Moonset to the west at dawn
Thursday morning I was up at 5:30AM and got my post up. It was even colder than the day before and I had to feed the fire in the office every hour.
I had realized a few days ago I had not written my thank you notes for Christmas presents. I kept forgetting to put it on the list. My sister reminded me and I finally got it on the list. So Thursday morning I was going to do it.
But when I went into the drawer to find thank you note cards, I was again faced with the awful mess in the drawer. I’d been picking up card collections here and there for decades and just put them in the drawer. I was finally sick of the mess and decided to straighten it out so I could find what I wanted.
So I pulled everything out and started sorting. I sorted the cards by type (birthday, blank, anniversary, etc) and tried to sort the envelopes by size as I went. A lot of the envelopes had gotten foxing (brown spots) on them and had to be discarded. And a LOT of the cards didn’t have envelopes.
So I took the envelopes out to the dining room table as I needed more room for sorting. Once they were sorted by size, I brought the cards with no envelopes out and matched them up.
Next I got out the trusty Ziplock bags of various sizes and a marker, and put each type of thing in its own bag and labeled it. Once that was done, I started putting things back in the drawer.
I had used boxes to hold things before, but they took up room and didn’t prevent foxing. The Ziplocs would only take up as much room as what was in them, but they are slippery and don’t stack well. In the end I got it all back in neatly, until I take something out. Then the bags will slide around.
I have so many envelopes because I was making my own cards, either by hand or on the computer. And I am a packrat…
I finished right at noon and no thank you notes got written as my helper friend arrived.
On Tuesday night my son injured himself at work and on Wednesday announced he could not bring wood in. So Tom had brought some in on Wednesday night. I asked my helper friend if he could fill all the boxes so I could make it through the weekend. He even stacked some by the wood stove.
Once that was done, we watered all the house plants. The little fern in the ponytail appeared in the summer. There are ferns along the back wall of the office, outside. Spores must have blown in and all the way down the length of the office to the ponytail.
That big beautiful fern I saved from a frosty night back in the autumn hasn’t done so well. I got it a big humidity tray but it’s losing leaves. So I decided to repot it into a bigger pot with good soil. My helper friend helped me do it.
When I tried to get photos, someone must have a high opinion of himself and think he’s a celebrity, because I couldn’t get a photo of the fern without him photobombing. Even the right bottom has a tail tip in it. Sigh….
The last thing we did before he left was to set up the treadmill and clean it up, or rather he did, as I was getting pretty tired.
While he was doing that I was trying to sort out a lost UPS order and then made a shopping list for my helper to get on Friday.
I watched Hello Dolly! for my evening movie after getting the fires going well.
Friday is my birthday and my helper will be doing shopping for most of the time he’s to be here. If he gets back in time, I hope to have him carry Christmas boxes down from the second floor. I plan to start taking down the decorations and the tree over the weekend. There’s no exercise class on Monday, so I will have 3 days to make a good start. Other than that, I probably will binge watch the All Creatures Great and Small, the original BBC edition that my sister gave me.