Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)
Starting this week, with winter beginning on Saturday the 21st, I’ll be subsuming the Garden/Yard section into the Nesting section until spring.
- Weather
Weather was warm from Mon-Thurs., with two days in the 40s°F and two in the low 30s°F, then it was colder from Fri.-Sun., with two days reaching the low 20s°F and one day when our high temp was 10°F. The average high was 30.2°F. Lows ranged from minus .8°F to 34.2, averaging 19.1°F. We had an inch or so of light snow on Monday and a little early on Thursday, and about a half inch of rain on Tues. and Wed. (the two days in the 40s°F). There’s still snow covering the ground, but not a lot.
- Beginnings/Firsts
Addressed and mailed about 75 Christmas cards on Monday.
Winter began on Saturday at 4:24 a.m. ET. and now the days will be slowly getting longer.
On Tuesday I filed my first claim online for lost USPS priority mail items — quite a detailed form to fill out — and within two hours I tried to cancel it (they’d turned up!) but it took about 36 hours to actually be able to cancel it officially, as that can’t be done online. 😒 There’s a bit of a story behind this, much of which was my own fault, and I won’t go into the details but suffice to say I’ve learned to keep all receipts (including email order confirmations with descriptions and costs of items and the date each was purchased) in case I need to file a claim for lost mail again. It’s also not a bad idea to take a photo of the mailing box after you address it. I was surprised that USPS tracking (not the printed slip nor the online interface) shows neither the address of the item on the package, beyond city, state, and zip, nor the address the item is actually delivered to (beyond city state zip). If I’d had the latter, I wouldn’t have needed to file a claim in the first place.
- Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi)
- Wandering
Not much wandering again this week, with baking (finished on Monday), tracking packages (still not finished), mailing packages (the last few), wrapping gifts for local friends, a dental appt., a potluck Xmas party, and hosting Salon on Friday, plus rain, but I did manage to get in a one-hour in-town walk on Tuesday. My husband got in some walking because he delivered cookies and nuts to neighbours on Thursday and Friday.
A few things seen this week include a lot of sauce bottles at the Hanover Co-op on Wednesday, a local pond on Tuesday, and a festive display at the local farmstand on Tuesday.
- Curiosity & Discoveries
My friend (RL) made this for our permaculture party — it’s focaccia bread art! And it tasted good, too.
- Creating
Packing up cookies and nuts for neighbours and wrapping gifts for friends were both a bit creative. Not to mention definitely time-consuming. I also decorated the little Gnom juniper Christmas tree on Thursday night, which was fun, and quick.
- Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)
Body/Mind: I didn’t get much walking or outdoor time this week but I did work out (strength training, stretching, some dancing) four times (4 hours) this week. Even without walks, I managed 5 days over 9,000 steps and two over 11,000 (and I treadmilled for 2.25 miles on Sat.). I had my 6-mo. dental cleaning and exam on Wednesday afternoon (all good), my hair cut at 7 a.m. on Monday morning, and I participated in an hour of Dharma Sunday, mostly the meditation (with Ji Hyang Padma leading), on Zoom on Sunday morning. It was a fairly social week, too, with a Christmas party for 3.5 hours on Thursday, a holiday Salon for almost 2 hours on Friday, and friends dropping things by and us dropping things at friends’.
From Dharma Sunday:
- Nesting
Cleaning/Maintenance: I did clothes laundry on Tuesday and lots of cleaning and tidying all week related to cooking, wrapping, and people coming over. We had our woodstove flue checked and cleaned on Monday. I watered the houseplants on Friday.
Food: Besides baking Neapolitan cookies and macaroons on Monday, I made veggie burgers with arugula, rice pilaf, and peas for dinner that night. Tuesday I made Herbed Artichoke Cheese Tortellini (with artichokes hearts, kalamata olives, oregano, parsley, basil, tomatoes, and Pecorino cheese), which we also had Wed. along with raw cucumbers and carrots. For dinner on Thursday, we had leftover orzo salad that I’d made for our permaculture potluck earlier in the day, along with sourdough bread. On Friday I made a new batch of the tortellini thing, which we had Saturday too, and then Sunday I made Hearty Minestrone Soup, a Whole Foods recipe, though I made it without cabbage, with fresh local spinach, and switching out cannellini beans for small red beans.
