Brain Games and Christmas Wishes

This post will publish on Christmas day, but will anyone read it then? I would guess not. Still, I have to write one because writing posts is one of those brain exercises I do that I'm afraid to stop doing because my geriatric brain might seize up like an old motor left out in the snow all winter. I also do the New York Time's Wordle, Quiddler and a game or two of Solitaire every morning. In the evenings it's online Mahjong---the real game where I play against three computer bots, not the matching tiles game where people think they are playing this ancient game, but they aren't. 

A surprising number of the residents here in my continuum care facility do Wordle, too. Once in awhile if the Wordle word-of-the-day is especially hard it will become a topic of conversation at the lunch table and every time it comes up it generally leads to everyone comparing their starting words. Everyone but me because I'm ashamed that I have three of them that I use and that almost always gives me enough correct letters that I can guess the word on the forth line---an unorthodox way to solve it but it works for me and my dyslexia. For example, recently the word of the day was 'flash' and after entering my starter words of 'pearl' then 'stick' followed by 'found' it was easy. Another example when the word was 'blade' I got 'pearl', 'stick' and 'found' using my three-word starter method.

Quiddler is more challenging but I'm able to solve it as often as I can't. And Solitaire? When I was growing up there would be times when my mom played Solitaire over and over again. She’d pull up a red leather footstool, top it with a TV tray, deal the cards and play the tricks, until I would go daffy watching her. I didn’t play the game myself until after my husband had his stroke. That’s when I bought a tiny deck of cards at a hospital gift shop and I carried it everywhere we went for the next 12 years. Spouses of disabled people spend a lot of time in waiting rooms. I became my mother only with a twist that, I thought, set me apart from the woman I didn’t understand growing up. I bought a book titled 101 Ways to Play Solitaire. Yes, I played the game that drove me daffy as a kid but I was learning 101 new ways to numb my brain, to turn it off so I didn’t have to have think about the serious issues going on in my life. True Confusion: I suspect 2025 will bring on a few sessions of binging on Solitaire and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they will be 45/47 related.

It's been a busy and rather pleasant holiday season for me despite what's going on in the national and world news. Like so many others, I've given myself permission to take a holiday break from worrying about what "President" Musk and "Vice-President" Trump are doing. There will be time enough to hop back on the Worry Bus in 2025. 

On Christmas day here at the CCC many of my neighbors will gather in their robes and PJs by the fireplace for coffee and a potluck breakfast at 8:00 AM. I don't get out of bed that early except for surgeries, but I'll be going to the White Elephant gift exchange later in the day. We don't get food service on Christmas day and no employees are on duty except for a security guard. Our concierge's desk will be manned by volunteer residents doing two hour shifts. I refuse to do one on principle---not that I've ever been asked. I should say I refuse to answer the call when they ask for volunteers. We pay a lot of money in fees to live here and they are spreading some of their employees too thin. On the other hand, with so many of us taking on self-appointed roles around here it has a homey feel, like we really are in charge of our own lives. At least the volunteer concierges will have a lot to do because a fair amount of people are having families coming over for gifts exchanges and home cooked dinners. 

There's about a dozen of us (out of 75) who will not be with families this year and our resident social committee has invited those of us who will be alone to bring our own lunch down to the (closed) cafe` where we can eat together. I won't be doing that. We spend plenty of time together already and I will not de-solve into a pity party if I spend dinner on Christmas eating alone.

Whether you read this post on Christmas day or a few days after, I hope you're having as nice of a holiday season as I am. The next time I'll see you it will be New Year's Day! Until then I'm sharing a message that was in the Hallmark Christmas cards I sent out this year. I LOVE the wording and the sentiment. ©

"Christmas keeps us believing in goodness,

 in kindness, in the wonderful dream of Peace.

May Christmas always have the power

 to remind us of the connection between us all

 and to renew our wish for a more peaceful world.

And this year, especially, may Christmas bring you joy."

 A Christmas tree from my youth, 1951.

I named that doll 'Jimmy' because a grandfather figure/neighbor

used to call me that. I recently purchased a briefcase for my mahjong stuff and it's the made of the same pink cabbage roses and tan fabric as the drapes in this photo. I loved it the minute I saw it but didn't make the connection until a few days later.

