It's been a while again, but then I've been working pretty much non-stop (including weekends), except for this past weekend... I had to do some Christmas shopping, even if it IS done online. Online shopping still takes time, looking for good pricing. Then I ran into a problem with an Amazon seller which now has to be resolved through Amazon, so not everything is perfect. The seller tried to tell me the cost of shipping should be higher and they wouldn't ship the item without several dollars more... but this is against Amazon's rules for their sellers so this has had to be reported. In the meantime, I hope I get my money back in a reasonable period of time. Nothing has been shipped so it shouldn't be a problem, and I did email the seller to cancel the order as well as emailing Amazon about it so they will investigate the seller. First time ever I have run into a problem with an online purchase, and I've been purchasing online for over 10 years now. Signs of the economic times I guess.

Yesterday I took an early hike with my dog.. .we often do that on Sundays mornings. I go early, leaving usually by 7am so we're back by 9:30 or so, then have breakfast and settle in to work for the rest of the day. Yesterday it was a crisp 32 degrees when I left... but for me that's an ideal temperature. I'll wear a t-shirt underneath a sweatshirt, and I'm a little chilly at the start of our hike, but I soon start warming up with the exertion and by the time I'm about 10 minutes into it I'm well warmed up. As the hike goes on that crisp air feels pretty good, keeping me comfortable.

When I got back I had breakfast as usual, then started to do some more shopping. My daughter had ordered a box each of juice oranges and grapefruit from the band at the high school she once attended--an annual fundraiser--so she came down to pick them up and left me with a few or each. The oranges are so sweet they are delicious, and so fresh they are amazingly juicy. Wherever the band buys these, they are of similar quality every year. So we try to buy some, but I just don't go through them fast enough to get a whole box--just one person can't eat that much citrus quickly. Between my daughter and I, though, we do alright.

Being as she was in the area, she helped me drag out the artificial tree from the attic and get it set up. Most times I wouldn't bother, but it looks like this year I'll be hosting the annual family get-together at Christmas, so out the tree must come. It's probably time I got a smaller tree... this one is about 6 foot diameter at the bottom and about 6.5 feet tall. Fine when my daughter lived here, but for just me, it's a little big and more than I need.

As for real trees.. I've though about it, but while these are readily available the problem comes in when one has to get rid of the tree at the end of the season, let alone that it must be kept watered. Trees don't get picked up by the trash service, especially not the trash services we have which we must contract for individually around here--no city trash collection services out in the county, but we also don't pay the taxes that "in-city" homeowners do, either. One either has to haul it to the dump oneself and pay a fee for disposal, or burn it (usual choice of many here), and I don't really want to do either one. So the artificial one works for me.

What is this with the pre-lit trees, though? It's hard to find one that doesn't have the lights all over it, and so far impossible to find one that not only doesn't have the lights, but is under 6 foot. I guess I'll have to start looking early next year, late September or early October when the stores first have all these out and see what I can find then.

In any case, I spent some nice time with my daughter yesterday. I had made some spicy chicken soup so we had that for dinner, and generally got to spend some pleasant holiday time together. Neither one of us has been much in the holiday spirit, so I put on some Nat, Frank, Bing and Mannheim Christmas music on the stereo to help things along a little. I needed something most traditional, but Mannheim adds a little more list into some of the old tunes so I added them into the mix also. At least we felt a little more seasonal...

