Galentines Day

I am blessed with the most unromantic husband. And the most caring husband, too. He would never think about buying me a Valentine's card or candy or flowers. But if I asked him to go buy me a Valentine's card, candy or flowers, he would run to the store. But what means more to me is that he cares about me, worries about me and does whatever he can think of to keep me safe and happy.  And it turns out I can go to the store and buy myself cards, candy and flowers whenever I want. 

He opens doors, not only for me, but any woman or child. He takes care of our sidewalks and lawn as well as any neighbors who need outdoor help. He is the first person to call if you have a leak and need water shut off or your furnace won't start or your car breaks down. Once I got a call from an 80 year old woman that I had worked with many decades ago who was having an issue with her electric stair chair in the middle of the night. He got out of bed and went over to fix it for this woman he had never met and came home, drank coffee and went to work.  

My car is always full of gas, my tires and brakes are always maintained. He worked a very hard labor job on the railroad for over 38 years to support and take care of our family which afforded me the opportunity to switch jobs every five years or so when I discovered something more fun to do. 

So - enough bragging about this guy, let's get back to the 14th. When I was rearranging (I am being honest, instead of cleaning) in my pantry, I found all kinds of holiday leftovers. I decided to celebrate Galentine's day with a tea party. Of course we still aren't going anywhere or socializing, but I also have a collection of containers. 

I used some white styrofoam boxes that I used for carryout holiday meals the first year of lockdown. I baked some tiny heart shaped cookies, made brownies which I cut them in heart shapes and packaged in some heart treat bags. When making a quick trip to the store I picked up some assorted candies and such. I also baked some chocolate mini muffins and a loaf of lemon bread. 

For our savories, I put a corn and black bean salad in some adorable little pink cups with gold hearts. I had some treat containers that held ziplock bags of chips to scoop it up! I made pinwheels with cream cheese, finely diced onion, grated carrots and cheddar cheese and some Penzy seasonings. My Pampered Chef sandwich press seals the rounds of wheat bread with homemade chicken salad, with grapes instead of my usual celery since I forgot to buy celery. The round sandwiches fit perfectly in a giant pink cupcake wrapper, part of a rainbow pack hiding in the pantry. 

I had some Biglow Salted Carmel tea bags and also picked up some flower seed packets for fun and thoughts of Spring.

My neighbor across the street lives alone and has two grown sons who live out of town. We moved to the neighborhood a year apart and have been friends since our children were in preschool 38 years ago. 

Across the cul de sac is another neighbor who has had quite the time with foot injuries (and two bouts with Covid since she won't get vaccinated). She was home in the recliner for the past two weeks after falling on the ice, landing on her knee replacement.

Behind me lives Miss Peggy who is in her late 80's. We met Peggy and her husband Jack when we purchased our house in 1978. They were raising a blended family of young men in their teens to early 20's and one elementary boy of their own. The "boys" have been in and out over the years and the youngest is staying there now. 

One street over is my friend Mary who has had quite the time since lockdown. Her husband suffered a series of strokes in the early days when family was shuttled to the parking lot of emergency rooms, hospitals, rehab centers and nursing homes. He has had a series of unrelated health issues from heart and lung problems to kidney stones. He is also developing some dementia. She has her hands full with him home now. He is wheelchair bound and recently fell and broke his collar bone. 

I decided to treat these special Gals on Galentine's Day.  I had six boxes so I also made tea party lunches for my daughter and daughter-in-law who were dropping off grandchildren for the day. 

The best part of Galentine's Day is that I only had enough supplies for six tea parties. Mr. Merry and I had a celebration with some leftover pizza and cheese dip from the super bowl! And since we were eating the "trimmings" from the heart brownies, all the calories and fat grams had leaked out! 

So how is that organization project coming?

If you can remember WAY back to my last post, I said that, instead of actually packing up my Christmas decorations, I was ordering ornament boxes from Amazon to repack them. I found some great boxes at a substantial discount and then they had a coupon to half that price that could be used with the discount. I could order multiples as long as I ordered different colors. Then Mother Nature blessed us with an ice storm and over a foot of snow that closed schools last Thursday and Friday with my grandchildren in their own homes! This gave me a four day child-free window. Except Sunday their sports activities resumed so I was cut down to three. 

The first box arrived and I was very impressed and inspired. Along the way, I decided to change my storage around, too. When we built the addition, Mr Merry build a wall of bookshelves for me with cupboards (actually a series of premade sink bases) underneath. Some odd Christmas stuff and lots of stuff that is just odd is stored there now. I pulled everything out from the cupboards, packed the Christmas decorations that were stored in the cupboards and under the bed in my guest room in my new boxes and by gosh, they all fit in those cupboards. 

When I saw where this was going, I visited Amazon and ordered the same boxes in a different style to fit under the bed. I have three closets in the guest room (we had three boys and my husband built three separate closets with doors after the open concept I used when they were toddlers did not work for pre-teens and teens). One closet is completely fabric and unfinished quilts; the other two are crammed with different holidays.  

My master plan was to move those holidays into the new under bed boxes and free up a closet! But first I had to take down my Christmas Village. It lives in three huge plastic containers in our storage shed. One of the containers had cracked on the edge and the lid was not tight anymore. I decided to move an even more huge container from a closet in my secret room of so much stuff that held my rather excessive Raggedy Ann and Andy collection. I packed what i thought were all the dolls in the first under bed container and packed up the Christmas Village using their former home. 

