Fun and Frolic With Long-Term Love

It sure does sound like an awful lot for those of us who don;t go anywhere at all. Holy smokes. I can't even imagine going inside a mall right now or eating in at a restaurant, masks or no masks. But maybe cases are lower where you are.
 
We have mostly been ordering in through Door Dash and the like, but sometimes we do eat out. Our restaurants are at 50% capacity.
 
I’m not really sure how to move forward here after a reader’s meltdown in the middle of my journal, but the mods were swift to remove the posts, so I appreciate that. I’m not interested in being vulnerable to a stranger’s abuse - especially in a place that is very clearly marked as a safe space by the site itself.

My last few posts prior to these personal attacks were full of joy and hopefulness and I’d like to return to that focus, as both of my relationships are currently happy. A mod is helping me clean things up, so you may see some more posts disappear. I’m sorry if it breaks some continuity, but it’s necessary.
 
Today is going to be crazy busy at the Box. I have a donor wanting to sponsor 20 MORE teens for Christmas, and they’re legit (I’ve gotten to know them after the last 3 years). I am so excited because I definitely have parents I had to turn down for sponsorship. It’s going to freeze up my inbox this morning, but it’s is so very amazing!

Right now my overflow room is completely full, so all 3 of my regular volunteers will be here to help with that, thank goodness. I’ve already heard from all of them, so I can count on that!

I am in the middle of soliciting donations for a chili giveaway and I think I just need $60 and a few more cans of diced tomatoes. Places here started limiting the amount of meat that can be purchased, so it looks like we will have to buy from Sam’s Club and divide it down into smaller amounts. That won’t be happening today! But I will have to post about it.

It’s almost 9:30 so that means I need to stop writing and instead get in the shower - we open at 11, and judging my all of the messages I’ve had this weekend, we will be swamped with visitors!
 
I have to ask- don't you worry about interacting with all these people, masks or not? The idea of having nonhousehold members in my home, or being indoors anywhere not my home right now... makes my skin crawl.
 
Yes! I guess limiting it to one day a week help makes it a little more okay in my mind. We go in and out when we need something at the store, and it’s not like a leisurely trip. We had pretty much stopped going out for dinner for a long swath of time, but had recently relaxed that for a bit. Now the governor has pushed us back to 50% capacity - we will probably be in again for meals til after the New Year at least. All of the organizing and cleaning and rearranging in my kitchen is coming at the right time!
 
Today is ughhhhh. I was very busy. I had a church come by and drop off some food boxes - about 20? - that hold fruit, veggies, dairy items (including a gallon of milk!), hot dogs and chicken taco meat. We went through them in less than 40 minutes, so I called the church and they brought 20 more. They were shocked they went so fast, but I wasn’t. Lol I was cleared out quickly both times. I also had a ton of people come and get diapers and winter coats today. Did a brisk business in toilet paper!

I had my 3 Musketeers (my regular Volunteers) all day long, so they handled the front of the house, sorting and organizing. I was on my laptop the entire time it seemed - I was gathering wish lists from teens and entering them into spreadsheets, and then matching them up with donors. I have a little over 50 that are being sponsored for Christmas, with 6 or so on the waiting list. I had gifts that had been dropped off to log, and parents to contact so those presents could get picked up.

It’s fun, but tiring! I’m glad I have tomorrow off. Though, it’ll be errands again - I am mailing out my niece’s birthday gifts, my mom’s Christmas presents, and paying my son’s electric bill. I don’t think other than the post office, I have to go inside anyplace. Oh! I have two Christmas trees to pick up for our giveaway. The donor is setting those outside her house though, so that will be a drive by.

I am getting bogged down with my kitchen organizing. I am working on the junk drawers - I actually emptied those out completely - as they are going to become spice drawers! I am agonizing over which type of glass jar to use, because I am going to make everything look the same with those. So I haven’t purchased any yet. I wanted to have those all done before the weekend but my indecision is screwing up the timeline I set for myself!
 
Woke up depressed today. I’m trying to find energy to shower. It’s Wednesday so at least I don’t have any heavy expectations with the Blessing Box. I can instead focus on family and my home. DarkKnight will be home for lunch today too, and that’s always a positive!

