Paint By Numbers

Maddie was trying the paint-by-numbers kit she got from the family yesterday, and she was actually spending some time on that.  She'd be there with her headphones on, watching some of her favorite online personalities and videos while painting away - she didn't get done, but she got a good ways into it:

It was another quiet day of our staycation.  We spent a lot of time in the basement, cleaning things up and getting things organized and ready for the de-Santafication.  It's always a sad occasion to start bringing the stuff down, and we were glad the neighbors dropped by with some extra chocolates, not only for the chocolates but the company and the shared belief that it's okay to keep the trees up just a little longer.

I had to give an amaryllis update, which you can see above.  It's just about to open up, and might do so on New Year's Day perhaps.  We got it a little later in the season, but at least we got one.  I remember the struggle to find one, and to locate it at Sam's Club like that was pretty great, and also in that unique presentation.  Very cool.  The flower's stem has been rising, rising, and towering at the kitchen table, and now appears ready to bloom.

Hanukkah, Day Six!  This part is funny every night, where I read a passage as Maddie lights the Shamash candle.  But as I'm reading, Maddie stands there for a moment struggling to get the lighter to light at all.  Which is funny because the passage is solemn and reverent, and the whole time there's Maddie clicking and clicking on that lighter and struggling to get the thing lit until we all crack up.  Every.  Single.  Time.  It's hilarious.  But we get the candle lit, and Mom has the candles all in place so that we read the scripture from Deuteronomy as we light each of the daily candles in the correct order.  And then, when lit, we read from the book we picked up at Christmas, the eight-day devotional to go with the lighting of the candles.

I've been still walking on the treadmill this season, and doing so daily - but instead of using the programmed videos on the machine, I've been watching all sorts of Christmas movies and specials, many of which are on VHS.  We have this television downstairs, one with a VHS player in it, and it's been so great to watch some of these videos on VHS.  Many of them you can't find on any other format yet, which is wild.  Anyway, today I was continuing to watch something not related to Christmas at all, the first Star Trek movie, "Star Trek:  The Motion Picture."  This is a loooooong movie.  So much nostalgia though.  I can't believe I remember some of the dialogue from this one.  But for some reason, the thing I remember most are the happy meals from McDonald's that promoted the movie.  My goodness, those were some valuable happy meals at the time.  I don't remember the toys inside, but I remember a board game and the artwork on the happy meals.  I would love to see some of those happy meal boxes again.  From time to time, there have been some really great happy meal collections.  I remember one set where happy meal containers were plastic and shaped like different boats.  I specifically remember my sister and I floating the boats down the river at Pigeon Forge.  Nowadays those boats are pretty pricy if you want to find them online.  I think the ultimate happy meal treasure for me was much later when I was a lot older - it was Inspector Gadget.  Each week there's be a different piece of Inspector Gadget, perhaps a let or a head or the torso or just the hat.  Each piece would do something different, and then of course each piece would connect to the other so that by the end of the collecting, you'd have this larger scale Inspector Gadget.  Yes, I still have that larger Inspector Gadget, folks.  I remember my sister and I going to all these different McDonald's locations over the weeks, making sure we got each one. 

Not related to McDonald's, a similar fast-food collection craze came for me in the 80's, when Hardee's was giving out California Raisin figures.  I have all ten of those still!

Anyway, that took me down memory lane.  That's where I was for a good part of the day anyway.  We were organizing old tapes in the basement, and old audio tapes too.  I have some of those leftover, though not many.  The treadmill is a perfect place to catch all these old VHS movies though.  I found a Garrison Keillor special from 1989, and a VHS tape of Praise in Motion's "The Gift" from 2002.  There are old Disney movies that I've never seen, like "The Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon."  I don't know if that was ever on DVD, or where you can see that anywhere.  But I found a copy on VHS, and during the playoffs I thought I'd check it out while on the treadmill.  

Mom and I were in the basement a good bit today.  And Maddie was helping out too, as she will be doing during the whole DeSantafication process.  We were bringing tubs up and putting them next to where some of the decorations are set up, making it easy to just pack things up and carry them down.  Also, I'm moving all my binders back to the church, the ones with the old messages and themes.  It might be a while before they all get to the church and set up again, but the office is going through quite a bit of change too - we'll be doing a lot of reorganizing in 2025.

We played some games tonight, including LEGO Marvel.  I opened up the character Fing Fang Foom, which is always fun to say.  And it's a crazy character too, with the ability to turn into this ginormous LEGO dragon.  We were spending time doing little missions here or there, and that was fun.

The movie of the night was "Jumanji:  The Next Level."  It's been a while since we've seen this one, and honestly didn't remember some of the details of it, but we all enjoyed it quite a bit.  I think this means we're going back to the original Jumanji tomorrow night, and maybe even the board game, right?

We closed out the penultimate day of 2024 with reading from "A Christmas Carol" first, which had us at Ebenezer Scrooge's grave, and a vow to honor Christmas.  Tomorrow night we'll wrap up that story.  And of course the other story we're reading still is "Hogfather," which I suspect we'll be still doing somewhere into the first week of January.  More than likely we'll continue in the Discworld after this with another book from that realm - we'll have to decide when we get to that point which book to do next.

Anyway, we said our prayers after that.  And then it was time for some rest.  Only one more day left of 2024!