It's Where?

My experience has been that it's a good idea to do some porch & steps sweeping/light shoveling during the storm instead of waiting for it to end and then have lots of inches to deal with.

I always promise myself that when it's really coming down I'll drive up and down the road to the highway every hour to mash down the accumulating snow, but I seldom do it, and I'm never sure if it would have made a difference in the long run.

I've seen mention of The Garment in the past, always wondered what it looked like, so now I know.

My renters, 50-something Trumpers thought it was fabulous, raved about how hilarious it was. They did realize it was political satire (not always a given with those two).

Hope you're doing okay. Looking forward to another exciting year.

Same to you, Kevin.

These all sound like wonderful gift ideas. To me, gifts should aspire to be something I wouldn't buy for myself, but am happy to have.

My in-laws seem to have a similar issue with Christmas gifts, and I never figured out why. The whole family gets together at Christmas, so what better time to exchange small gifts. But no. One year my mother-in-law informed me in so many words that her children could not be expected to have to figure out what to buy for gifts.

But Wait! They buy birthday gifts! So here they are doing the gift thing throughout the year, trying to figure out how to get it to the recipient. I don't see the difference - her children are taking the time to think of what to buy for each person's birthday, but they can't transfer the timing to when the family is together. Me: I can't be bothered to keep track of the dates of their birthdays, so having the Christmas date certain was convenient.

It reminds me of the plot of the Prince of Tides - there must be some big watershed family trauma that has ingrained Christmas-gift-phobia into their psyches.

Back when she first said that, I had been enjoying coming up with inexpensive, thought-out gifts and made wrapping paper by hand-stamping bells, trees etc. onto brown paper using poster paint. Not being able to do that crushed my soul a little bit. And there was a Thanksgiving dinner where cousins of my husband's brother-in-law had obviously been informed that 'this ##### thinks the family should exchange Christmas gifts' and the hostility was palpable.

I feel the same about pictures - there won't be hard copies to be passed down in the family - someone will die, their cell phone or computer will get wiped, and there goes all their pictures unless they've got one of those legacy Facebook pages, and even that's not all of the ones they had.

Your posts are always so interesting.

I looked at that blog, and she had great ideas and the way she presented them was easy to follow and inspiring. It IS sad that she's not with us any more, and I hope her site stays up for a long while because there's valuable information, and it's nice to think that she's not gone, she's in the parallel universe.

Our cold winter temperatures finally got here, more what we expect for this time of year. Our most recent cold front rushed out to the midwest, pushed by 80 mph winds, and caused those tornados when it met up with the unseasonably warm weather.

Good for him!

For a while I was monitoring an Irish Facebook group about the lockdown. Some of their jokes were funny, and it was interesting to see what people had to say about the lockdowns and other government measures compared to over here.

Thanks for these reviews. I feel like Netflix doesn't show me everything available, based on their algorithm, so I'm going to type the ones you've recommended into the search and see if that helps.

Yes, please let us know.

Jeri emailed me that she can't get into this blog. The way she describes it, sounds like her computer is big-time hacked.

Yes, I agree that it was better back in the day.

During the 2020 pandemic lockdowns when our local restaurants could only provide curb pickup service, they relied heavily on text messages to let people know when the order was ready and the customer could leave their car and come grab their bag of food (and liquor laws were changed to allow cocktails to-go). At that time, I didn't have a cell phone signal at my house here in the mountains, so no cell phone/no texting. I had to buy pizza for the neighbors as well as myself so I could have the texts sent to their phone and they could pick it up.

Thanks for this. The other day I was looking at the Netflix offerings and nothing sounded good, so I'll start with these.