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I took a few photos last night that I would have loved to share here today but I never got around to uploading them. ☹ There's a geat "portrait mode" shot of Shanti with the finished Christmas Tree and Christmas lights blurred in the background. I guess I can share it later. In the meantime, you can go back in time through all of my annual Christmas Tree ornaments, from 2020 back to 2003,
via TikTok. The editing in that video clearly indicates how much of a novice I remain on that app, although I have long approached it with the intention of using it differently from how most people do. I'm not especially interested in "going viral" with anything, or doing TikTok dances or sharing monologues about stuff I would always be more comfortable sharing in writing anyway. I really use the app so I can create posts in ways no other social media platforms currently allow me to. Still, I look at that video and realize how I could have moved differently in each of the ornament clips, as I should have been already moving when I started each one, and instead each starts still for a split second before I start backing up. Oh well.
In any case, I kind of barely managed to find the time to put up the annual Christmas decorations last night. I was unable even to get started until sometime around 4:30 maybe. I put on the Deluxe edition of Sia's fantastic
Everyday Is Christmas album, after going down to our storage unit in the garage, bringing up two boxes of decorations and the box containing the artificial Christmas Tree that's now in its
eighth year—one year longer than the tiny live Christmas Tree I used before it even though it basically died after a couple of years, but still one year less than I used the large artificial tree I had before that, assuming I purchased that one for Christmas 1998, which I believe I did (I have no photo evidence).
I do know now, by the way, that artificial trees are
terrible for the environment. I should never have thrown away the first one; my only defense even in purchasing that one was that I was a young and ignorant 22-year-old with too much inheritance money on my hands at the time. It could be argued I should have known better even then, but I had far less excuse when I bought the current one in 2014. I think it's easy to assume artificial trees are better for the environment, but that just means it's easy to be blind to the fact that they will one day just be landfill. But, I have it now and I can't un-buy it, but I won't ever buy an artificial tree again. And since I do have it, I really love the convenience of it, and not having to deal with things like shopping for a tree every year or creating a fire hazard because I insist on having a tree up from right after Thanksgiving (had I been at home, the tree would have gone up on Friday) until New Year's. This artificial tree won't dry up and risk burning up the condo.
Anyway, I did something new this year that I can't believe I never thought to do before but makes me happy now even though I'm still the only person who will ever notice: I hung the
annual Christmas Tree ornaments Shobhit and I have bought each other every year, zigzagging from top to bottom on the side of the tree facing the living room, in Chronological order. Granted, I only thought to create a photo album showing them in order either last year or the year before (I don't remember which), so it was easy to use that as reference. I then hung the other ornaments I've long used every year in between them and also on the back side of the tree facing the window, which is always where the "
Silver Balls" ornament gets, um,
hung.
Shobhit was home and watching TV while I worked on it, after having taken a break for dinner and watching this week's (excellent, as usual) episode of
Succession. He asked me, "Do you need me to do anything?" and I said, "Nope." This exchange also happens every year. I suppose you could call it one of Shobhit's and my Christmas traditions.
I hung up Ivan's Christmas stocking again, along with Shobhit's, mine, and the two for the cats. This hasn't happened since 2017, his last Christmas living with us. Ivan has now been around for four Christmases: 2014, during his first stint here while Shobhit still lived in L.A.; 2016 and 2017, after he moved in at the end of November 2016 but before he left again in February 2018; and now 2021. God knows if he'll be with us over more Christmases, although I suspect he will. He typically gets antsy and restless and wants to travel for a while after a year or a year and a half, so I feel like there's maybe a 50-50 chance he'll still be living with us during Christmas 2022, and a far lesser chance by Christmas 2023. But, given the history so far—he's lived with us three different times now—I'm beginning to have the expectation that he may come back and live with us every few years until we die. I'm kind of comfortable with that idea, actually.
He never actively participates in Christmas with us, mostly because he always works one of his nursing shifts that day to get the increased wages. He never goes home to family for holidays. Nevertheless, if he's here, I always hang a Christmas stocking for him (as I also did for Tommy the Christmas he was here), and I always get him a gift. I don't expect one from him, but he typically does get us something like a gift box of soaps and lotions and stuff like that. This only happens when he's actually living here, although a couple of times I have still had gifts sent to him on Christmases he was not living with us.