I bought my son’s Christmas gifts last night online, and so did DarkKnight. I think that’s my first this year. Yikes! I need to get a move on! I spoke to both of my partners about presents and the plan to is make snowman towers out of our gifts to our mutual friends and my kiddos. Basically, you wrap and stack the presents to look like a snowman. Google it, I guess, if that doesn’t make sense. There are 3 of us, so it should work out okay. Since I am not putting up the tree, at least it will look and travel well.

My next Stitch Fix says it is out for delivery. I am hoping it is amazing. I asked for outdoorsy stuff for when I go on my nature walks. I have to plan something for this week - so far I have stuck to my birthday resolution to get out into the world at least once a week. It’s supposed to snow today so it ain’t gonna be now. Lol I am on week 8.

I think I know what is bothering me emotionally today - it’s my Invisalign! I’m supposed to start a new gray tonight and I am oh so anxious about it. It’s just lowkey got me on edge.

Tonight DarkKnight will be home from practice and the 3 of us are supposed to work on the kitchen together. Some organizing, but mostly cleaning and getting things looking nice. We have started to see tiny roaches and I have the exterminator coming tomorrow. MisterMoonbeam brought them with him with the last storage unit trip (I saw one come out of a box right after we set it on the counter) and now they seem to have a colony under my dishwasher. FUCK THAT FOR REAL. DarkKnight put down some Borax on Monday but I am not fucking around. I want to pull out the dishwasher so the guy can spray the fuck out of underneath it. This is not going to be a problem!
 
Ugh. This Stitch Fix delivery was terrible - I sent everything back. They let me apply the $20 styling fee to an immediate replacement box for next week, so that was nice. I was really disappointed though, because I was having a lame ass day and I was hoping some new clothes would give me a boost. Oh well.

I completed all my errands with zero issues so that was good. When I went into the post office, no one was in line so even better! I managed to avoid all other humans the rest of the day - yay! Tomorrow our electrician is supposed to be here in the mid afternoon though. I put off his appointments a bunch until now. He said he will work on any project I’d like - so I think that means we will finally get the downstairs bathroom fan installed and a new outlet in the upstairs bathroom as well.

The guys and I spent the entire evening after dinner cleaning. I took care of all of the litter boxes (they weren’t bad) and the upstairs bathroom. I vacuumed the sun porch and cleared the kitchen table and most of the long counter in there. DarkKnight cleaned the bathroom in the basement, took care of dishes and washed the kitchen floor. MisterMoonbeam vacuumed his office and his bedroom, emptied the trash & recycling, and broke down moving boxes that were in his office. Team work! I really need to hire a new cleaning person to keep up with everything. We are in agreement that cleaning sucks. Lol
 
Electrician canceled yesterday, but I am currently waiting for the exterminator to arrive. I’m still in my pajamas, because DarkKnight got up late, which set off a chain reaction of everything being pushed back a bit in my morning schedule. I need to shower, but now it’s too late until after the exterminator leaves. Ugh.

I think today is going to be a good day though!
 
Exterminator came and went. He pulled out my stove and fridge, found nothing. Searched through the cabinets - he remarked on how well organized they were! - and found nothing. He said there seems to be a bunch of babies under the dishwasher, but that is it for the entire house. He said thankfully we caught it early, and in a week we won't see anything anymore. He says a mama must have come in with an egg sack. He didn't see any larger ones, but clearly there's at least one somewhere! He didn't charge me. Yay! They haven't charged me in ever so long, because I praise the company online and have sent a LOT of business their way. I promised to not let MisterMoonbeam's boxes get unpacked anywhere but outside. I am 100% sure these bugs came from his storage. I'm glad it seems to be a quick and easy fix.

I'm so very tired, but today has been successful, and that's always rewarding. I gave 20 families ingredients to make chili & cornbread at home (including 2 pounds of ground beef each) and I gave several others huge bags of dog food, as I needed to clear out the Blessing Box backstock of pet supplies to make room for storage of hats & scarves. I gave away breast pumps, a play kitchen and a kids' tea table and chair set, and many, many bags of food and toiletries. Diapers and adult diapers moved out. A couple of coats left here, but it was gorgeous out, so not many were thinking of needing those right now, I don't believe!

I'm hoping to take a walk today once MisterMoonbeam is off of work. We won't go anywhere too far because the night will fall fast. I think we will walk down to city park, do a lap around the lake and come back home. I'm excited to have the weekend off, but I don't have any plans with either of my guys. Maybe I can sleep in tomorrow! I did get my new spice bottles and drawer organizer in the mail yesterday, but I haven't had a chance to mess with them yet, so I guess that is on the list for the weekend.