Memory Makers, Health Insurance and Swedish Death Cleanings

 

With winter comes hot cocoa with marshmallows and every since my youth my favorite way of making it is with whole chocolate milk with a touch of vanilla. Even though I occasionally make it from scratch with Hershey's cocoa or buy the kind that comes in individual envelopes like Swiss Miss, Land O Lakes or Frederik's, it's still my favorite way to enjoy hot chocolate. I learned to make it that way from a high school home economics teacher, the mother of my best friend growing up. I went to a baby shower recently where they made it that way in a coffee urn and they had a bar with choices for topping like whipped cream or marshmallows, sprinkles, candy canes or peppermint bark, caramel sauce, cinnamon sticks and liqueurs of all likes. If they served those things with the cocoa at the ski lodges of my twenties, I don’t remember it but I guess they do it now, at least here in Michigan.

I've been trying my darn-est to cut calories and increase my physical activities these past few weeks so I am now making my nightly hot chocolate in a six ounce cup with one marshmallow instead of in a ten ounce cup with two or three marshmallows. I've even tried drinking brewed tea in the evenings but I don’t like the stains on my teeth from drinking too much tea so it's not a go-to favorite of mine. My mom was avid tea drinker (and my oldest niece, too) and I keep a ceramic pot in my kitchen in her honor. I wish she'd lived long enough to experience Starbuck's summer teas. It always makes me feel luxurious when I can order one of their Iced Peach Green Tea Lemonades.

Growing up my parents weren’t rich be any stretch of the imagination but they were hard working and provided my brother and me with a stability neither one of them had in their childhoods. We had three meals a day, clothes aplenty, a nice middle-class neighborhood to live in, a summer cottage where we grew treasured memories. And we had love. Not the said-out-loud kind of love but my brother and I knew we had it even if as kids we didn't recognize what a blessing that was. The closest I ever came to poverty and poor people growing up was hearing the stories my folks told of their childhoods and seeing my mom slip tens and twenties to some of our less fortunate relatives.

Then I entered the work force I made enough money to support myself and to squirrel away a little for a rainy day but I didn’t have health insurance. Things were going good until I broke my foot and had to be on crutches for twelve weeks, I couldn’t do my job and I had a hard time paying my bills. The classic statement---before Obamacare came along---that we are all only a heartbeat away from a major financial crisis in our lives due to a medical emergency became real to me. My bank account and my sense of security recovered quickly after that summer but it was a lesson learned and that lesson gave me greater empathy later on in life after my husband’s stroke.

Don had good insurance so that part of the stress a major medical crisis brings to the Table of Life was not one of our problems. Downsizing was, though, and we had more than most people to dispose of…two houses, various trucks, three front end loaders, a street sweeper and a huge poll building full of commercial and personal stuff. It was the hardest period in my life. Downsizing was/is hard emotional work.

Yesterday my youngest niece asked me if I'd ever heard of the Swedish Death Cleaning and panic set in. We were communicating by text so I couldn’t decide at first if: A) she thought I should get rid of everything except the bare essentials of living out my days, B) she thought her husband should do one because they've been stressed all year over a re-occurring medical issue, or C) it was just an off-handed question because she'd just heard about the Swedish Death Cleanings at a Christmas party. She's had a house cleaning service most of her adult life so I'm pretty sure---now---she asked out of professional curiosity.

Still, I told her after Don's stroke I tried to get him to sell some stuff he wasn't ready to let go of, like his classic Corvette and hunting gear, and even though I knew he'd never recovery enough to get his old life back, I had to back off on selling certain Memory Makers because it was like I was taking his hope for a full recovery away. Sitting around in a house stripped of everything but the bare necessities (the goal of Swedish Death Cleanings) might sound altruistic when you're middle-aged and looking at seniors near the end of their lives but it sounds ghoulish when you're the senior. Remember when we had blogger friends who did the Swedish Death Cleaning? I felt ghoulish back then and it still does. If the idea comes from within, that's one thing but someone nagging another into the process is quite a different can of worms.

Still... I do have a small project in my den that will involve some downsizing/purging and project Make-my-Den-Function-Better is at the top of my New Year's Resolutions List.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

How I'm Surviving the Holidays

How did is get to be December already? And why have I started my annual pilgrimage to Diet and Exercise Mountain already, a full month before I'd traditionally do it?  I've got the answer to that second question. It's the fact that I've stress-eaten myself into gaining so many pounds this year that my clothes are getting uncomfortably tight and I refuse to buy a bigger size. I'm so serious about this that I'm not entering the gingerbread house building contest this year. Aside from the fact that I can't have all that candy around tempted me night after night as I'd add layer after layer of gum drops, gumballs, life savors, pretzels, cotton candy, twisted licorice, etc., etc. on a cookie house put together with Royal Icing. I also want to give some of the others residents at my CCC a chance to place in the winner's circle this year. Between shopping for just the right candy and building a gingerbread house, then decorating it, I'd be on a sugar high for over a month and once you're riding on that tiger's back it's hard to get off. And think of the money I'm saving. Gingerbread house decorating is expensive when you do things like buy a box ice cream cones because you want one to cover in spearmint leaf-shaped confectionery. Last year a bought an entire bag of something just to get a star shaped piece of candy for the top of the aforementioned Christmas tree. I need to go get on the scales. I think I gained a pound just writing this paragraph. 

