The First Week of 2025

I was somewhat hoping we would roll into 2025 in a calm and peaceful manner but of course, I wake up on New Year's Day to mass shootings in New York, Illinois, and Texas as well as the driver that drove into the crowds in New Orleans which killed 15 people followed by the exploding cybertruck here in Las Vegas.  Sheesh...looks like it will be another year of people losing their damn minds.  Lovely.

In other news, we haven't seen any of the cats in about five days.  Where do they go?  Why do they just disappear like that?  We miss them but looking back through my pictures of all of the feral cats we have fed in the past, there have been more than a dozen that hang around for a while then just disappear!

Our sunsets are still amazing (see above) and hubby and I spent the day cleaning out the kitchen.  Can you believe two people have this many pans?  We cut this pile down by almost half and will donate the pans--and other kitchen items we don't need--to the Goodwill (which is where nearly all of these items were purchased in the first place!).

Quick End of the Year Update

2024 has been a pretty crazy year; hopefully things calm down in 2025 (but I'm not holding my breath!).  These last couple of days of 2024 will be spent cleaning and organizing like I always do at the end of the year.  In cat news, the mom cat and remaining kittens all seem healthy and active which is good.  We decided not to go to a cousin's Christmas party which we usually attend (color me lazy this year; my social events calendar has gone from busy all the time to you have to drag me out of my house kicking and screaming...I guess menopause does that sometimes) which turned out to be a good thing as I heard everyone who attended the party got sick.  They don't think it was food poisoning but norovirus is spreading around the area like wildfire.  Bullet dodged I guess.  My new year's resolution will be to not make any new year's resolutions this year.  And the store displays went from Christmas to Valentine's Day practically overnight!  I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

  

Merry Christmas!

Just a quick post to wish you all a Merry Christmas!  I hope you and yours had a wonderful day!

Merry Christmas Eve!

I hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas Eve!  Hubby and I are enjoying a quiet day at home, watching movies, and I will probably bake cookies later this afternoon.  In sad new, the little kitten that was looking ill yesterday died this morning (hubby was traumatized by this turn of events).  This wasn't the kitten that all the others shunned, this was a happy, healthy kitten just a couple of days ago.

So I made an online report because H1N1 is going around and seems to have made the leap to mammals, but got no response, probably due to the holiday.  Poor, cute kitten.  I hope he wasn't poisoned or anything awful like that, but his swift demise was kind of shocking.

In happier news, I have been tracking Santa throughout the day, and it's been a bright and sunny day (not really Christmas-like but infinitely better than having to endure the storms hitting both the Pacific Northwest and New England this week!).

A couple of interesting links: a vocal range test and some very cool historic photos.

Merry Christmas Eve!

5 Kinds of Eeekkk Today

It's been an unusual and unsettling day today...

1. The little kitten in the picture appears to be ill today.  He barely moves from the bed hubby made them when usually, as soon as the kittens hear the slider open they bolt out of bed and run around to the back of the house.  Since these are feral, unvaccinated kittens, I told hubby to stay away from them.  There have been reported rabies in cats in nearby areas so we want to steer clear of these cats if they seem to be sick.
2. I was on a meeting with some of our state partners today and I saw something that said read.ai on the screen.  I asked what it was and the host didn't know so she turned it off.  Imagine my surprise when after the meeting I get a written report from the meeting composed by AI, which, besides summarizing everything we talked about prior to being turned off (some stuff out of context), it also rated us on our engagement/attention during the meeting as well as our sentiment/how we felt about the meeting's content.  That is creepy AF!  I sent the report back to the state people and asked them to never use this again in the meetings I attend.  Yikes!
3. I got hubby a new monitor because his had a crack in the screen.  When I was setting it up, I clicked on display options and found that the laptop I had hooked up to it--the laptop with the "broken" screen which I tried everything from updating the bios to taking the laptop apart to ensure the screen connection to the motherboard was fine--suddenly had a bright, brilliant screen!  Seems the brightness on the laptop screen had been turned down to zero so, duh, it looked like the screen didn't work.  Hubby always says "this is broken, I didn't even touch it" when apparently he must have leaned on the key that decreases the screen brightness!  Now that half-broken laptop is good as new.
4. Then my order for a new TV for one of our guest rooms was canceled for no reason.  I went back on the website and it was still available for order so after copious live chat with customer service, they agreed to reorder the TV and send it with free overnight shipping.  It's still kind of incredible that a 32", 4k, very thin and light TV can be had for only $80; I still remember when our family had one very heavy, very expensive TV that everyone shared and we needed to "wiggle the bunny ears" to tune in the channels!
5. Finally, I think one of my New Year's resolutions will be to severely limit my YouTube watching/news scrolling.  The algorithms used by these websites seems to disproportionately show as much "doom and gloom" stuff as possible and goes very light on the happy, uplifting topics.  Media manipulation is just awful these days!

 

The State of Retail

This is me every time I go into a retail store lately...

I remember the days when stores would stock at night so shoppers would come in the next day and find a nice, tidy store.  These days, every time I go into a store there are stocking carts everywhere...

And don't even get me started on the price of...everything...these days! 

I just had to add a couple more photos from Dollar Tree yesterday...

5 Things from This Week

In no particular order...

1. I was at the Dollar Tree yesterday and found these books in the photo above.  Usually the books I find there are titles I've never heard of by authors I've never heard of but these are some of my favorite authors!  For only $1.25 each, of course I scooped them up.  One of my goals for next year is less scrolling and more reading real books.
2. An FYI for people on the west coast who use the military's TriCare health insurance plan, there is a new contractor that you need to sign up with by the end of the year.  I wouldn't have even known about this except for the fact that I was looking at the base website for something else and saw the notice.  So I called and signed up and asked why I didn't receive any notification about this either by email or snail mail and the lady just said she didn't know why but many people have told her the same thing.  Really, customer service everywhere is awful these days!
3. Christmas is just around the corner.  We only send money to the kids and grandkids so gift giving has already been taken care of this year.  Hubby and I plan to have a very quiet, very small Christmas which sounds just perfect to me!
4. I don't understand the sociology of cats.  The mom cat and two of the kittens absolutely shun the third and smallest kitten.  They don't let him eat with them (he doesn't even try to approach the food until everyone else has eaten and left), and hubby made two piles of blankets on a rack for them and the littlest kitten is often left on one pile of blankets by himself while the others are in the other pile of blankets.  I would love to rescue him and take him inside but all of the kittens are scared to death of people.  :/
5. Saturday will be the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  I'm definitely looking forward to longer days of sunlight!