Then I started to empty the first holiday closet in the guest room. The sizes of the decorations were not really going to fit in the underbed boxes. And I discovered another box of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls.  SO

I ordered more boxes - these are double the size of the ornament boxes and I am thinking the other holiday decorations should fit inside. I can restack them in the closet and hopefully it will consolidate things into a manageable level.  Unfortunately, they won't be here until later this week, arriving on an afternoon when my two and three year olds will be here. 

You may remember I already took everything out of that closet. So now I have many, many piles including breakable objects, waiting on boxes. I am trying to tell myself that I won't have to pack them back into the closet until the new boxes come, but I am pretty sure that I will be doing that later this evening. 

I swear my greatest talent is turning any small project into a larger project into a huge project. 

On a happier note. We had ordered a 1/4 steer for our freezer that was going to be picked up in mid December. We had been emptying the freezer, but unfortunately our farmers accidentally sold it out from under us. I don't know why she is so busy with a newborn, two toddlers and a full time job off the farm as a registered nurse on the surgical floor. But there you go. She promised me one in late March or April.  BUT, someone who was purchasing a quarter in January backed out and we lucked into an earlier delivery! (by delivery, we drive out to the country butchers and pick it up, LOL). A quarter lasts us almost a year and I really like having good quality meat just outside the kitchen door. This time we had them make 50 pounds of the ground beef into packages of four quarter pound beef patties. This is enough for a super fast dinner one night and lunch the next day.  Don't worry about the ground beef though, two weeks before she called I won a silent auction for 20 pounds of ground beef being raffled for a virtual fundraiser for the junior prom in a nearby village. We are set to at least next fall, if not longer, on beef, even though we eat all meals at home. We haven't been a restaurant since, well, you know. 

Yesterday one of my former Sunday School students who is now a Vocational Agriculture teacher posted on facebook that his FFA is raffling 1/2 hogs fully processed. So now I have four tickets in hand for that hog, too (I am not sure what is exactly going to fit in the freezer at this point). I do have five children with families I can share with, so we will be all set should I actually hold the winning ticket. 

Hope you all are staying warm and safe. 

Welcome to Winter

 Thanks for the kind words on my last post.  

I am feeling a little more productive.  I found some Christmas storage containers on Amazon with 60% off coupons and a discount on top of that. I also discovered I could use the coupon multiple times if I chose a different color.  I received the first box today, a cube with dividers for 3 rows of ornaments and I am pretty excited about the whole project. So perhaps Christmas will disappear by the end of the month. 

This will start a much larger project since the ornaments used to live under the bed in the guest room. The cubes will be moving to the closet in the room where the door remains closed. Items will be need to be removed from that closet (which is kind of scary because I am not sure what all is in that closet) and hopefully fewer of those items will move under the bed. 

This will all be dependent on weather. We took my youngest son's three children on Sunday because we had a winter storm warning for Monday. Mom teaches at a different school that never, ever closes, but they attend a rural school with country roads, hills and bridges that freeze over.  So dad brought them at dinner time while he was on his way to work. The next morning my two grandsons who board the school bus arrived at my house and had a snow day, too! So I got to organize activities for five very active little boys all day Monday. 

By evening we had received a few more inches, along with some drizzle and icy rain and the roads out of our county were under a "only travel if necessary" warning. We decided not to risk the trip to a neighboring county where the three live and kept them a second night. 

When we got up this morning, our roads were still snow and ice covered so the two local bus riders had another day off. And the three overnight guests did have school in their county who was spared the snow and ice, but we couldn't drive all that way to their school. So we had all five again all day today. 

Right now we are home alone, resting up for tomorrow when we will only have a two year old (who has been home with his mom, a teacher in a town next door that has been closed, too). Tomorrow night his three year old cousin will arrive and stay through Friday as usual and then, speaking of Friday - it is a teacher in-service day so I will have my bus riders all day on Friday, too! 

Got all that? I'm not sure I do. All I know is that it will be Saturday before I can begin to think about dragging stuff out of that closet and getting this project started. Unless there is a storm and I have a houseful of children snowed in with me. 

Stay safe and warm everyone! 

Word of the Month

 I am not willing to concede to a word or theme for all of 2022. But I have been considering several ideas.  I believe that January has progressed far enough along that my word is Procrastination. 

I did finish my New Year's Eve garage sale puzzle. Then I got out the Tea Cup puzzle my friend gifted me when I broke my arm. I could not sit close enough to the puzzle board to really work on it and my eyes were fuzzy with pain killers. Then after the world pause ended, my tiny grandkids were playing in the pieces. 

The Tea Cup puzzle is complete, except for 5 missing pieces from the border which were there at one point. I use large bulletin boards for inexpensive puzzle boards and store them on a dresser in my spare room. I am now cleaning behind everything in the spare room to see if I can locate them. And by that, I mean I finished the puzzle on January 4th and just started cleaning in there this afternoon. 

I have procrastinated on Christmas decorations. We did take the outdoor ones down one day last week. The tree is still up. I had big plans for the past two days as my school aged grandchildren had MLK day and today off for a teacher in-service. But we got five inches of snow so they spent most of their time shoveling and building tunnels and castles. I do have the empty boxes for ornaments in the living room now. 

I have decided to leave the bathroom and bedroom Christmas until February. 

I have been very moody and depressed about the state of the world and family matters and then wrote a few posts that, luckily for you, I did not hit publish. I think we will just let them be. 

I guess I will procrastinate until the end of the month and try to do better, be better and have a better outlook in February.