Another reason why I'm not entering to contest is it's time consuming and I'm back to feeling like I'm running out of time in my old age to finish all the things that need doing and/or I want to do. Naturally, being a self-indulgent kind of person I usually end up doing the fun stuff before things like mattress turning, closet and filing cabinet purging, starting my income taxes and fine tuning my estate plans. And being a worry wart I've accumulate a lot of necessary distractions from what our reality will be after January 20th. My upstairs neighbor says she's just not going to worry about it. Easy for her to say, she's 93 and a prime candidate to be shipped off to the glue factory and she says there's nothing we can do to change things. I don't agree but that's not the post I'm writing today.

What projects are on my agenda right now? I'm working on finishing a landscape painting that I don't like but I need to cross it off the list so I can go on to a more inspiring painting, another customized paint-by-number of one of my niece's grandsons. She asked me to do it from one of her favorite photos. When I ordered the kit from the Asian import company they made it and sent it out the same day when others I've ordered from them took several weeks to product before putting it on a slow boat from China. I think they were trying to beat the coming tariff increases this time, same as me. After that is completed I want to try to repaint some of the tiles in my new 1930's Bakelite Mahjong set that my nice gifted me a couple of weeks ago. I've watched two videos on how to restore them and it doesn't look that hard to do. The only part you can't do over and over again until you get it right is putting the tiles in the oven to 'age' the ones that are lighter in color than the rest of the set. I won't be doing that on this set but I've love items made with Bakelite my entire adult life so I'm fascinated by the change-the-color-process. I might try the process on some orphan tiles I've accumulated in my hunt for one bams.

On Black Friday I took full advantage of the sales and also bid on a 1923 wooden Mahjong set. Won it! It's missing one tile that I think I can duplicate over at the wood shop and then dink around to get the aged paint color just right. But I won't let myself play around with that project until I've condensed and purged some stuff on a bookshelf in my den closet. That's my plan: for every project I do that's fun I'll alternate it with projects that need to be done, be it deep cleaning or downsizing here in the land of I won't live forever. Do I sound manic? I would be if all the plans in my head actually come to pass. They won't. But half a list accomplished is better than nothing and without a list that's what would happen.

I did manage to carry out a project for the common good here on the continuum care campus. Our mail room cabinet where we store out of seasonal decor, Mahjong sets and boxed puzzles was in desperate need of cleaning and organizing. It's always been a fight for space as the puzzle boxes seem to breed in the dark. So I took it upon myself to move the puzzles to our library---after getting permission from the woman who man's our library. She's self-appointed but was an actually librarian before retirement and she's done wonders with our library here, doubling it's size and rotating books between ours and the library in our assisted living building on campus and the county library's donation box. Book seems to breed in the dark around here, too. It felt good making space where it was needed and giving people better access to the puzzles.

I've also started gearing up for another project in the community. Starting in mid January I'm teaching three two hour classes in how to play Mahjong followed by a month of monitoring a newbie table of players during our regular club's playing time. I teach with a lot of hand-outs so I'm set up folders for the class attendees this time around. 

But the biggest thing I'm doing to get through the season is what I'm not doing. I skipped going go the choral concert, the brass band concern, the Christmas plays and live nativity, the bus tour of city lights and I won't be enjoying cookies-by-the-fireplace Christmas morning. And I didn't join the decorating committee who spent last week decking the halls with every wreath, garland, tree, ornaments, candle sticks, nativity sets, lights, reindeer and red bows on the planet. I am, however, going to the Christmas buffet, a sing-along, a cookie decorating party and the White Elephant Gift exchange. And I just returned from seeing a ballet company of girls 13 and under who performed to music from The Nutcracker. 

