The Holidays, Part II

 It is the Monday after Thanksgiving, and I can officially now say these things:

1. All Christmas cards have been mailed. The last batch went out today. Recipients should begin receiving them within the next day or two (well, maybe a bit longer for those folks in Canada, but because of the travel time there, I made sure all the Canadians' cards went out first). 
2. All of my parents' Christmas presents have arrived at their home in NC as of this afternoon, so we're done there.
3. We have finished Christmas shopping for Daisy's parents. Well, Daisy finished up last night, I believe; we shouldn't need anything else for them at this point, but I'm sure over the course of the next month we'll pick up some little incidental "stocking stuffer"-like items for them.
4. Daisy says she also got two more things for me last night, which means she should likely be done for me at this juncture as well, or very close. I've told her I don't really need anything because what I got her is more for both of us than it is just for her, and that's completely true.
5. With Daisy, her parents, my parents, and (hopefully) me taken care of, we should be almost entirely done with Christmas shopping for the year before we even hit December, which is -- frankly -- wild. Yes, I usually finish shopping very early, but Daisy does not. 

I did not really partake much of any of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday stuff. For Cyber Monday I didn't even bother to look for or at anything. I did an Amazon order over the weekend that included some of my normal purchases (like bottled/canned seltzer water, coconut water, cat food for the Orange Lad™, etc) and some of those things were marked as Black Friday deals, but at most I saved maybe 20% on some of them simply because of the timeframe in which they were ordered -- they were things I would've gotten anyway, sale or otherwise. Last week, well before Thanksgiving, I ordered a new robe -- at 44% off, but that was a lightning deal and I don't exactly count that as Black Friday shopping. 

It's quite comfy, by the way. The robe, I mean.

Daisy will be very happy with what she gets this year for Christmas. It's not likely something she'd ever expect due to the price of it, but it does carry on a tradition we've occasionally had for the better part of the decade-plus we've been together at this point. It's a very expensive carrying-on of that tradition, but eh, as I purchased these items months ago, they're all paid for/paid off at this point already. I'll give the full rundown here once Christmas has passed, but even sharing this information now, I'm not concerned about it since she reads this site so rarely that she likely won't even see this writing until well after Christmas. 

There are two small items that I purchased which could kind of be classified as extraneous or Black Friday things -- I snapped up a VHS head cleaner for my ancient VCR to get it as usable as possible, and a plug-and-play video card that will plug into the back of it and run directly into my PC, so that I can record/transfer old VHS tapes to digital video files via the computer. Daisy has a ton of old family videos that I've wanted to do this for, for many years, and I have some old tapes I've kept from my teenage/college years as well (my Dad texted me a few weeks ago and said he found a giant box of them under my bed in the house in WV, and now I have a wildly renewed interest in them and finding out what they are/getting them, as they're likely gems of nostalgia). 

Anyway, here's hoping the old VCR still works after having been unhooked and boxed up for over a decade. The transfer equipment (which cost me less than $20 total) arrives on Friday, and the first two tapes I'm going to test it with are some pretty heavy material -- two tapes I made on September 11 and September 12/13, 2001 -- six hours each of just straight news coverage from the evening and overnight hours on those days, where I just stuck tapes into the VCR and hit record, and let them run. I knew I would want to archive a lot of that coverage for the future, and well, 22 years later, here we are. If you weren't alive during those days (hi, kids!) it's hard to describe the sheer amount of panic and mass hysteria that was running rampant in the media for about a week or so nonstop, and I knew it would be a fascinating snippet of history that I'd want to document.

So, there's that. We'll see what happens. The biggest variable is whether the VCR will work correctly or not, because...well...it would be supremely difficult to get a "new" one that actually functions well in 2023. If it does work well, it's likely only a matter of time at this point until its components fail. Tapes degrade over time as well, and I'm not looking for 1080p audio/video, just a way to preserve the stuff I have.

For those of you wondering, no, I don't think I have any commercially-purchased movies or TV shows or anything like that on VHS anymore. Most of them I got rid of or sold half a decade ago or more, and I flat out tossed probably 100 tapes or more when we last visited my parents and I cleaned out my bedroom there (that hurts to think about now, but it is what it is). It's possible I may come across one or two still hidden in boxes from time to time, but at this juncture I really haven't saved anything I didn't outright need to save. It may be worth my time to scour through my boxes of items (something I've been meaning to do anyhow) to see what I have left, or to check out yard sales and pawn shops to see if I can get some tapes for pennies on the dollar, seeing as pretty much nobody really wants them anymore. I'm pretty sure I did save my original Star Wars Trilogy collection somewhere, from the re-released tapes in the mid-90s that were digitally remastered but not the special editions. Do I know where they are now? Fuck no. Such is life in 2023.

Anyway.

