Busy, Busy, Busy

 December and the beginning of January are busy, busy, busy times at our house. Michael and I got married on December 21, not realizing—sweet young things that we were—that children would bring school events that crowded our anniversary almost to oblivion. School pageants, and later band recitals, for two or three kids often left us eating our anniversary dinner in January.

 Christmas is frenetic with all the shopping for and wrapping and hiding gifts. Fun, but time consuming. On Christmas Eve, we are in the habit of going to our church for the evening candlelight service, replete with carols and good cheer. Then we go home for a special meal: cheese and crackers, sausage, fresh fruit, and Christmas cookies, along with obligatory Irish coffee.

 The Irish coffee is served in beautiful goblets that are embossed in gold and green with lines indicating how much sugar, how much whiskey, and how much coffee. You’re on your own for the whipped cream serving, but I think that frothing over the goblet is just right. We received the Irish coffee goblets as a wedding gift in 1976 and we have toasted Christmas Eve with them every year for the last 49 years. Kids partake too, with the whiskey adjusted appropriately.

 We used to open presents on Christmas Eve after dinner—hence the easy to make and to clean up meal— and Santa left gifts for Christmas morning, but, as a family, we decided to go full Christmas morning for gifts after I became ill with lupus. We needed to streamline our traditions to make it easier to manage. The ‘new’ way worked well enough that we’ve kept on doing it for about 30 years.

 Now that we’ve gotten through our anniversary, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, you’d think a little peace and relaxation would descend on the house. Wrong—I’m still busy. December 28 is Michael’s birthday. Since it’s right after the holidays, I always try to make him feel extra special. And because I am a dedicated sale shopper, I almost always buy those gifts in the after-Christmas sales, so I have to duke it out with the crowds.

 The cake is baked, the gifts wrapped, and his special dinner is cooked. Now can we get some peace and quiet? Heck no. It’s New Year’s Eve and fireworks are blasting the night skies all over our neighborhood. Fireworks are legal in Harris County. It’s mayhem.

 Okay, New Year’s Day has arrived, a quiet day for most people. But most people don’t have a son whose birthday is January 2^nd. We do. He has had some doozies when it came to birthday dinner requests. One notable year, he asked for pepperoni pizza and for everybody to get two cans of soda! Now that he’s middle-aged himself and lives far away, we’re off the hook for the extra sodas.

 As a special added attraction, our Brooklyn grandkids (8 and 12) are coming solo for a visit from the 26^th to the 31^st. Fun is planned, tickets are purchased, and it’s coming together. But there is a lot to do to get ready.

 In the past, January also contained my grandmother’s birthday on January 3. And three of my brothers have birthdays on the 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th. Those birthdays require virtually nothing of me nowadays, although we did travel to Arizona for my oldest brother’s 80^th birthday two years ago. A fun time, totally worth the travel bother!

 But new birthdays have happened: our two granddaughters’ birthdays are on December 3^rd and 5^th! So, let’s count it up. From December 1^st through January 9^th, my family (including family of origin) celebrates 8 birthdays, a wedding anniversary, two major, multi-day holidays that require gift giving and out-of-town company for five days. Is it any wonder that I’m exhausted thinking about it?

Who am I kidding? The joy of celebrating with family and friends far outweighs the hassles of the season. Even when I’m falling behind, and I get slower at this stuff every year, I love the outcomes.

 However many events you may be celebrating this season, I hope your life is as overflowing with love and fun as mine.

 From our busy, busy house to yours,

Ciao

 

 

It Starts with Befuddlement

 My daughter Alix and son-in-law Adam recently discovered a slowly leaking pipe. It had flooded their kitchen, essentially destroying it from the inside out. Hearing about their disaster caused a set of awful memories to resurface for me.

Over the last 10 years, Michael and I have experienced three floods inside our house. Yes, that’s three and yes, inside floods, not nature-caused floods. “How could this have happened?” you might ask. Short answer: in 2015, a faulty toilet in our bathroom overflowed while we were taking my mother to dinner on Valentine’s Day; in 2019, the infamous Texas freeze, as in “when Hell freezes over” struck and 6 of our copper pipes froze and split; and, in 2023, the valve on a pipe in our guest bathroom cracked and spewed water while we slept.

 Most people never get to experience an event like this, so I thought I would walk you through the experience. Flood discovery, I have found, follows a script. The initial squelching step into unexpected water is the WTF? moment of befuddlement. The experience is so unique (at least the first time) that you can’t comprehend it. This is quickly followed by the “oh sh*t” moment of panic, when comprehension kicks in and you realize there’s water where water should never be.

 Remember the old Marlon Brando movie A Street Car Named Desire? There’s a scene where he bellows in desperation, “Hey, Stella! Stella!” This Stella moment is the next step in the flood experience. You yell frantically for your spouse so they can share this astonishing moment with you.