For years now I've not had any Christmas spirit to speak of. I've had a couple of years where Christmas spirit came back, but for the most part it's been more of a trial I would rather not endure. I do know where that began... many years ago, when I was a teenager and my mother had changed into someone for whom Christmas was all about what SHE got. She was not always that way, but became very egocentric for a time when she was in charge of the apartment complex and everyone there tended to kowtow to her. I remember one time specifically when I was in college, my hair dryer broke (I had waist-length hair back then, I needed a dryer for those 8am wintry class mornings) and I had to go out and buy one.. leaving me very short on money for Christmas gifts. I had very little money to begin with since I was also paying to put myself through school and received nothing from my parents other than the occasional $5 my dad would slip me when he thought my mother wouldn't find out about it--she was the one who insisted that I not be given anything at all so that I would learn to take care of myself. In any case, what little I had left was all used to buy Christmas gifts for my sisters and my parents. On Christmas morning when we opened the gifts, my mother started raging at me because I had bought the hair dryer and not spent more on her for her gift. She made the rest of the day miserable for all of us, with nasty comments aimed at me all day about being selfish and ungrateful. That left me jaded for a long time.

On the other hand, when I was first separated and had nothing at all, when the Christmas tree for my daughters and I was to be a 1-foot Norwegian spruce that I had gotten from the grocery store for $2 and we could afford no presents whatsoever, I had the grandest Christmas ever. Someone left a Christmas tree on our front porch during the night--I never knew who it was and didn't want to know, but it was a wonderful surprise. My boss at the time gave me $125 in gift certificates--$25 so I could take my daughters to lunch, $25 for each of the girls, and $50 for me (which of course got spent on the girls). A friend of my older daughter and her mother came by one day bringing us $70. They told us that every year they saved some money from their paychecks to give to a needy family who had no other way to celebrate Christmas, and who better to give it to that year than someone they knew? I was incredibly grateful, it enable me to provide a Christmas dinner and a few more gifts for my daughters and family. The giving Christmas spirit of all those people made that the most memorable Christmas ever, and I still talk about it every year when Christmas rolls around. It helped to get me through probably the nadir of my life, and I will never forget it.

These days my daughters are both grown, my older daughter will be married this next year and my younger daughter looking like she will also get engaged this coming year. My Christmases tend to include a family get-together on Christmas Eve, my daughter here on Christmas morning, and then she is off after breakfast to her boyfriend's family celebration. I sometimes miss those old days when the girls were young and I would get to see their faces light up on Christmas morning when they saw Santa had come once more. I don't miss the work of it, though. Nor do I miss the disappointment when my X once again didn't bother to do anything for me for Christmas, unless his mother was coming for dinner, in which case he would go out on Christmas Eve and buy something that showed no thought about me whatsoever, just so his family wouldn't see that he never bothered about me at all. I tried to do my best for everyone, so my own conscience is clear on that account. But Christmas became very disappointing when everyone else had lots to open and my own "tree" was bare. It was not about the gifts--it could have been something as simple as taking us all out for a ride to see some special lights, or something that showed some love. It was the lack of apparent caring that hurt so much, and eventually caused that marriage's demise.

So I always have mixed feelings about the season that lean toward the more gloomy side, and always wish that one day I might change that about me. I did go to my sister's church Cantata Saturday night--she and her husband are in the church choir, their girls in the junior choir--and it was nice to listen to the music and be around people who do have that Christmas spirit. I only wish I could raise it in myself. It's not about things--I really dislike the commercial side of Christmas--it's about wanting to feel appreciate and loved. My daughters do try a little, but they are very involved with their significant others these days, and that's as it should be. For the most part, it's just like any other day... and most likely I'll be working once my daughter leaves Christmas Day.

I've been so busy working that I've barely had time to think about anything I need to do for myself, it's all been about everyone else. This afternoon I'm taking a few minutes to jot some things down here.

Back in April the younger daughter moved out and into an apartment up in Asheville. A couple of weeks ago she announced that she and her boyfriend were going to move in together. I've seen this coming for a bit now, they are always at each others places and it was not too hard to guess that this was going to be the case sooner or later. I have no issues with it, they seem to be well-matched and get along famously, and I would not be surprised to hear of an engagement announcement sometime within the next year.

But, the moving in together now impacts me, since my daughter now wants to store some of her stuff back in my garage.

