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2800 lights, ~30 angel ornaments, and 9 hours later... 🎄 (also: Snoopy!) . . #Christmas #ChristmasTree #Holidays #Angels #Snoopy #LakeForestPark #WashingtonState

A post shared by Don (@donnunn) on Dec 1, 2019 at 3:59pm PST

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One of the (dis?)advantages of being color-blind is that I tend to dress simply, in solid colors and materials that are easy to match—basically the adult version of Garanimals. I also favor darker colors in general, and a lot of navy, green, and blue in particular.

Today, then, I am an unintentional 6-foot freshly inflicted contusion:

• Navy boxers
• Black socks, shoes
• Dark blue jeans, black belt
• Navy tee under a black Henley
• Navy hoodie under a black wool overcoat

This is the result of a few standard clothing items (I always wear black socks) mixed with random grabbing out of the dresser drawers and laundry basket.

Tomorrow I will probably happen to choose brown or green and so will switch to the Healing Bruise look on the holiday, because with the new year comes optimism, or something like that.

Flex found a sunbeam and a throw for a bit of relaxing.

Because the WA lottery commission loves to drive people CRAZY.

On the plus side: It was a $10 winner. So time well spent.

$65,000 to go.

Flex resting on the kitchen floor mat.

Normally I’d post a photo of this year’s Christmas tree with a count of the number of lights we installed (it was 2800 in recent years)—in fact by now that photo’s usually been posted for a few weeks. But this year we decided to observe the holiday in a pretty low-key manner.

No Christmas tree, for example—I’m sure our electric meter is pleased with that, no lights making it work overtime to track power consumption this month. We did lighter decorating with candles and some small lights, a lighted garland over the fireplace with our Christmas stockings. Also did some baking and we hosted a small group of family and friends at dinner on Christmas Eve, a tradition we started about 10 years ago to leave Christmas Day relaxing and uncluttered.

In that spirit, then:

Here’s to a warm and happy Christmas to you and yours, and the best wishes for the upcoming New Year and into the future.

The aftermath of the chicken pot pie recipe Julie Anne made tonight. HELP ME.

Nightly meds for Flex, my 10-year-old black cat who has hepatitis and diabetes. He’ll be on daily steroid and insulin doses for the rest of his life.

Steroid on the left: 0.5 mL budesonide in an allegedly chicken-flavored suspension. Flex adores chicken but doesn’t much care for the medicine. And I gotta say, the one time he pulled away as I was giving the dose and it splashed on my lip, chicken was not the flavor note I came away with. But of course I’m not the target audience.

On the right, the U-40 syringe holding Flex’s 1.5-unit dose of ProZinc insulin. (He gets that dose twice a day.) The injections don’t bother him unless I manage to goof on the initial stick—happily, it’s been a few weeks now since a stick made him cry out or twitch away.

Not why I put the cushions there, Flex, but excellent idea anyway.

A routine task, putting away laundry.

I pick up socks, turn to the dresser, put them away, turn back to the basket. Stack of tee shirts, turn to the dresser, put them away, turn back to the basket for the last pair of jeans it still holds:

Flex cannot pass up a chance of a hint of a possible tiny bit of food. We often find him perched in the kitchen sink this way.

It’s planting day at the manse.

HELLO YOU BEAUTIFUL WEEKEND

In no particular order.

• I don’t particularly like working from home.
• Flexie. The keyboard is not your resting place.
• Drinking one’s own canned beverages? Feh.
• Alamo!
• These kitchen-table chairs UTTERLY BLOW for anything more than about 25 continuous minutes of use.
• Seriously, Flex, go the hell away!
• Yay whatever music I want to play, at whatever volume.
• Remote access is simultaneously
• cool
• mind-boggling, even if you know at least the basics of the technology involved
• irritatingly slow
• Annie: The claws are not required for standing on my leg, ow ow ow ow ow
• This neighborhood is almost freakishly quiet on weekdays.
• The sofa, it calls to me....
• GODDAMNED CATS

When I couldn’t work from home, in the days when my job didn’t offer it (retail is hard to do except at the store) and before the technology was fully baked (hail the days of Citrix on Decker Lake Lane!), I wanted to work from home all the time.

