Putting Away the Old Year

The holidays are over and I’m working to put the decorations away while handling the “normal” day to day work load. I figure I’ll be working until I’m at least 70 (I don’t think I have any other choice). Started the morning off slicing fruitcake and packing up cookies for Jeff to take into work with him. All the holiday baking got thrown way of kilter due to the nice idea of purchasing a new range.

The new range purchase might be a metaphor for pretty much all of 2018. I came to the realization, that all of my drama is just that, my drama. My life is no different from millions of other people who have day to day issues. I have the same aches, pains and health issues that millions of other people have. So writing about my “adventures” are really nothing out of the ordinary. People have flights cancelled and get rerouted all the time. Okay, maybe having TSA hand inspect my In & Out burgers is a unique story, but again it’s just my own drama.

My daughter’s wedding was like millions of other weddings, it had it drama, stress and conflict. The only uniqueness was it was my daughter, so the story is only special to me.

The amazing road trip to Colorado was preceded by some bad news regarding our elderly orange and white Persian cat. The vet found a tumor but due to his frail condition and age, she felt it to be inoperable. She gave a through exam and asked if I wanted to talk about the euthanasia process. I said I wasn’t ready.

I don’t think I experienced altitude sickness while I was at tech school in Denver years ago, but I sure did this time around. Granted we were over 2000 feet further up than Denver. It was a peaceful “working” vacation at the invitation of one of my clients. As much as we enjoyed the cross country journey, the next time we go out west we are flying.

The months leading up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were fairly uneventful, with the exception of having to cancel the trip to my step-sister’s wedding. Seems our elderly kitty is exceeding the vet’s expectations but we no longer had a kitty sitter to come to the house and stay with him. Megan quit her job here in town so she no longer had a reason to commute 45-60 minutes one way every day. The one day she did come over to visit she wound up hydroplaning her car off the road. She would not have been able to kitty sit even if she wanted to. On the bright side, after being unemployed for around 30 days she found a job a lot closer to where she lives.

We’ve starting buying our Christmas tree pretty much the day after Thanksgiving now. If we wait until when we used to buy it, on my birthday, the selection available is almost nothing. The news foreworned of a “tree shortage” but the trees were in supply, just a lot smaller than what we had purchased in previous years. We weren’t going to decorate outside this year because our neighbor had told us he wasn’t going to be able to do his annual Santa on the Roof due to health issues. At the last minute, a couple of the neighbors pitched in to put up his decorations and that left me scrambling to put up something in our yard. To say the least, the next day I could barely move because I was so sore. At least we had a few things up for the hundreds of people who would be coming to see Santa on our neighbor’s roof. I was also able to bake my first batch of Christmas cookies that 22nd day of December.

I put the fruit cake for my dad in the mail on December 26th. I carried another one out to my husband’s coworkers the next day, with two remaining in the freezer. As New Year’s rolled around I was making cookies to mail and to deliver. I made my delivery to a friend that I have been bringing cookies to for years now, yesterday six days into 2019.

So I wrote more than I really wanted to spend time doing. I’m trying to play catch up for those who took the holidays off and now want everything done yesterday. To them I say “the line starts back there”.

As I update my playlist to include Gold Dust Woman and Both Sides Now, Maggie May, Time in a Bottle, Taxi, Daniel and Hello continue to make me cry. I Won’t Back Down and I Don’t Care Anymore are my oxymoron songs that I sings at the top of my voice. My latest fortune cookie tells me “Your persistence will pay off”. We shall see, we shall see…