The Holidays, Part I

 So, we have now passed Thanksgiving and are officially into the Christmas season. 

To commemorate this, today -- November 25 -- Omaha got its first snowfall of the year. It came late this year, and coated everything in a layer of thick, fluffy whiteness that is still coming down hard as I write this. I remarked to Daisy that at least this year the weather waited until an appropriate time to snow -- after Thanksgiving. If it snows before Thanksgiving, I call bullshit, but anytime after Thanksgiving until early March or so, well, that's reasonable. 

We were lucky here in Omaha, where there's maybe an inch on the ground and in the grass. In Kansas, where I used to live (as many of you know or remember), they got almost a foot of snow -- 11 inches on the ground in the town next to where I used to live -- by 6pm. 

Of course, even the small amount we got will all melt off within a day or two -- temperatures are supposed to hit the 40s and maybe even the 50s later this week. Omaha is expected to have a "mild winter," so the predictors say. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen.

Thanksgiving was a rather muted and quiet affair, which is exactly what I/we wanted. For the first time in many years, I did not watch the parade, nor did I watch a single second of football. I took off the Wednesday night beforehand and slept for the vast majority of it, not even waking up before around 9am on Thanksgiving Day. Daisy's mother had let us know in advance that she was making a roast vegetable/roast chickpeas recipe that Daisy had actually sent her, involving squash, red onions, brussels sprouts, and a lime cilantro creamy dressing. Dad, of course, had gotten a small bird which he'd cooked/carved in advance and he was the only one who ate any of it. Daisy baked a blueberry pie for dessert, and Mom made her famous "Snickers Salad" for me because I'd specifically requested it (there's still a decent-sized tub of it in our fridge downstairs that I took home). It was just the four of us and the parents' cats, which honestly is my favorite way to celebrate the holidays. 

After dinner, we finalized the next trip to Nova Scotia. In 2024 it will be in late August/early September as expected, and the plane tickets are already booked. We are flying in and out of Bangor as expected as well. We'll need to figure out the rental car and lodging arrangements, but honestly with it being so far out we could likely wait until after the new year to worry about that, if necessary. If nothing else, the trip gives me something to look forward to for the next ten months while I build up my PTO again.

I have taken off December 19 (Tuesday) through December 26 (the following Tuesday) to give myself eight days in a row off during the holidays -- including my birthday, December 20. It took a few months to build up that PTO with the express purpose of using it for the Christmas season. I also took off New Year's Eve, which is a Sunday this year (so I only had to put in two hours of PTO for it). I will work New Year's Day as per the usual, as it's the one holiday I almost always work every single year. 

I will always take Super Bowl Sunday off (no matter who's playing), and I will have to save up some time to visit my parents in the spring -- whenever we plan that -- but otherwise, almost all of the PTO I save this year will go directly to the Nova Scotia trip. I need 13 pay periods to come and go before I'd have the full time I need to go to Nova Scotia -- which is, well, half the year. The other half of the year's PTO can be used for pretty much anything I need, including the trip to my parents' in the spring and next year's holiday season. So, I should be good, honestly. And that isn't counting if I get a bump-up in my PTO accrual once I hit my 10-year anniversary in August (which wouldn't really matter anyhow as I would hit it about four days before we leave for Canada). I don't know if I get a further bump in that or not, honestly. 

If not or if I don't have enough when that trip rolls around, as I told Daisy, I'm salaried, so I can either take it without pay or my boss can, well, deal with it because he's never really seemed to care much about PTO anyhow, and it is what it is. 

Anyway, that's done, and starting tomorrow, I have seventeen working days before I hit the Christmas vacation time -- and you best believe that I'll be counting down every single one of them. Likely, they will all be terrible and/or will move as slow as mud through a spaghetti strainer. 

This morning, after Daisy woke up (and after it was already snowing), she said she had a surprise for me -- though it wasn't really a surprise, because she didn't think I'd want to do it given the snow, but...about three miles from our house, a new Big Lots store had opened.

Big Lots has always been a huge holiday tradition for me. I don't really know why, honestly. It's one of those stores where I always went when I was growing up, well into my college years, a few times a year but always around the holidays because they always had so much stuff. It's a tradition I carried with me when I moved to the midwest and one that Daisy and I partook in multiple times over the course of our marriage, always getting tons of neat things -- decor, movies/CDs, food/snacks, etc -- every time we went there. However, Big Lots took a big hit during the pandemic, already being a discount/overstock store as it is, and the last one I knew of that existed in Omaha closed down about a year and a half ago with no publicity or fanfare -- one day we drove by it and it was just gone, sign letters removed from the building and everything. The building sat vacant for a year or so before it became a Ross Dress for Less.

Which, I mean, don't get me wrong -- we really like Ross -- but it's not Big Lots.

I was bereft; I was very sad and upset when it closed. To me it was the end of an era and another part of my younger years that would just become fond memories, never to be experienced again. It was like losing K-Mart all over again (don't get me started on K-Mart, I am still bitter).