My Invisalign has been hurting pretty bad lately. I had massive anxiety the last two nights with putting them back in before bed (after dinner) and I cried a bit. I did some breathing exercises and focused on my anchor, as I was taught in my hypnotherapy, and it did help. However, it's like I need to remember that I can combat the anxiety in that way - I get worked up and then I'm like, wait, I can stop this myself! And then I do. Still, when it aches and hurts, it's difficult to remember to focus.
 
Today has had me mostly on the couch, still in my pajamas. That’s been nice. However, I’ve been working on projects, so it’s not really a lazy day!

First off, my spice drawers are finally done! I love how they turned out, and I think the only person happier than me right now is DarkKnight. He does all of the cooking, so he was nervous when I said we had to edit the spices from 66 to 48, but after checking expiration dates and donating multiples, it ended up not being difficult at all.

This is the initial, jumbled mess I was working with - and these are the tallest cabinets I have, so when I started organizing it was clear the spices had to find a new home.

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I emptied out my two junk drawers - which amazingly I was able to find homes for every single item in those!

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These are the finished spice drawers:

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We also have a few spices right next to the stove - they’re the ones used most often.

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So all of this took some time today, but it was totally worth it. The next step is reorganizing the non-perishable food, but I believe that will wait. With Thanksgiving being this week, I think I am going to focus on all of our serving dishes and platters and both editing those and making sure they all make sense where they are being stored. (Spoiler alert - they don’t! Lol)

Today was also busy with me messaging parents about the Teen Christmas program, and we had a bunch of packages come in the mail for those kids, as well as presents for Senior Santa. I had two donors stop by to drop off gifts for our seniors, so I had to log those, get them into bins, and for items that weren’t purchased on their wish lists, add those to the Amazon lists. It seems like this would be a quick process, but there is so much back and forth between donors and me and the recipients, it lags. I love it though! These programs make such a difference in my community - I can’t imagine not having them.
 
That's a lot of spices!
They look very neat and organized now.

I too am venturing into my junk drawers (and looking deep into my kitchen cabinets), ahead of my approaching move.

I'd hoped to find some more interesting items than mismatched plastic containers and lids, but there you have it.

Definitely no magical mermaid water.
 
I have no idea where that sticker even came from, TBH. 😂 Here’s what I uncovered:

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Three Narcan kits were put near exits in the house, all of the batteries were put in a drawer under the TV in the living room. I’m going to buy a battery keeper from Amazon later this month! A lot of the items belonged downstairs, like the cat costumes, various wires and jewelry-making bits. The candles all went into a drawer that holds my wax melts, and the chopsticks & plastic ware got donated. I really was able to rehome everything to a better location, which felt very satisfying.
 
Yes... I also have:
chopsticks ✅ lightly used birthday candles ✅ Raid traps ✅ Large lighter ✅ Random pens and batteries ✅

I do not have:
Birdseed ❌Cat costume❌Mysterious green and white item resembling a plastic cat ❌
 
Ha! It is a plastic cat. A toy that is supposed to dispense discontinued string treats, but never worked right and now definitely doesn’t because you can’t buy the treats. Lol
 
I'm so glad that the junk drawer crosses the cultural divide lol, and the generational one (I have one, my mother had one, her mother had one...)
 
I never thought about it that way, but you’re right!

I’m still kind of sleepy at the moment, but I have my clothes in the bathroom and I should actually be showering right now. I have zero plans for today. Last night MisterMoonbeam agreed to buy dinner tonight for the two of us from a particular local restaurant, but after some reading online he discovered it’s closed today, so I am a little bummed. They have the best ever mac and cheese! DarkKnight will be at practice from 2 pm to 9 pm, so I am bummed out about that. It’s supposed to be a date night but obviously that won’t happen, which is why MisterMoonbeam and I were making plans instead. Now I don’t know what I will end up doing. I feel tired and lazy though, so probably nothing too strenuous. I am happy with staying in the house - the clothes I grabbed are a T-shirt and leggings and a long cardigan. I have a bra set out but meh.

I’m thinking about starting a marathon of Downton Abbey. I watched the first two seasons like 7 years ago and then stopped. I would like to rewatch it again and finish the series! My polycule just watched all of The Good Place together, and we are almost done with Season 2 of Star Trek Discovery. We watch The Mandalorian together every Friday night. I really wanna watch His Dark Materials, as season 2 just started, but I feel like I will wait to start that once we get up to date with Discovery. I hate having to wait each week for a new episode to drop, so giving it a few more weeks will improve my mood about it.