There truly is something for everyone to do around here and no pressure if you want to sit out any or all parts of the festivities. Well, I shouldn't say that. I've been taking heat for a week for not building a gingerbread house this year and I'd like to punch the woman who keeps nagging me about my decision. ©

After Thanksgiving Netflix Binging

I've been writing some dark and depressing stuff since the election so I'm turning over a new leaf and vowing that this post will make us all want to poop glitter and grab moon beams to wipe ourselves. Scratch that visual. I don't know where it came from. What I meant to say is I plan to write a throw-away post that doesn't make anyone think beyond sugar plums and candy canes and other stuff that should be occupying our minds this time a year and since Netflix holiday movies falls into that category I'm going to share some reviews of films I've been watching in my planned attack against the holiday blues taking up residence inside my head. But before getting to them I want to review of a limited Netflix series I saw this week called Man on the Inside. Not a holiday movie but appropriate in an old person's blog. 

It was recommended by a fellow blogger, Donna, over at My View From Here and it stars Ted Danson as a man who moves into an independent living facility like mine, only we don't have the happy hour craziness shown in the series or have guys who walk around in suits---not even our CEO wears one. Donna wrote that she was worried the series "might be full of offensive ageist jokes." But instead she found it was full of "realities that were funny, but never mean-spirited or stereotypical. People were portrayed as PEOPLE," she said "with all manner of gifts and gaffs, all just trying to find love, friendship, and connection. It's funny and poignant and always respectful." I admire Donna and love her blog but I was not as impressed as she was by this eight episode series. Okay, maybe I'm jaded but it bothered me that the director of the place was portrayed as a gossip whose character lacked professionalism. I get that the writers were using her for many of their laugh lines but the staff where I live don't tell tales out of school. 

Donna also commented about Ted's character trying to help a person on the edge of getting moved into a dementia wing and how she couldn't understand why the other resident's pulled away from the woman. To me, that was spot on to what happens. Since moving to my continuum care campus I've known four or five people who had to move on down the line and those who rally around someone dealing with dementia number about the same as those of us who pull away. And it's not always the same people who rally around or pull away in the months leading up to the downward spirals. I've done my share of avoiding getting deeper involved with needy people---people I didn't especially like before their mental decline became obvious. But I also go out of my way to help a few others here who are trying to hang on to reality. Whose to say why any of us pick and choose who to rally around (aka end up 'babysitting' when their spouse needs a trip to the store) and who pulls away (aka guards our time because we got burned out caring for loved ones when they crossed over to needing 24/7 supervision. I chalk it up the the Law of Universal Grace i.e. you give it when you can and you get it back when you most need it. According to the Artificial Intelligence "thing" that seems to be popping up in my searches lately 'giving grace' is defined as "to give grace to someone is showing kindness, understanding, and forgiveness, even when they may not deserve it. It is an act of compassion and mercy." Grace is big part of the culture at the continuum care facilitates in my limited experiences.

Now on to Christmas movies: As I've mentioned in an earlier post I've been watching a holiday movie every night for about ten days now. Along with a little Black Friday shopping/beat the tariffs shopping, the movies are part of a "Find my Christmas Spirit Project." I wrote and deleted four reviews of holiday movies that I thought were too outlandish and stupid, the kind I'd give two thumbs down on if Netflix let us. In the spirit of season I'm passing up bashing them and will---as the song says---accentual the positive instead.

One movie I like I also wondered if it's like Die Hard ---the movie people argue about every year---"Best Christmas movie ever!" says fans of this action/adventure films while others say it's a movie set on Christmas Eve and that's its only relationship to a holiday film. El Camino Christmas was released in 2017 but it's a new one for me. The premise of this movie is a young guy goes on "an impulsive journey to find the father he never knew, his search takes him to the remote desert town of El Camino, Nevada" where he gets trapped in a liquor store on Christmas Eve during an alleged robbery and a police stand off. He bonds with a few strangers in the store, one of which he eventually falls in love with, and another character (played by Tim Allen) turns out to be his father." The main characters all had some depth to them and while it had almost as many bullets flying as in Die Hard I'm adding it to my list of holiday movies I want to see again. Why? Because in addition to liking the characters Tim Allen has some lines referencing old Christmas movies that I think will be funnier the second time around.

The other holiday movie I liked this season was Feast of the Seven Fishes, released in 2019 but also new to me. My reasons for liking it might not appeal to others. It caught my attention because it follows a large Italian family living in a coal mining community as they prepare for a catholic tradition of only eating fish on Christmas Eve. My dad grew up in a coal mine town where his Italian, immigrant uncles and aunts also lived and the way the uncles in the movie interacted as they cooked together brought back a few ancient memories of my great uncles. My dad also had an anchovy dip recipe in his head that he'd try to make from time to time that came from Christmas Eve dinners of his youth. As I watched the movie I kept thinking this family could have been my extended family. The story, the characters and the subplot romance in the film felt totally authentic to me. And this year, especially, I need that in my entertainment.

Until Next Wednesday. ©