Whoa it's what year now?
No, really, I'm not sure. I haven't gotten a ton of sleep recently, and the minor barrage of explosives over our house followed by a week random plague didn't necessarily help!
I have no particularly profound thoughts about the year that's wrapping up, nor the year that's coming in its stead. Simply, it's gonna be wild in all the tones and timbres of such a sentiment! And it was wild. And is wild and forevermore shall remain such.But hang up hang up. I'm not ready to just run pell mell hurry scurry into the great beyond. One must look back before moving forward, or else one might not awkwardly trip on one's own metaphorical feet and go crashing metaphorical face first into the... ok the analogy got away from me.
Execute: segueway. NOW!
Before we performed our strange leap of arbitrary time travel, we feted! We decked halls and balls and holly jollies! And otherwise celebrated any holidays that came our way.
Christmas and Hannukah coincided this year. Eight nights and twelve days compressed down into one very ecstatic morning of gift diving and candy hunting. And more. Much, much more that I have been forbid to memorialize.
But before that, even, we had a visit from the further flung Grandma than typical, followed by a short break leading into Christmas Eve. All of which was thrilling, I assure you.
Christmas Eve mainly was characterized by me scurrying around a lot and everyone else not scurrying much at all. Andrew probably did some kind of crazy bike ride or other. But it did not involve scurrying, per se.
I am the household goddess of gifts, stockings, and other holiday merriment. So, there was much to attend to.
And somewhere in there, I added to my roster just for kicks to make...
Cookies! Allan has been a bit more interested in baking since our Thanksgiving pop tart experiment. We've made cinnamon rolls. We've intended to make Berry Verenika, but then realized we didn't have any wheat flour, so we've then made some gluten free brownies, and then some cookies with pancake mix. We are living it up here.
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| Allan insisted on cutting! |
On Christmas Eve-Eve, Allan was 100% on board with the concept of making Christmas cookies!!! At first, this was going to be a simple chocolate chip kind of deal, but later I found some old holiday cookie cutters and so of course we shifted gears to sugar cookies. With icing! We made the shift late morning on Christmas Eve.
Sounded all well and gleeful to me, until I realized that the new recipe required the dough to sit in the fridge for "2-3 hours". Which kind of meant we needed to get going pronto in order to have them even remotely ready for the evening. Allan was intently ensconced in some shiny thing on her phone and demurred when I asked if she'd like to start making cookies. She did volunteer, however, that the cookies had to be made before Christmas or else Christmas would essentially be ruined (which is already was due to it not snowing here, but that's another thing). She then granted that it would be ok if I started without her.
The recipe - as you might expect - called for room temperature butter. Which is much easier to accomplish if you have had any foresight and plenty of time to leave the butter out.
I had not. It was fairly emergent to start the recipe ASAP and the butter was all ice blocks and stone structures.
I know enough about baking to know that melted butter produces an entirely different texture of cookies and that cold butter is also its own thing. I know enough of melting butter to know that butter pretty much never just uniformly warms up. Alas, there wasn't much to do with this information. After a frantic internet search, I tried several of the "easy" ways to heat up butter "fast". In each incarnation, some portion of it melted and some remained solid and gelid.
I tried to split the difference and just knead the butter warm with some deep tissue action. This mostly resulted in half a stick of butter irrevocably stuck to my fingers until I gave up flailing and wiped it off with paper towels.
In the end, I went through probably two or three extra sticks of butter before getting my slice and microwave approach to functionality. And maybe forty-five minutes of Allan occasionally informing me that there wouldn't be any difficulties if she were doing it, but no she didn't really feel like helping at the moment, thanks.
All accomplished, the butter was still a bit on the cooler and less malleable side. Mixing was a bit of a thing, mostly involving the ingredients flying out around the kitchen counters and other more creatively gravity-defying locations.
At some point, I deftly managed to avoid knocking over the uncapped bottle of vanilla extract, only to capsize the same bottle a minute later in the new spot I had put it, while thinking "oh I need to put the cap on that."
The house smelled wonderful! You don't need candles or Febreze when you can just empty half a bottle of vanilla extract on your counters! That fragrance has staying power, trust me here.
The rest of the experience was actually fairly smooth, albeit quite messy. I have had my fill of flour on flesh for roughly the next decade. Especially, flour under my fingernails. Some minor sort of sensory nightmare there, as it gets compressed in a mildly torturous way.
Allan did join in after an Outschool class and a movie. She used the cookies cutters with éclat, let me know that we needed frosting, and regally returned to the couch for me to carry on.
The frosting was another last-minute improv, and I didn't have the light corn syrup required in most recipes, so I ended up making a straight buttercream cake frosting. Which is, I assure you, quite delicious, but implacably rich. Allan located some food coloring that would be acceptable, once we couldn't find the red, and we added the only sprinkles we had.
The cookies are darned good, but darned hard to eat more than one or two, being pretty much several sticks of butter and a few bags of sugar with a healthy deluge of vanilla. Most of them are now frozen in the freezer, because we also have several jelly donuts for Hannukah, the entire contents of a Hannukah basket, some bear claws I had originally bought for New Years before we inherited our glut of deliciousness, and an amount of candy that strains credibility. Oh, and now another set of chocolate chip cookies that I thought Allan and I were making, but actually I was making, and Allan was licking at the bowl after I made them...
