. . . But today we shall eat ice cream.

Every few years, I fall down a stupid rabbit hole of googling people I grew up with. I have refused to join Facebook for the very reason of not wanting to be in contact with most of them, so I can’t really give you a good reason for why I do it.

I grew up in a large, mostly white town that skewed conservative at the time. It’s purportedly gotten more liberal since I moved away, but its current Republican mayor was first elected when I was 10.

While Karen and I have stayed friends since our high school days, I mostly let everyone else go pretty early on. We (just) predated the internet and it was easy to drift apart as people left for college. As time has gone on, I’ve kept the distance intentionally, although Karen sometimes shares updates about people we both knew. There was just too much rampant conservatism and casual racism from what I remembered (and what Karen shared about her Facebook interactions) to want to welcome that back into my life.

So, why then do I torture myself by looking up the people I grew up with?

I had a drink with a girl I’d grown up with back before our tenth high school reunion. She had come back to attend; I lived nearby but wasn’t going. I asked her why she wanted to bother and she said that she really hoped that some of the people we’d grown up with had escaped.

I’m a little more forgiving now in middle age than I was in my 20s, but I suppose it comes down to exactly that. I check up on them because in the end I want them to have lived happy lives and to have had horizons that expanded beyond the narrow experience we grew up with.

And just often enough, I discover that one of them has.

The Christmas tree is out, but the ornaments and decorations aren’t yet put away.

We won’t run out of underwear or masks this week, but I have no clean handknits (including my favorite hat).

I put my knitting away for the night with the bind-off a third done.

My book is further along, but not yet ready to return to the library.

And, my cookies didn’t all get made. But that means there will be warm cookies tomorrow afternoon or evening, and no one will be mad about that!

It’s a plain, old two-day weekend, so I should probably scale back my expectations for what I’m going to get done. We did start the weekend by baking chocolate chip cookies and going to a friend’s house for supper and a movie. I know, I know. I haven’t been in someone else’s house (or had someone in mine) since visiting my parents for my birthday a year ago. We’d already postponed this from last month when the hospitals were overwhelmed. We wore masks, we stayed distant, and mostly we’re all careful (although both Rudi and Shawn are working some in person). But it was absolutely a risk we could have avoided, and only time will tell if it was a mistake or not. (Clearly, I’m feeling a little guilty.)

In addition to baking the rest of the cookies (I made two dozen to take with us), I’m hoping to spend some time outside, send off some mail, turn the heel of my sock, do some laundry, finish a book, and, alas, take down the Christmas tree. It’s time.

What do you have on tap for the weekend?

The sun is setting at 5:15 this week, which means there’s ambient light until nearly six. I haven’t done a great job recently at getting outside the apartment during daylight hours, so I’m appreciative that the sun is now working in my favor.

I’m wondering about the feasibility of packing up my work laptop when I’ve got 3 hours between video meetings (which, to be fair, is only like 3 times a week) and taking it up to the park to work at a picnic table on my cell phone hotspot. I did it some in the few weeks between being sent home and the mask mandate, but after that it was just too much work. It always feels like it would be too disruptive to my day to make the switch, but I wonder if being out in the sunshine would make me more productive.

I suppose it can’t hurt to try.

Whoops! I logged on to pay a bill and discovered I hadn’t posted this last night:

This will be another weekend of self-care. I’d love to see some studies on the psychological effects of constant helicopter surveillance, but when I try to look it up, all I find is how overbearing parents affect their kids. Clearly not enough researchers live in urban areas during periods of unrest. My friend Sarah and I began the weekend by doing an Inaugural ice cream tasting at a local scoop shop this afternoon, so I’m hopeful that sets the tone for what that will look like:

• Watching the latest Jumanji movie, the new episode of All Creatures Great and Small (Have you started watching yet? It’s quite good.), and something streamable (Maybe Bridgerton or The Prom). I watched a mediocre Christmas movie last night, and may continue the trend after Rudi goes to bed (ski coaches go to sleep very early during the season).
• Enjoy our Christmas tree. It’s still going strong this year, and my goal is to keep it up through Wednesday, at the very least. (You do you. I’m seeing a lot of trees still in windows this year here in D.C.)
• Spend time outside. It rained here tonight, just after I got home from the cross-town journey back from the ice cream parlor on my bike (thanks, weather gods). The forecast suggests most of the weekend will be dry and some might be sunny.
• Bake. I know, I say this every weekend and then fail to do it. But I have a package that needs to go out next week and some cookies are part of it, so… Plus, I am picking up a new sourdough starter at the farmers market on Sunday, so that means I need to start planning for discard baking again. (The height-of-summer fridge death killed off my 2020 starter and I was too disheartened to get one going again this fall. But this week is one for new beginnings.)
• Buy the makings for gardener’s pie (our vegetarian version of cottage/shepherd’s pie) at the farmers market. Rudi and I were talking about the need for comfort food this week, and that’s one of ours that we haven’t had yet this winter.
• Order out. One of the things that Rudi and I talked about after I did an end-of-year reckoning of my bank account was that as long as we aren’t frivolous with our other spending, we can probably to support our local restaurants once a week. We’ve already lost several favorites and I’d like to help stem the tide.
• Finish a knitting project. I have several lingering on the needles, and I’d love to move them from potential clothing to my wardrobe.
• Wrap up my overdue reading. The library is closed until after the inauguration for the safety of their employees, so this can extend into the week. But I’d like to start the Biden administration without feeling guilty about books the library wants back. (Plus, if I return them before Wednesday, I can wave to Kamala and Doug, who currently live in the condos adjacent to the library (but who will move to the VP’s mansion at the Naval Observatory after being sworn in.)
• MLK Day has begun to shift toward a day of service projects. A pandemic isn’t a great time to join a group event, but I can probably find a park that needs its litter picked up at a bare minimum.
• Clear off the coffee table. My living room in general needs several days of work, but this feels like a manageable place to start.

How about you? What do you have planned for the long weekend?