antimony

The first thing about ornaments is that there is no disadvent in ornaments. Ornaments may be created but not destroyed. Man hands on ornaments to man; they deepen like a continental shelf. (Put up as little as you can, and don't buy any ornaments yourself.)

The second first thing is that you can't imagine how many my mom had, as of last year. However many boxes you're picturing it was more than that. Years upon decades of gifts from relatives (sometimes in threes, one to my mom and one to each of my sister and me), Girl Scout craft projects, other craft projects just because my mom likes craft projects. My mom's share of all of *her* mom's ornaments, who collected Santa Claus-themed stuff and sometimes had a whole separate little tree just of Santa Claus ornaments in addition to her main tree.

In theory, I thought it was great that she was ready to downsize. In practice what she meant was that she wanted to see my sister and I divide them up, except for her favorites, perhaps the right amount for a small coffee-table tree.

I had been dodging taking more of my ornaments for years, doing things like dutifully sorting out a box of them and then leaving it behind in the garage. But it was a category of my parents' Stuff that my mom was actually ready to do something about. So... Ornaments.

Gave away an old Razor scooter via the local buy-nothing group.

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, 2024 anthology edited by Sonia Sulaiman. I manage to read about one anthology or collection a year, despite an interest in short fiction and a fondness for themed anthologies. Like any anthology this was a mixed bag, some stories that worked for me, some that didn't land, some that were just incomprehensible to me (but might have worked better if I had the right set of cultural references). The selection leaned towards stories in which Being Palestinian was a major concern of the story (although there were a couple that were more like stories that happened to be written by a Palestinian) and many were strongly... "Palestine-ist", I guess you would say, the ideology that centers return to specific ancestral or sometimes personal homelands as the central cultural/spiritual project? Anyways, I thought "Down Under" by Jumaana Abdu and "The Center of the Universe" by Nadia Shammas (which I vaguely recall from when it was in Strange Horizons) were standouts, and "Cyrano de AI" by Karl El-Koura was making a decent stab at doing an "interpersonal use of LLMs" story before it (kind of ironically) backed off from saying anything really interesting.

Yesterday was all, uh, advent and no disadvent - Christmas shopping including tree but also groceries and school supplies and picture wire and replacing lost winter gear and three boxes of dish detergent from the only store around that still carries a dish detergent I don't hate (it's all pods, pods, pods now, and I guess I've become the dad from Strictly Ballroom, "it's all video, video, video". anyways.).

Today, however, we put up lights on the tree and in the living room and also got rid of all the spare bulbs and fuses and warnings/instructions for lights we don't have any more, and also threw out two broken strings of outdoor lights that were in the garage. And also we had two strings of lights we'd never used because the colors were creepy and unpleasant (a blue and a purple, which I had bought as colors of holiday lights I like in general, but these weren't good implementations) and it occurred to me that I could send them with Q to see if the LARP people had any use for them, as people who sometimes want creepy lighting effects on purpose, as I have seen in some event photos. He has been instructed to emphasize that I don't want them back.

I haven't been standing still, I've been lying in wait? Or something? Anyways, paid off a couple of days of prep work going through stuff today by taking a) ten more books to the library booksale, b) an outgrown kid's raincoat, hat, and a barely used hat/muffler/glove set to the library children's resale shop, and c) four bags of ripped bottom sheets and worn-out pants and such to textile recycling.

(I know, I know, visible mending, but my pants inevitably wear through in the seat and crotch and I just don't want visible mending there. I can however report that after years of indulgently buying new sheet sets when the bottom sheets got too ragged to use, we have made a new commitment to only buying individual bottom sheets for awhile to get more use out of all these perfectly fine tops. Also knit bottom sheets (like modal or cotton jersey) really do not hold up as well as woven, fyi. Also I'd been holding on to most of these bottom sheets for many years thinking they were big pieces of fabric I might want for a kid costume or craft situation, but the baby's class is touring the high school this morning (!) and the big one is thinking about college visits, so I think that whole phase of my life is winding down, and also in fact nobody has wanted any homemade costuming in a decade or so either.)

One of the things that sucked and continues to suck about the fire (yes I am still sorting through fire stuff, it's an enormous emotionally-fraught job and also the situation keeps evolving as the kids age and become more able to remember to wash their hands) was/is the loss of the opportunity to dispose of things as we would want them disposed of. We've thrown out hundreds of books because we didn't feel good donating them anywhere with smoke contamination, and while we were able to recover a lot of clothing and linens (for professional cleaning) we were paying by the pound and we threw out a lot as well (and some, like the packed-away kid's clothes in the eaves, I just didn't have time to do more with than frantically hunt through for some favorites). Which is all fine - safety always wins, and it's totally fair to optimize for time or money sometimes rather than minimizing waste - but one of the things I like about disadvent-type work is getting to dispose of stuff deliberately rather than waiting for some disaster (or, like, the decisions of others, if my own ownership was suddenly not in the picture) to force some sub-optimal path.

We went through a whole bunch of miscellaneous bits of hardware - plastic cups of random screws and baggies of leftover Ikea pieces - and ended up keeping almost all of it, but better organized and put away. Sometimes the disadventure is the work you do along the way and not so much the actual volume of stuff removed.

I wore the same make and model of sneaker for something like 10 or 15 years and would happily have kept buying another pair every 15-18 months indefinitely, but my mom alerted me in late 2023 that the newest edition of them had been completely redesigned in a bad way, so I panic-bought two more pairs to put off the dread day of reckoning when I had to find a Different Shoe. I deployed the first of them in 2024 and attempted to deploy the second this past summer, at which point I discovered they were also Different, in that instead of the normal tongue-and-collar situation they had a sort of elastic ankle tourniquet that wasn't going to work for me at all. (One walk was enough to confirm that.) If I had taken a better look at them when I had gotten them, I would have tried to return them, but alas, at the time I had merely glanced in the boxes to see that they were the colors I had picked, and more than a year and a half later I was somewhat past the 90-day window for returns, oops. So that was an expensive mistake, but today I took them to Goodwill, and I like to think that someone who might struggle with the cost of nice running shoes will be pleased to find this practically-unused pair, as long as they don't mind having their ankles tourniqueted. (And I did successfully make it through the ordeal of finding a new brand and model of shoes that work, which I will now hopefully keep buying every 15-18 months until they also decide they're tired of having me as a repeat customer.)

Also I actually took last night's books to the library as a book sale donation.

Murder By Memory, Olivia Waite, 2025 SF mystery novella. Fun, and a fast read, but I wanted to like this more than I actually did, alas. SPOILERS: ( Read more... )