99 New: Friday Round-Up/Truckin’

I bought my daughter’s family a karaoke machine. I could envision them gathering around after dinner to sing, the kids putting on shows for the neighbors, little stars being born, the whole deal, and then I re-opened Amazon and slammed down hard on the delete button.

We are going to get a new dog tomorrow. After much wailing and rending of garments, we have declared the end of mourning for the dear departed BowWow. I’ve been pouring over the local rehoming site, rehoming being such a polite word for “we can’t deal with this dog but maybe you can.” We want an older dog because we just bought new rugs. Plus we’ve got that life expectancy thing to factor in, ours, not its.

The schlepping this week has been epic. My Time of the Month Club adventure – collecting menstrual supplies for people who are homeless – has been blessed with success. Everything that’s donated gets unloaded, counted, re-bagged in our trademark pink bags, and delivered. There are times when the amount of stuff in our dining room is stupefying – don’t ever underestimate the generosity of people asked to help out the homeless. The October donation drive which has now motored right up to Christmas is going to yield in excess of 50,000 pads and tampons. And that’s not nothing.

I’m thinking about getting an extremely tiny Christmas tree. We are late purchasers of Christmas trees, not as late as a friend of mine who, with her husband, used to wait until late Christmas Eve to go to the closed Christmas tree lot and swipe one which I always thought was hilarious and cheeky. This year, I want to not wrangle a giant tree into the house and do the hideous job of unraveling and connecting the lights so I’m thinking of a tree more on the order of a giant plant. When my in-laws did this, ‘transitioned’ to a smaller tree, I thought they had lost their minds and their entire sense of Christmas.

You can sink like a stone this time of year. Even if you’re a pretty happy camper, Christmas can bring up all the dolls you didn’t get when you were a kid. It’s a slippery slope once you start tallying up the mishaps and mistakes, so don’t start. Instead, cut back on your drinking, get a lot of sleep, and spend good time outside every day. And last, arrange your face. It’s crazy but I really think your mood follows your face. I know this. I smile a lot when I don’t mean it. And then I do.