Nobody may ever eat these, but at least they were made, and Christmas was permitted to continue in its admittedly ruined snowless state.
As I mentioned, Christmas was also Hannukah. The original plan was to put out ALL the gifts, then open one for Christmas and one for Hannukah per day. This was Allan's plan. I kid you not. And she's executed this in previous years. But this year, well, really can you just look at this pile and not be overcome with the need to dive in headfirst and leave no gift unbagged?
At any rate, we decked the halls. There was holly jolly whatnot all strewn about.
Then a little break until New Year's, which was notable for starting out with some lamentable lurgy or other that was definitely not COVID, but sure felt like it other than it not lasting for several weeks. I slept poorly on New Year's Eve, what with all the fireworks. Given that, it wasn't a surprise to wake up a bit achy and full of that shaky adrenaline one gets when the body is in crisis.
Then there was my pulse. My heart rate is fairly elastic, so while an ordinary day might see resting rates in the 60s and 70s, a low energy day might be closer to the 50s, and a stressful day might be more in the 70s and 80s. When I'm sick, though, it's more like the 80's and 90's. Which is rather uncomfortable after a while.
It came on somewhat gradually enough that I sent Andrew off on his ski adventure before really understanding that this was likely not just a case of sleepies. I was also running a low-grade fever, so I put a mask on and spent energy I didn't really have preparing the sick bay and making sure as much was in order as possible. By evening I had the occasional forays into moderate fever, the occasional bout of chills, and didn't quite realize until midday the next day that I hadn't eaten anything, because dang the indigestion and heartburn were intense.
Had this been COVID, I would expect I'd have flipped a positive the next day, gotten my paxlovid and spent the next three weeks or so mostly laying on a couch, bored and lonely and so definitely over that damned taste in my mouth. Since it wasn't, I just woke up feeling poorly rested, but with a slightly lower temperature, and a rapid-but-less-so heartbeat. After a negative test, I donned a mask and told Andrew we were fine for the day - he had reasons he needed to be out and about. And we really were. Allan was still enjoying break. I would trudge up to check on her every little while, then go back down and take an ordinarily uncharacteristic nap.
The mask started to drive me up the wall (my poor nose), but I also remembered I hadn't eaten in a long time and made minor culinary incursions downstairs without serious ill-effect.
The day after that, I took a deep nap in the morning, and woke up feeling... well, not "better" in a comprehensive way, but notably better than before. My heartrate finally broke 70, and my body generally started feeling normal again. Normal isn't well, because my MCAS is usually setting off some storm or other of mediators, but closer to baseline. I still was waking up broiling and full of acid every night, and a had a swollen gland in my right neck that made it uncomfortable to turn my neck, but it's all relative.
The day after that. I took another COVID test in the afternoon and was not surprised to find it has remained negative, as I was feeling mostly better other than the nonstop week of crappy sleep (the room downstairs has a comfortable, but very warm bed, and the noise of the rest of the house seems to concentrate there in a cacophonic assault just around REM time). I moved back upstairs and actually got some semblance of sleep, which can't have hurt. We were calling me "better" from thereout, even though my legs still feel like jelly every time I try to climb the stairs.
The day after that and the day after that, I got really itchy and my eyes got super irritated, something I would've expected before the lurgy hit, since I'd spent Monday getting my mammary glands smooshed and snapped, and there was a lot of contact with allergenic substances along the way. My official story is that my T Cells were too busy with whatever awful bug I'd caught to throw their usual dermatological hissy fit. But they never actually forget!
At any rate, I'm still beat, but better. A little disconcerted that I managed to catch whatever this was merely from going to a medical office where I and everyone around me were thoroughly masked. But such is life. I'm also impressed it hit so hard within less than two days. And further surprised that nobody else in the household caught it, even after accounting for the precautionary steps I took to avoid that.
Which is to say, this year is stating out with a raised eyebrow or two!
Started is what matters. We're somewhat back to schedule. Even added an in person class with a local homeschool association. The community center where it was held was pure chaos, but I hear the class was "fun." And today we have a variety of appointments and long-cherished outschool classes. More to come as the weeks unfold.
I suppose it could be a reaction to the volatility of the news cycle or simply that social media loses its sheen when I'm not particularly obsessed with a given television show, but I'm currently going through my "book phase" of the year. It seems in my adult life, I often go several weeks with very little interest in reading anything outside of what Allan and I are already reading together. Then all of a sudden, all I want to do is read and I read a book every day or two for a while. I'm somewhat in the midst of one of those, which wasn't a bad thing for a sick-week. Perhaps I'll follow up with a lil summary once the phase has passed, but I've been enjoying just randomly flipping through Kindle Unlimited's recommendations and grabbing only things I've never heard of before. Apparently I'm in a bit of a phase about Southeast Asian dystopian fantasy, but that bridges a pretty wide range of storytelling!
I hope the New Year is not too interesting and holds promise for all of you!
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