Supplies: Nothing much this week, though the Amazon S&S was delivered on Sat. and Sun. with some health and food items and bird seed. I ordered a couple of Christmas/New Year’s Eve gifts this week, including a replacement for one I had to cancel when it wasn’t sent as promised.
Financial/Admin: I sent in my check on Friday for the local farmstand CSA for next year — It’s not a typical CSA, where the farm boxes up items for you each week; at our farmstand, you give them money in January and you get a gift card with that amount plus 10% more to spend any time on anything at the farmstand (including, besides what the farm produces, additional perennial and annual plants, Christmas trees and wreaths, compost and soil products, decor, other foods not grown there, and much more). It’s a great deal for the customer and a good way for the farm to collect (literal) seed money before the growing season begins.
- Sleeping & Dreaming
My FitBit lost its charge overnight on Wednesday and then was on the charger most of the day Thursday so I don’t have any record for Wednesday night’s sleep (or Thursday’s steps). But otherwise, sleep was OK, with an average FitBit sleep score of 86.3 this week and average per-night sleep of 7 hours 24 minutes (low of 6 hours 7 mins and high of 8 hours 17 mins). My incomplete REM total is 10 hours 40 mins for 6 nights, and the incomplete deep sleep total is 9 hours 15 mins for 6 nights.
- Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching
Reading
BOOKS: I finished reading John Banville’s The Drowned (2024), crime fiction in Ireland in the 1950s. A sort of outcast hermit, living with his dog, finds a car, still running, in a field, and against his better judgment gets involved in trying to find the owner, who turns out to be man claiming his wife drove them there and then took off running towards the sea, where he can’t find her. Both men end up in an isolated nearby house where a vacationing husband, wife, and young child have just arrived. Meanwhile, we follow DI Strafford from Dublin who ends up investigating the case when it turns out that one of the men was involved in a case (the murder of a woman a few years back) that he handled. Strafford has his own issues with Phoebe, a much-younger woman he’s dating, whose doting father, Dr. Quirke, is the pathologist. It’s a slow story without much of an ending — you’d want to read it for the atmosphere and a few interesting lines. (My favourite: “His fat and greasy tie reached hardly halfway down his chest, and, to the eye of Quirke the pathologist, suggested the protruding dark blue tongue of a strangulation victim.”)
OTHER:
I read this: There’s Another Kind of Virus Out There That Can Ruin Your Life. Prepping for hackers at the end of the world. by Jessica Wildfire at The Sentinel Intelligence. May be behind a paywall, but essentially it’s about how to stay safe from people who want your identity (including ditching Microsoft and Google) and exactly what to do if you think you might be the victim of a hacker who’s installed a virus on your device.
I like these by Sophie Lucido Johnson, part of a short series about how dark winter can feel:
Watching
We watched “Auntie Mame” over two nights this week, a favourite Christmas-ish movie.
Listening – mostly Christmas, a little country
- Connections & Community
Local Support: As mentioned above, I sent in my CSA check to the local farmstand this week. Also shopped at the farmstand on Tuesday and had breakfast and bought things for friends at a café/farmstand not far from us on Saturday. I did a big grocery shop at the regional co-op on Wednesday as well as a smaller shop at its adjunct shop.
Relationships: Spent a pretty good deal of time texting this week with my stalwart friends (RN&ChN) whose packages I sent astray — and those packages all arrived (at the wrong place) and were successfully collected by my friends, two on Tuesday and one on Thursday! Another package was mailed to a friend’s (RaS) correct address but for some reason took 10 days to arrive (from NH to NYC), also on Thursday. Neighbours (WD&RD) brought us a lovely flower bouquet on Saturday, when it was cold and windy, so they drove the few yards from their house to ours and brought the flowers in in a big box covered with plastic to protect them. So sweet.
I sent a long email to a friend (RVN) on Friday. We picked up items at the café/farmstand and grocery store on Saturday for friends (RL, ED) and delivered them. My husband delivered cookies and nuts to six or seven neighbours and friends on Thurs. and Friday (and got some in return) and we delivered one more on Saturday. We attended the permaculture potluck Christmas party on Thursday, with white elephant exchange and cookie exchange — 9 of us were there in person! I hosted the Salon group here on Friday, with 6 of us attending (missing one local and one long-distance member).
- Endings
I guess we officially said goodbye to autumn this week but here in NH it feels like we do that around Halloween most years.
- All This Useless Beauty
The featured image is the only new wrapping paper I bought this year: dinosaurs having fun and going about their business while an asteroid’s about to hit.
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