Now I can work from home pretty much whenever I want and I avoid it. I like keeping my home and my workplace distinct and physically separate, too easy to lose work/life balance otherwise. And no cats at the office, which makes it orders of magnitude more productive. Or at least far less cat-hair–covered.

Is this what it means to gain perspective, or (gasp!) to become an adult?

I’m blessed to have a warm house and a beautiful Christmas tree surrounded by friends and family.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

I step away to refresh my coffee . . . .

In the middle of a lingering rainstorm, Yahoo’s weather data keep telling me it’s cloudy.

Reminds me of another rainy day back in June:

Yay more rain. Or as Yahoo! calls it, fair weather.

— Don Nunn (@donnunn) June 26, 2013

Forty years ago today at 09:23 MDT, Julie Anne joined the world with a yowl, and the world blinked at the sudden arrival of this brightest of lights in its midst.

Forty years on, the light’s brighter still.

Look, even the kitchen calendar is getting in on the act.

• Jewells in Seattle
• Facebook
• Twitter

Walked into the kitchen, found warm-beveragy goodness. And free apps!

And ready for its close-up.

The home-grown to-MAH-toes are out of frame to the left. Cuz, important photo subject.

Sirloins and veggies. Ahh, summer.

Julie Anne’s efforts to get a fire going in the chiminea met with... difficulty, shall we say:

The several sheets of newspaper on the lower right was a full New York Times when she started

So I stepped in (at, for the record, her suggestion) with the charcoal lighter fluid.

Kids, don’t try this at home!

A couple minutes later we still had the roarin’ fire we sought. Cuz, science!

No eyebrows singed in the making of this inferno

The phone, she is broke :-(

We joined friends for a matinee of The Producers in Issaquah. I was getting into the car on our way to the theatre when I bobbled the phone in my left hand and it clattered to the driveway for the fourth time I can remember, and this time it gave the unmistakable psht! sound of the glass giving up the fight.

Yay AppleCare+ — we’re waiting now at the Apple Store, University Village for warranty service. Should be all good in the next hour or so.

Twelve-year-old me really really really wanted this morning to watch Seattle City Light deal with the fallen tree a block down the road. The tree went down as a fast-moving storm blew through the neighborhood Friday evening, taking out or cable service and snapping a power pole in the process, and my 12-year-old self was all about gawking at the work to fix the problems because: Ooh! Big powerful machines!!!

Forty-year-old me knew that if I didn’t mow the damned lawn, it would overtake the house in a matter of hours. It had been three weeks since the last mowing, a combination of weekend plans and bad weather repeatedly delaying the next mow.

Somehow my brain arrived at a perfect compromise: Mow the front yard first!

So that’s what I did, and I managed to avoid chopping off any digits and scalping the turf even though I kept my eyes on the work down the street even more than I kept my eyes on the task immediately at hand.

And how was your Saturday?

So today, a couple of things:

On the drive home from work—which was itself unusual, I haven’t driven to work without a specific reason (like after-work plans or errands I need to run midday) in I don’t even know how long—I found myself belting out If That’s What It Takes. Which got me to thinking:

1. HOW IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE that I know all the words to this song.
2. Why didn’t I notice what I was singing until the last 30 seconds?

Thank God no one else could hear me in stop-and-go traffic with my windows rolled up, though this kinda shoots that all to hell.

Then for dinner tonight: Fish sticks.

I can’t remember exactly when I last had fish in stick form. I mean, I’ve had fish & chips fairly regularly over the last few years, but that fish is more wedge-shaped or (in many Seattle-area restaurants anyway) random–filet-shaped. There have been other fish entrées in restaurants fairly regularly over the last few years. And I grill fish on a regular basis year-round, mainly because I like to watch the planks burst into flame. But the stick form, they fell out of my life when I was, oh, maybe 12 or 13, and didn’t make another appearance until tonight.

And oh were they good. Crunchy little things, 2 by 1/2 by 1/4 inches. I remember them being much bigger when I was a kid, by which I mean about the same length and width but maybe twice as thick. Also soggier, no matter how long you baked them, but maybe the bigness was cuz I was smaller and now I’m an adult and most things from my childhood seem smaller, like the time I voted at my elementary school and I needed to use a restroom and I thought, good Lord, I’d have to kneel use these urinals.

Julie Anne made a strawberry-rhubarb pie with rhubarb from our own garden.

Isn’t it purty?