterday, as usual. For those of you who visited family or friends, I’m relieved to hear that you socially distanced and/or wore masks. Not sure I can say the same about my family–I was horrified to hear that my dad and stepmother went to my brother’s house for Christmas Eve and to my stepsister’s for Christmas. Hopefully they showed some common sense, but my brother is so mad at the governor of Michigan, he’s been avoiding masks. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!
I’m looking forward to a week off. The days are stretching out like a pathway of leisure time . . . The fun is starting today with a new sweater project, my Quidditch Yoke present-to-myself. Plus finishing up HP6.
If you want to see where I work, we released a factory tour video on the 23rd: https://youtu.be/ZbG2MEGnBAg
Enjoy some peace and joy, people. You make my world so much brighter.
It’s my best effort yet at creating a video. I also did the voiceover.
I actually watched all 15 minutes of the video. It was a soothing, even hypnotic, report from The Land that Time Forgot or from an alternate time line for America. Your pleasant, clear, blow-by-blow of the manufacturing process, using the names of the individual workers, made me see how someone could contentedly work there for years.
I noticed that the video had 1.5k views. Who is the audience for this? Are weavers
really interested in how their looms are made?
Thanks so much for the compliments! People do tend to stay for many years—our head of Assembly has been at Schacht for 36, I think.
Yes, weavers and spinners love to know how their equipment gets made. In normal times, we’d have several tours per month—people traveling to CO or locals would bring their entire family. Usually Mom was the weaver or spinner, and everybody else was just kind of tagging along. But at the end, everybody would be excitedly chattering about everything they’d seen.
Either that, or our subscribers were dying to watch something that wasn’t a Christmas movie!
What a great video! I think you did a fabulous job of the editing, showing the bits of wood and where they fit on the products.
I liked your Flip loom pun. 🙂 I’ve thought about getting a Cricket loom but I really don’t need one. Besides, I have so many other hobbies! Doesn’t stop me from watching weaving videos and thinking about starting a new hobby.
As for me, I’m spending Caturday like most of my rainy Caturdays: reading, watching YouTube videos, and trying to get up enough energy to finally sew something: a purse or belt pouch, or even some masks!
In case you need an excuse: I’ve been weaving scarves on my 15” Flip. Weaving them is much more fun than knitting them, plus I use up stash yarn! A 15” Cricket takes up even less space than a Flip.
Thanks for the compliments. I’m especially proud of Bradybunching the 4 action clips near the beginning. I’ve produced more than 40 videos since March!
That really was interesting. I don’t weave, but I liked seeing how everything is made and assembled. Thanks for sharing!😁
That was fun! I love the behind the scenes workings of manufacturing processes. I wondered if that might be you doing voice-over! Well done!
You are an inspiration – you seem to get so much done! I feel a proper piker when it comes to that.
Lily and I had a very quiet day by ourselves. I had takeout from the local Italian restaurant and homemade pumpkin pie 🥧. My mom got me a tee shirt that says “Like most websites, I use cookies to improve my performance” – perfect! I sent my parents a dark chocolate sampler tray from Nuts.com – you get to customize it and pick which candies and nuts you want in it. The biggest hit was the dark chocolate covered espresso beans 🙄. I called my mom in the evening and we talked for two and a half hours. Since we are all safe and healthy, I’ll call that a good day even if I didn’t get to see them in person.
Lily LOVES work-from-home! She get attention and cuddles all day long!
Last night my brother gave me a Starbucks gift card he’s had in his wallet for a while (he doesn’t go to Starbucks), but he wasn’t sure how much was on it, so I transferred the balance onto the card I have on my account. When I went to the website to check the balance I got the “we use cookies” message but it was something like “we use cookies but not the kind you eat” with the accept/decline buttons. When you tap accept, it pops up and says “how about a real cookie?” with a link to the mobile order screen for a chocolate chip cookie. 😂
Wow, that’s masters-level enabling! I have enough of a cookie problem without Starbucks “helping” me! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Thankfully I don’t actually eat any food from there. Also my old location closed two years ago so they’re not quite as convenient as they used to be. Add in covid and I don’t go to Starbucks much these days; I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been there since March. But I finally got a smart phone so I can do mobile order (the app doesn’t work on my tablet), though I haven’t tried it yet.
Aw, lovely.
She deserves those cuddles! What a gorgeous girl!