Hey, Boomer Girls!: Didn't We Just Do This?

Red and green! The holidays are here! Is anybody looking forward to it? Or let me put it this way: Is there anyone without grandchildren who's looking forward to it?

Sigh.

Gump's has been flogging its Christmas-ornaments-for-tourists since October, little Golden Gates Bridges and Coit Towers. Starbuck's is doing both pumpkin-spice and peppermint-chocolate drinks--which holiday are they exploiting, anyway? The catalogs are arriving, even the Shaker Workshops.

Oxymoron, somehow: what happened to simple-and-free?

I'm doing Thanksgiving dinner for my family this year. There's no way out, because my sister's birthday is on T-giving Day and asking her to wrestle with a clammy-cold turkey that morning is too much to ask. I think.

My friend Mabry says a woman has only so many dinners in her. My quota of holiday dinners was filled about 25 years ago. Also, my quota of Christmas shopping, although the internet makes it a lot easier.

Onward. Can't leap forward to January 1, so might as well make the best of it.

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Retail: I just bought a pair of clogs! Yes, I did, despite wearing size 41 (11 US size). They are surprisingly comfortable. I clomp, but there you are. I feel taller and more confident when I'm wearing them. Only with pants, though. With skirts, they make me look like a cartoon character, all feet.

On Tuesday, for the first time, I deliberately bought a pair of fat-jeans. My closet is full of semi-skinny jeans I've been talked into by salespeople. I can't breathe in them! Can't sit down! To hell with it. So I bought a pair a size up, not skinny (see photo, above). They're baggy, but so what? AND they were on sale.

I also bought a couple of pairs of my usual size because Not Your Daughter's Jeans has slyly figured out how to incorporate an invisible maternity panel at the tummy. Oh, yes! They must have, because these jeans are quite comfortable, extremely forgiving, even a bit skinny.

Style M10K43B4337, if you're interested.

It's getting to be the time of year when I can wear a scarf without triggering a hot flash. I took a look in my scarf drawer: total disaster. I can never find what I'm looking for; I rummage around frantically, and then give up because if I find one I want to wear, it's always a wrinkled mess that needs ironing.

So, I took a handful of 20%-off coupons to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought two of these:

$4.99 each

They are splendid! I ironed my scarves and looped them through.

There's so little left in the scarf drawer that I can actually find things:

Did you know that BB&B coupons are good indefinitely, even if there's an end date printed on them? Also, you can use one for a group of things, instead of one per item. Learned that yesterday.

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For months, ever since Jerry found out he'd have to vacate his campus office in Wellman Hall, we've worked a few hours each weekend packing up books and reprints to bring home. Or, better yet, to leave in a big sloppy stack outside his office door to be recycled. We owe the Recycle Gremlin a great big bottle of bourbon.

Here we were last weekend:

My role is to badger and direct. I read the Sunday New York Times until I see that he's bogged down and putting way too much stuff aside to be saved. Then I'm ruthless. No, no, and no. He pretty much goes along, mostly because his home study is already full.