 Once the shouting is over, reality sets in and the second moment of panic arrives. How do you stop the water? Where is the water even coming from? Do you need to shut down the whole system or just a local pipe? Where is the shut-off valve for the house? Where would that local pipe shut-off even be?

 When your partner joins you, you have the opportunity to re-experience the WTF? and “Oh sh*t” moments through their eyes as they take in the scene in shocked disbelief. However, instead of becoming an occasion of solidarity, it becomes the “Do something!” moment where your spouse expects you to fix it. This is similar to being the person who finds the dog pooh, the hairball, or the child covered in peanut butter. You found it, you own it.

 While you are attending to water shut off, you get to give your partner their own personal hell. “Call the insurance company!” Now they can have a moment of panic. Who do I call? What’s the phone number? Where did I put the policy? Who did we even buy insurance from this year?

 It will seem like forever, but before long the water will stop flowing and the insurance carrier will be alerted. If they’re good, they’ll have a remediation team on the way within hours, even if it’s the middle of the night. If you aren’t lucky this way, it may be a few frustrating days before a remediation company shows up. We’ve had it happen both ways.

 Meanwhile, you will spend frantic hours picking up the God-awful number of items that are on your floor, in the water or threatened by it. You will struggle to remember what this stuff is and why the hell it’s on the floor in the first place. Don’t even try; just pick it up as quickly as you can. Many wet items can be salvaged. Sadly, others can’t be. It’s amazing how quickly water can erase years of living.

 There are moments of grief and loss coming, but don’t get ahead of yourself. You have to stay focused on rescuing whatever you can and working with the remediation company on an action plan, because once the loss part hits you, you will likely be too depressed to do anything except the bare minimum.

 When I spoke to Alix after they discovered their flood, she expressed the very same stages of disaster coping that I experienced. I think this process is universal and applies to all kinds of disasters, but I can’t prove it. I was happy, though, that I could tell her about the end of the flood disaster cycle, something she won’t see for several months I’d guess.

 When it’s all over, you do not have a return to normal. No, you have brand-new stuff. The walls are rebuilt and repainted. The flooring is new and spiffy. The cupboards that you have banged around for 10 or 15 years are new and have features that put the old ones to shame, like pull-out shelves. Damaged furniture is replaced.

 You have had a significant remodeling job done and your insurance company footed most of the bill. Yes, the deductible is a bear, but it’s not as much money as a new kitchen or living room or bedroom or take-your-pick would have been. There, doesn’t that make you feel better? Not yet? Give it time, happier days are just around the corner.

 

 

The Season of Dread

 It is the season of dread for anyone who has to send gifts to another city for the holidays. Not only do you have to decide on the gifts you want to give, wrap those gifts and package them up, but you have to relinquish them to the not-so-tender ministrations of the US Postal Service or another carrier to get them to their destination. And those mailing or shipping services cost an arm and a leg these days.

 Over the years, I have mailed Christmas gifts to people in Minnesota, North Dakota, California, New York, Oregon, Missouri, Arizona, and Texas. Probably some other places that escape me at the moment. I have sent a LOT of packages into the void. Most of them have arrived, but it isn’t guaranteed.

 A package of gifts for my granddaughter Heaven, who was three at the time, was waylaid at a post office 60 or so miles from her small Texas town. Because of holiday closures, she got her Christmas gifts on January 3^rd. It’s heartbreaking to try to explain to a toddler that the presents really are coming … someday.

 A package to my friend in Minneapolis got misplaced by USPS one year. She received the package weeks after Christmas. This occurred before package tracking became a thing, and neither of us knew what had happened. Plenty of frustration over that, although the package eventually arrived.

 Another package, sent to my brother, made so many circuits around the country that by the time he received the box of candy, it was a huge, misshapen lump of chocolate in the corner of the manila envelope. The box it started out in had been beaten to a flat pulp as it was thrown from truck to truck, sack to sack.

 A greeting card with a gift card inside, sent to a granddaughter in Oregon, disappeared completely, the generous gift spent by a postal thief. I stopped sending gift cards after that, deciding that no one would know if I slipped a check inside a card. Just the other day, I heard on the news that I shouldn’t do that either – bad actors were stealing them for check washing scams. I guess we’re down to electronic payment apps now.

 Amazon (and other online ordering) became the apparent answer to these holiday mailing and shipping woes. Yes, the relatives on the receiving end would have to do the gift wrapping for us, but the gifts would get there quickly for the most part and free for people like me with Prime accounts. Yay, maybe.

 Last Friday, my Brooklyn granddaughter turned 12. After several conversations with her and with her parents, we identified two gifts that she’s really like that fit our budget. Six days before her birthday, I ordered them from Amazon and happily learned they would be delivered in three days, plenty of time for the parents to get them wrapped before the big day.