I had just begun getting a lot of the old junk out of the garage, hiring a local service to cart away some of the old stuff when I got rid of my old sofa recently. I need to get him back to cart away more of this stuff that has been gathering in my garage, a lot of it thanks to either my mother's stuff that's still needing to be cleared out, or my daughter's stuff that she's left here over time. I had dreams of actually putting a car... actually, the new truck... in the garage this winter. This will be the first time in 9 years, since my mother passed on, that I will actually have the space to put a vehicle in my garage again. Since the truck is new I would really like to have it inside this year in case of ice or snow, so that it won't get the scratches on it that always seem to come from trying to get that frozen stuff off a vehicle.

My garage was originally taken over by a lot of my mother's old stuff in 1999. I've gone through some of it, and my sisters have taken some of it, and I'm now close to having a garage act like a garage again. I'm not thrilled that my daughter is assuming that I will just store everything here for her... the deal being that her stuff can't move back in without her. Not that I really want her moving back in either--I like having the house to myself and knowing that things will be where I put them when I need them--but I don't want her stuff moving back here like I'm one of those storage places. I guess I need to see just how much she plans on moving here.. if it's just one or two items it could be okay. But nothing that's going to keep me from using my garage as a garage.

I am leaving this one up to the universe once again... I don't want an unpleasant confrontation with her, but I also don't want a lot of "stuff" taking roost here again. I'm still trying to get rid of all the stuff that got dumped on me from my mother's. Since no one else had space to take it at the time (and they really didn't), I ended up with it all. I've been living with this mound of "stuff" for way too long, and this year have finally made inroads on it, telling everyone that it is now all mine since I've stored it all this time, and I am now choosing to either sell it on eBay or send it to Goodwill or some other method of getting rid of it. I'm almost there... though I still have some of it in a storage cubicle that is also slated to be emptied shortly.

Okay, I'm ranting... but I hate this assumption that this stuff can just come to me. When I left home I was told I had to get all my stuff out by a certain date, since I was then married and needed to take care of my own things without expecting someone else to take part of that burden. Nor would I have expected someone else to store it in their place for me... though that happened for 3 months way back when.....

Back in the early days of my marriage we lived in an apartment that the landlord was not so good about keeping up. We lived on the second floor of a two-family, and already the oil furnace had backed up once and sent that oily black soot all through the house. But it was not too bad that first time and we figured--hoped--that he now had it fixed and working properly. Summer came and went. My older daughter was born the next August and when she was just 3 months old we had another of those "puff backs", only this time it was much, much worse. I woke up to smoke that was so thick I could not see my hand in front of my face. My ex felt his way to the window and opened it to get air in, then we got my daughter out--there is nothing so frightening as seeing one's baby with black smuts coming out of her nose--and he knocked on the door of the people below. The woman had her own room which was not over the basement, so she didn't get any, or very little, smoke in her room. But her son who was sleeping on the couch in her living room could not be woken up, and we had the firemen and first aid come. The furnace got turned off, but apparently it had melted a plastic bucket standing 6 feet away into a puddle.. we were lucky to have escaped an imminent fire. Had I not woken up.....

Needless to say we could not go back there. We called my mother-in-law and went to her place that night, then moved out what we needed to have right away. All the rest of our stuff got stored in my ex-sister-in-law's basement until we could find a new apartment, which took us three months to do. In the meantime my SIL's basement was water-prone and we had some heavy rains, so many of our belongings got soaked and water-damaged. My mother-in-law was great, but it actually cost us more to stay with her than it normally did when we were renting our own place.. between the cost of utilities, and the fact that she ate more expensive foods than we did, plus paying her some rent (she didn't ask for it, but we would not have felt right if we had not), it was an expensive few months. I was very, very grateful when we finally got our own place again. And when we did, we got all our stuff out of my SIL's basement and never looked back.

All of this ramble is to say that I would really prefer not to have my daughter move a bunch of stuff here, and I don't feel she should assume that it's okay. She's never actually asked, just stated that she'd be bringing some stuff here to store for who knows how long. 

I think we need a little chat.