Ghost, our fish, seems to be doing pretty well. He scared me last night as he seemed very lethargic and did not want to move or swim around, hiding himself beside or behind the tank filter -- but this morning when Daisy came downstairs he got very active, swam around and danced for us, ate some food, etc. He did the same for me this afternoon when I went downstairs as well. So, I guess he's okay and just dramatic. An emofish™ of sorts. 

Or he was sleeping most of the night, since most living creatures sleep at night, and bettas don't have eyelids.

Whatever works, I suppose. Point is, he's still alive and seems to be doing fine, so Daisy obviously did everything correctly when she set up his tank for him. 

I returned to work last night for my first post-Thanksgiving shift, and it was one of the quietest nights I've ever worked in that place this year. I do not expect that to continue for long as we move through the end of November and into December. This is coupled with the fact that tonight begins the full moon, and full moons mean absolutely idiotic/crazy customers to deal with on a bell curve that builds up, where the top of the bell is "peak idiocy" that will slowly once again wane as the full moon moves into its next phase.

You think I'm kidding or being superstitious. I'm not. People go insane during full moons. Ask anyone who's ever worked in retail. What I do is not retail, but trust me when I tell you that it gets nuts on my side too. I haven't worked in retail since 2010. In 2025, it'll be fun to celebrate my 15-year-anniversary of being retail-free. 

Anyway.

I do have some somewhat tragic news here that I need to cover, briefly, as to not be remiss and gloss over it -- my Dad's mother died last week. 

Now mind you, my "Dad" is not my father, he's the man who raised me who my mother has been with for over 30 years now (I have no living grandparents; throughout the entirety of my life I only ever had one alive while I was, and she was my grandmother who died in 2018). Still, as a teenager and into my college years I had many family dinners and holiday gatherings at Dad's family homestead in Pennsylvania, and the woman was always wonderful to me -- though admittedly I never really had one on one time with her and we weren't like, buddy-buddy or anything. Would I classify her as a grandmother-like figure to me? Sort of, but not closely. I estimate that the last time I saw her would have been around 2003-2004 at the latest, as once all of the kids in the family (including myself and my "siblings") grew up, the holiday dinner gatherings where all of us were there together became less and less frequent -- all of the kids grew up, went off to college, got married, had kids of their own, etc -- and the house was very small for everyone to be crammed into it even in the 90s before any of us kids did that. But, I have some very fond memories of those family gatherings that she and her now-also-deceased husband, the patriarch of the family that my Dad is named after, presided over. 

She died the weekend before Thanksgiving, in her sleep, at home -- just the way she wanted to go. She was 95, and had been in rather poor health for the last several months. I talked to my Dad via phone shortly before her passing, as he'd just gone back up to WV/PA to help take care of her in her last days, knowing full well he'd likely have to return again within a few weeks -- he was correct in that. Because of the holiday, her funeral was done quickly before Thanksgiving with the gathered family there, and I believe my Dad has since returned to North Carolina. My mother stayed in North Carolina to take care of the animals, and told me they'd have their own Thanksgiving dinner once he returned. 

What I did not mention to any of them was that I'd already made out and stamped/addressed the family Christmas card and it did indeed get mailed out with the rest of them this year. However, it's addressed to the entire family, not the dead woman in question, so I'm going to assume that's mostly okay and not in poor taste. Dad has two sisters with kids, both of the sisters slightly younger than he (he's 73), and their kids are both older and younger than me, most of them now with their own families as well -- so I've always sent a card to "the [surname] family" as a blanket greeting for all of them. If I sent individual cards to everyone it would balloon my card budget like crazy. Most of them, again, haven't seen me in 20 years or more and we're not really what I'd call "in touch" on any sort of regular basis. Hell, a good chunk of them -- including the sons, daughters, wives, and husbands of the "kids" of the family that I was part of growing up in the 90s and 2000s there -- I've never met because they weren't in the picture 20 years ago.

As an aside, I really wish I had the budget every year (and the addresses) to send cards to all of my extended family and friends who are far, far away from me. Most of my father's side of the family never gets anything because I either don't have their addresses or I'd need to get 100 more cards to cover them. My oldest sister (actual sister) and her family get cards because I was able to successfully reconnect with her once she became an adult, got married, and had two children of her own, but I think that's it really. There's about 20-25 friends from college I'd send cards to as well, if only I knew where they were and if they were still alive, and probably a similar number from high school too. I know many people whose day would be immeasurably brightened by receiving a card from Daisy and myself, and I have no clue where they live, if they are still alive, or (sometimes) if they'd really remember me. That includes several of my middle school/high school teachers, multiple college professors, and many friends and colleagues from grad school. Plus, of course, former coworkers too from various jobs. I have a small handful of this year's cards left, but I don't want to put out a "hey, give me your address" post on Facebook to the public because I would inevitably get many more requests than I could possibly reasonably fulfill. 

I may do it anyway -- I have a box of cards, unopened and purchased on clearance from Walmart -- in the event that I ran out in previous years and would need spares.

Anyway, onward.