 I got an email telling me that the package was out for delivery on the appointed day. But it never arrived. Although Amazon’s tracking persisted in telling me the package was out for delivery for days after the specified date, my order record online said simply, “Your delivery is running late.” It still says that a week later, while the billing information claims the order is complete.

The annual ordeal may be different, but it isn’t gone. Now it is the dread of trying to get help for an online purchase from a system so unresponsive and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to solve anything. You can’t connect with a person right away ever. I embarked today on a quest to locate my granddaughter’s birthday presents by asking the Amazon AI for help.

 Here are the opening words of every single response the AI made to me today: “I understand your concern…” “I understand your frustration…” “I completely understand your urgency…” I understand your concern…” “I understand your concern…” “I understand your frustration…”  “I understand you’re looking for more information…”  Its answer to every one of my questions ended with some version of “Would you like me to process a refund?”

 After seven “nos” from me to the refund, and many additional questions from me trying to elicit useful information, the chatbot finally said the magic words “Looks like we need to get more help.”

Segue to the human agent.  

 I won’t bore you with the list of unhelpful, nonsensical, or redundant words the agent subjected me to after we connected. I suspect English is not their native language. The agent finally assured me that the estimated delivery will be tomorrow. Okay, phew. Tomorrow is great. Before I ended the chat session, the agent gave me this final sentiment: “Thank you for your patience and understanding. If the item will not showed tomorrow, please contact us back so that we can check our availbale [sic] options in here.”

 Yes, it is the season of dread for gift givers—because no matter how we send them, the gifts always carry a little gamble.

Ciao

The Decision that Never Goes Away

Over the last 49 years, Michael and I have had to ask ourselves some very difficult questions.

       ·       Should we get married? (Obviously, yes.)

·       Should we accept the transfer and relocate the family? Should we do that again? And again? And again? (Phew, we finally landed in Houston and stuck!)

·       Can we afford this house? This car? This vacation? (No, but we mostly bought them anyway.)

·       Are we doing everything we can/should do to raise happy, healthy kids? (They seem to have turned out okay.)

·       Should we adopt a child in our middle age? (No, but we did anyway.)

·       Will we survive this crisis? And this one? And this one? Etc, etc, etc. (We did, but never without collateral damage.)

·       Will our retirement savings last through our old age? (Hopeful, but remains to be seen.)

 I’m not saying we’re special. Everyone faces difficult questions, often many, in the course of their lives. But of all the questions we’ve faced, none has been as persistent—or as maddening—as the one that greets us every evening: what’s for dinner? It is the most fraught question in our relationship and we have to face it down every day.

 In a recent Progressive Insurance commercial, Mara—the perennially grumpy insurance agent—terrifies graduates by reminding them that they can look forward to deciding “…what’s for dinner every night for the rest of your lives.” Kudos to the copywriter who came up with that line: they hit the jackpot!

 Now, some of you are thinking to yourselves, why don’t they make a weekly meal plan, then they’d know what’s for dinner  every night. That has occurred to us periodically and we’ve even occasionally tried it for a few weeks at a time. But ultimately, that only compounds the problem. Asking “What are we going to have for dinner for the next seven days?” is more than seven times more difficult than facing tonight’s meal.

 We have tried to find a permanent solution, with no success. One can tiptoe into it: do you have any thoughts about dinner? Or: how hungry are you? One can boldly go: what do you want for dinner? One can sidestep: what do we have for dinner?

 Occasionally, one of us makes the sacrifice and offers an idea. That usually means offering to cook as well and usually results from a personal craving or burst of energy that may flag before the meal comes to fruition. Too bad, offer accepted, you’re on the hook.

 The impasse that results when neither of us has any idea what to make or the gumption to make it, usually resolves in a free-for-all. Then you’re on your own to scrounge through the fridge, pantry, and/or freezer for sustenance. I mean, there’s usually cheese, eggs, bread, and the odd can of soup in the house.

 It may also lead to a fast food run. If we’re feeling momentarily flush, it might mean going to a restaurant. The beauty of eating in a restaurant is that there will likely be left-overs, which assures a future meal. Unless someone sneaks into the fridge at midnight.

 I haven’t mentioned breakfast or lunch. We gave up on those years ago and they are strictly free-for-all meals at our house unless we have houseguests. Long ago, when we were responsible for feeding children, I know that we did this better. The kids did get regular meals and there was pre-planning because, duh, working parents. You couldn’t wing it without potential disaster, peanut butter sandwiches and cereal excepted. Back then, dinner was a duty. Now it’s a negotiation.

 So if you’re still wondering what’s for dinner tonight—join the club. We’ll be asking again tomorrow.