Honestly, with all of the household organization going on, I am most interested in decorating shows, but I haven’t found any new ones to watch! I’ve seen Tidying Up, and the new Home Edit show on Netflix got me motivated to start this latest wave of clearing things here at my house! Anyone have any recommendations? We have Netflix, Hulu, Brit Box, Amazon Prime, Disney+, CBS All Access, HBO, Vudu...I know there are more but I can’t remember. We don’t have cable.
 
Ha! I can't edit my spices down that far - we're about to reorg them, as I need to do a big reorder, I'll have to take a picture once it's done.
 
Ha! I can't edit my spices down that far - we're about to reorg them, as I need to do a big reorder, I'll have to take a picture once it's done.
Please do! DarkKnight & I were a little nervous that we wouldn't be able to get it down to 48, but it really didn't take a whole lot of juggling. We definitely didn't get rid of anything we will miss, and if we did, we'll just buy it again.

I am up early this morning, as someone messaged me about stopping by to drop off Christmas gifts for a senior. I don't officially open until 11, but with the holidays, if someone needs to deliver presents early or late, I am so down! I want to make it easy for the donors to contribute, not more difficult! I actually was awakened by the alarm since it doesn't normally go off until 9. So I was OUT when it woke me.

Oh! The sponsor just rang the doorbell, so the gifts are here! :)

I need to write out my to do list for today, but mostly I am a mix of tired and happy. Yesterday was honestly the LAZIEST day I have had in a long time. The only thing I did that was even remotely like work was log the 4 boxes of gifts that arrived from Amazon and sort them into totes. I watched the entire first season of Downton Abbey, and both DarkKnight and MisterMoonbeam watched the most of all of it with me! I didn't expect that, because I was expecting them to be off doing their own thing. But I guess they sat down and got hooked. lol Now I am faced with the conundrum of to whether wait for them to watch again with me, or continue on alone. We have two more episodes with Season 2 of Discovery, and that's what we watch together right now! Downton was supposed to be a filler marathon for ME. Gah! lol

My schedule this week is filling up. The Blessing Box is going to be open today and tomorrow, and then closed the rest of the week. For Thanksgiving, MisterMoonbeam and I are going to his parents. No one else is going - just us. They live in Virginia, in the county with the lowest positivity rate, and have been quarantined this entire time. We feel this is an acceptable risk. My son and BugGirl are coming to our house on Thanksgiving while we are gone, to visit with DarkKnight and to hold our annual Chinese food & board games get-together. BugGirl has been a part of our bubble, but we haven't seen my son but a handful of times since Covid started. Of course, he and BugGirl live together, so by extension, he's been a part of it, but we've tried to distance with all of my kids. At least, I think this is the plan. DarkKnight and I are going to talk about it. He might just pick up Chinese and deliver it to them at their house, and then play games remotely. That would be safer, but I am going to let him make the decision.

Our current plan is having our actual Thanksgiving on Saturday, as we always do. Our governor has put the cap on 10 people that don't live together, and we are below that! It will be my polycule (so 3), my son, BugGirl, and my youngest daughter and her boyfriend (they also live together).

What I like about this is that if my kids were to pass something on to us, MisterMoonbeam's parents would still be okay, since we are visiting them first. What I don't like is that with 3 kids, the risk is larger for my polycule. I don't wanna be a part of the Corona explosion! That said, since BugGirl is part of our regular bubble, with my son by extension, and my youngest also being in BugGirl's bubble up until recently (they work together - or they did until BugGirl got fired), I feel we *should* be okay. I think we are going to discuss plans more tonight. Because what I don't like about this is that it is still an awful lot of people. We may also do a drive-by Thanksgiving, and again just deliver the meal to their separate houses. It's what we did for Easter. I feel really sad about this, and it's a difficult thing to work out. On one hand, I really do think we will be fine, but for each person added, it's like exponentially increasing our risk. More discussion!

I do plan to go shopping on Black Friday, but 100% from my home! I've only had time to purchase a Christmas gift for my son, and that's it. This weekend I hope to knock it out of the park and get almost everything done. A friend is having a Black Friday shopping zoom party, so I will probably log on for that.
 
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