So I guess Daisy shouldn't have been surprised this morning when I said "It's not snowing that hard, let's go."

"I'll get dressed and grab a piece of leftover pizza for the car and we can go," she said. 

And so we were off, over the forest and through the woods, to Big Lots' house we goooo...

I will say that the new store was fairly impressive in size -- larger than most others I've been in, but...I don't know, it was sort of depressing. Instead of there being massive, endless racks of CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays, there was just one small rack, like it was there as an afterthought, and most of what was on there was on there for a reason -- it wasn't anything anyone would want. The stuff that someone would want was very available/streamable on most streaming services. The holiday gift sets section was on point, as were some of the sales, but the snacks and other foods were also lacking, housewares were meh, their toy section was atrociously bad, and their prices in general didn't seem to be any better (and sometimes worse) than places like Walmart or Target. I'm glad Big Lots still exists in Omaha, but I left that store very disappointed overall. Don't get me wrong, we still got $100 of stuff, but still -- it lacked a bit of the magic that made it truly great when I was younger.

Maybe the 90s and early 2000s were just better, or maybe I'm slowly becoming a jaded old man more and more by the year. Perhaps it's both.

In the same shopping plaza as the new Big Lots was a Marshall's, a PetSmart, and (ironically) a Ross Dress for Less. Daisy wanted to go to Ross just to look around, and we did end up having more luck there finding stuff we actually needed/wanted -- we got a few Christmas presents, some decor for the house, and I got a new pair of sweatpants that are nice and look very comfortable. Ross doesn't generally carry a lot of "fat guy" clothing -- even less than Burlington does these days -- but they're good for plus-sized women like my lovely wife. I don't think she actually found anything today other than some socks, though. Usually at the very least I can find some underwear there (not that I need any at the moment), but nope. Still, sweatpants. 

We needed more clay litter for the pan upstairs that the Orange Lad™ uses, so before we went back home we went to the PetSmart too -- as they actually carry the litter we use and we can't order it online (I guess it's one of their store brands, and there's like three PetSmart stores here in town, so we don't mind just picking it up in person). 

And that's when she saw it. 

As I was trying to lead Daisy back to the cat litter area (and past the three very cute kittens they had there ready to adopt), she stopped dead in her tracks in front of one of the aisles, and motioned for me to come back and join her. 

"He stared at me," Daisy said, "and told me with his look that if I didn't rescue him, he was going to die in this store."

I turned and saw that she was looking at the rack of betta fish, little bowls stacked neatly on top of one another, and she was indeed looking into the eyes of a little white one. Plain white, nothing special about him by his looks -- actually quite small and sad-looking compared to the other multicolored, fancy-tailed fish surrounding him on all sides. Per his classification, he was an "exotic" betta, and his coloring was called "platinum."

His name is Ghost, and he is now our newest pet.

Daisy spared no expense on a five-gallon tank, neon gravel, the octopus decoration above, a fake plant,  water conditioner, premium betta food, and a tank warmer for this little fish.

To be fair, he is adorable and seemed very happy once we were able to slowly introduce him into his new home. His big heated tank, with a light in it as well, sits on our kitchen counter in the middle of all of the action -- so to speak. 

I'm not a fish guy. I've never been a fish guy. I like visiting the aquarium and I like seeing them in pet stores, but I've never been a fish fan, really. I have only ever owned one fish, and really only half-owned one at that -- his name was Spike and he was an angelfish. My ex had gotten him along with several other fish (all of which he ate, killed, or killed and then ate) in a ten-gallon tank, and he lived for about a year and a half or so before he went belly-up when he got sick or too cold or who knows what. That's been the extent of my fish ownership experience. 

Anyway, Ghost seems to enjoy his new home just fine. I told Daisy that if he dies, we can just get another one, or some other fish in general, since we now have the tank setup. It's high enough off the floor that none of the old fart cats will ever know it exists, and while Hank seemed to be mildly interested in looking at it from the floor, I seriously doubt he'll ever get up on the counter and stare at the fish inside it. The tank is so heavy that his little orange ass couldn't do anything to it if he tried. 

Also, if he dies, he's a fish. It's not like you can really mourn a fish, right? Scoop him out, plop a new fish in, begin the cycle anew. 

So now we have a fish. Ghost, our post-Thanksgiving fish. 

In other news, the first two batches of the year's Christmas cards have been mailed out. I started sending them yesterday with the first batch of about 30, and then today with the second batch of about 25. The final batch, with the remaining 20-25 or so, will go out on Monday. It took me great amounts of self-control to wait until Thanksgiving had ended before I began sending them out, as I'd had them stamped and addressed for almost two weeks now. 

My Christmas shopping is (mostly) done, and I've been done shopping for Daisy since late September. All I have to do is wrap her gifts now -- which I can really do anytime, as I got a new roll of wrapping paper for just that purpose this afternoon. I shipped my parents their gifts this past week, before Thanksgiving for the most part. For Daisy's parents I don't know what we'll do -- generally I get them each something small and inconsequential and then she gets the rest of the things for them, whatever those things may be. 

More to come.