All the things I haven’t been doing

Oh, hey, hi – remember me? I’ve been not doing a lot of stuff recently … not taking pictures of cookies, not writing blog posts, not keeping track of what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising in my diet & exercise app. Some days I walk 5 miles, some days none.

I have been baking cookies, so that must make it cookie season. I shipped 10 boxes yesterday and another 10 today.

The party, pandemic style is happening Saturday, with 3 shifts, sign up for timed entry to keep the numbers down. I think there will be about 45 people over the course of the whole night, in other words, somewhere’s less than half the “normal” number.

I did the party shopping today, and it was so reduced – like one pack of little wienies, about 40 little dogs, instead of the giant Costco 2-pack with around 100 in each pack. I’m not making anything where people will be hanging over the buffet spreading something on a cracker, it’s all going to be pick it up and eat it. Spanakopita, Brie & cranberry bites in puff pastry. I’m debating what to do about the veggies & dip – provide small paper souffle cups for the dip maybe? I’ll make up some of cups with dip and leave a spoon in the dip bowl and extra cups so people can make their own when the pre-measured ones run out.

This has been the most grueling semester at work; too many students, and everyone, staff and faculty and students alike, are stressed. And I know, I know, I know, this is highly educated, privileged, mostly white people, employed at a major university, but I feel as exhausted as if I was doing hard physical labor.

And finally yesterday when I thought I might have some time to write a blog post, I got error messages when trying to login. Today I spent about 20 minutes on support chat with my hosting service to get it fixed and it turns out that SiteLock themselves is the source of the DNS problem in the first place. I pay them way more than the hosting service per year, too.

And all the stuff I probably shouldn’t be doing – listening to the news primarily. The other day I had one of those headlines the NYT throws at me that the polar ice caps are now melting from underneath. And WI republican Robin Voss, who has spent over half a million bucks of taxpayer money – $650,000 – on investigating the 2020 election, saying he never in his wildest dreams could have imagined how hard the Democrats would try to “undermine” his investigation, meaning that city and county election officials are refusing to be interviewed behind closed doors and want it in the open. Sheesh. And omicron. And weather.

Here’s the cookie pics:

And oh, yea, we got a tree, from Chris & Jay’s cut your own tree place, Westres.

And the litebrite tree is out.

And I am giving away cookies.

So I guess we are doing what we can to be festive and uphold tradition in the face of the ongoing shit show of the daily news, pandemic, and climate change.

Very happy merry, as my Dad used to say.