Thirteen, But Not Thursday

I keep planning to do a Thursday 13 to catch up, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.  So, here are thirteen things anyway. 

First, though, thank you for your kind words when I wrote about Duke.  I love how much people who never met him loved him. 

Now, on to some catch-up things.

1. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We took the meal to the hospice house for lunch, as usual.  As always, everyone was incredibly nice.  We hosted our Thanksgiving later that night and had a full house.  Everyone ate way too much, then sat around and talked and played games. 

 

2. Once again, I got too busy and forgot to take pictures of all of the food.  I took pictures of the desserts and some of the potato and sweet potato prep but then didn’t take any more pictures.

 

3. Our new fridge is a little bit smaller than the old one, which normally isn’t a problem, but it was somewhat problematic around Thanksgiving.  Fortunately, the fridge in the breakroom at work was mostly empty, and several people have mini fridges in their offices and were nice enough to let me store things.  I made a few early morning shopping trips before work and had a list on my office bulletin board of where everything was to make sure I didn’t leave anything when I left Tuesday. 

 

4. I crocheted a Grinch scarf using this tutorial.  Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.  Can you spot where I messed up joining the red and white on one of the feet?  Everyone says it’s not very noticeable.

 

5. I used Howard and Frankie to model my Grinch scarf for me.  Howard was a much more cooperative and enthusiastic model than Frankie. 

 

Howard, the enthusiastic model.

Frankie, the reluctant model.

6. We got the cats a little gingerbread scratch house at Christmas.  They seem to love it.  And we’ve discovered that scratch houses with peaked roofs hold up better than ones with a flat top (like the taco truck) since they can’t really get on top of them to crush them. 

Caroline

 

7. We did a very early Christmas with Nick’s mom, stepdad (Susan and Alan), and grandfather, and my sister and her girlfriend (Gabby and Amy).  Because of scheduling, we had it in mid-November (even before Thanksgiving), and it worked out really well.  We’re talking about doing that again this year. 

 

8. My Christmas gift from Susan and Alan was tickets to see the show Cats and dinner at The Melting Pot.  I had seen Cats once before when I was 10 or 11 and loved it.  At the end of 2019, Susan came up with the idea of gifting experiences for Christmas and/or birthday presents.  That was how we saw Les Misérables right before COVID.  Obviously, COVID kind of put the brakes on experience-type gifts for a little while, but for Christmas of 2022, I was gifted the Cats tickets. 

 

9. Another advantage, besides not having to dust it, find a place to keep it, etc., about experience gifts is that they don’t necessarily happen at Christmas.  Our Cats tickets were for April 8^th.  It was really nice to have something fun on the calendar for so long.  We don’t see a lot of shows like that, and we don’t tend to go out for fancy dinners or get dressed up a lot, but it’s nice to do sometimes.  We had a great time!  Dinner was amazing, and the show was incredible. 

 

10. Jennyanydots is still my favorite character.  She reminds me of my childhood cat, Sassy, and I love the tap dance routine.

 

11. My birthday was earlier this month, and my coworkers surprised me with donuts and a card, which was really nice.  One of my coworkers and I were in my office working on something, and someone else came to get us and said there was a short meeting in the breakroom.  The “meeting” turned out to be everyone in the breakroom with donuts and a card and singing happy birthday. 

 

12. And one of my coworkers gave me this mug, which I think perfectly explains why the meeting story worked so well. 

My office is still pink.

    13. Since 2022 was not a good year for us, we decided to burn calendars on New Year’s           Eve.  It felt so good to throw the pages in and watch them go up in flames!  

 

So, what have you been up to lately?