The cats, of course, give even less of a shit about Christmas than Shobhit does. But I always include them anyway, because, well, I just have to! They're still family, after all.
I would love to come up with some radically different setup for the Christmas decorations, but that really never happens. I just don't have the bandwidth for it. I found myself contemplating my grandparents last night, and how many years they must have had just the same decorations out every year for decades. I may be reaching an age myself where that is just the expectation going forward.
It's also slightly odd experiencing Christmas going forward without my mom still alive, even though the first time that happened was last year—and we never went to Idaho for Christmas itself anyway; it just meant that last year we were under no obligation to take the early-December trip there that I had taken annually for the prior decade. With both Mom and Bill gone now, I don't think we'll go visit even annually anymore. Maybe every couple of years at most, depending on how estranged my brother and I get again. And to be fair, although I hesitate to use the word "estranged" as it has connotations that don't really apply here, we just have so little in common anymore, and even Tristen is becoming a bit of a bonkers anti-vaxxer due to Christopher's influence (in spite of the fact that Bill literally died due to one of them bringing COVID home to them), there is less and less reason for future visits. I will in conjunction with Dad and Sherri ever going again, though. Without Mom there to draw me into visits, I'd want my other parents around whenever I go again.
In any case, middle age brings with it an evolving sense of how the holiday season is experience. I don't love it any less and I don't think I ever will, something Shobhit would probably do well to remember.
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So what did I do with the whole day
before putting up the tree and lights last night? I spent literally hours on my L.A. / Palm Springs email travelogue, which had included a couple of photos from PCC events (the Harvest Potluck and my working a shift at PCC Central District last Monday), which I already wrote about, so those first bits were cut out of the
blog post version that I shared here right around 4:30 yesterday. That alone contains just over 3500 words of text in it, or what would amount to about 6 pages of prose content if it were in a Word document (which I just pasted it into to figure that out).
Come to think of it, though, I never did actually write about the work shift on Monday, as it was the last thing I did before my vacation officially began, and I had already posted about the previous weekend that day. I think I will soon edit the post to re-include that bit at the beginning.
I'm not certain what time it was when I first opened the travelogue email draft, but it was in the morning, and that was after getting all the photos loaded to Flickr. I want to say I had my shower before starting on the writing, and I did that later than usual, so I may have started it, say, around 10:30? That would mean the whole email, combined with pasting captions from there into the associated photos on Flickr as well as creating the html coded version for this blog, took me a good six hours. That includes a brief break to make myself a veggie burger for lunch.
A lot of the time it took had to do with research I did for captions that I keep making increasingly long, which makes me worry a little about reader attention spans but whatever. This was particularly the case for population figures I gather for Coachella Valley, which took a good chunk of time, and also getting information from Wikipedia on the history of the Salton Sea.
All this meant that I had no time for working on the 2022 calendars I will be gifting for Christmas, which I am woefully behind on. I had thought I could work on them using Shobhit's laptop in Palm Springs, as all the photos I need are already uploaded to my account at Costco.com, but the trip proved far busier than I anticipated and I had no time for it. Right now I literally have some hours blocked out on my Google calendar for working on them, and hopefully finishing them up, on Wednesday; I have other plans both tonight and tomorrow evening. I'm not concerned about getting them printed in time for handing them out to people in Olympia on Christmas, but the people I have to mail them to, I'm increasingly running the risk of them getting them late, after Christmas. That's not the end of the world though. I do need to figure out how I'm going to get Uncle David and Mary Ann's calendar to them in Adelaide, now that the USPS isn't delivering to Australia. The long tail of consequential bullshit from the President Fuckwit administration just never ends.
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I would normally fill my DLUs this week with photos from last week's trip, but it's now the Christmas season and I have backlogs from last year I want to burn through before I am already creating DLU-worthy Christmas photos from this year. Two of the shots in this very post are from
two years ago, actually; the third is from last year. All of them are from the "Oly Lightstravaganza" near Dad and Sherri's house in Olympia. We may or may not make a third visit to it before heading home Christmas evening this year. Last year they had it closed off so people could not walk through it and could only look from the outside; it would be interesting to see if or how they change it this year.
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[posted 12:43 pm]
