MISC STUFF

December 17, 2020

1. The dumbest thing I ever bought was a 2020 planner.
2. I was so bored I called Jake from State Farm just to talk to someone. He asked me what I was wearing.
3. 2019: Stay away from negative people. 2020: Stay away from positive people.
4. The world has turned upside down. Old folks are sneaking out of the house & their kids are yelling at them to stay indoors!
5. This morning I saw a neighbor talking to her dog. It was obvious she thought her dog understood her. I came into my house & told my cat. We laughed a lot.
6. Every few days try your jeans on just to make sure they fit. Pajamas will have you believe all is well in the kingdom.
7. Does anyone know if we can take showers yet or should we just keep washing our hands?
8. This virus has done what no woman has been able to do. Cancel sports, shut down all bars & keep men at home!
9. I never thought the comment, �I wouldn�t touch him/her with a 6-foot pole� would become a national policy, but here we are!
10. I need to practice social-distancing from the refrigerator.
11. I hope the weather is good tomorrow for my trip to the Backyard. I�m getting tired of the Living Room.
12. Never in a million years could I have imagined I would go up to a bank teller wearing a mask & ask for money.

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The mailman has been cookied.  Ned's a great person to have around.  I just plunked the cookies that were ultimately stolen into a plastic bag and hung them on the mail box.  Ned bought cellophane bags and a thank you card, wrapped the cookies up with a nice ribbon and waited until the mail man arrived and handed them to him. 

All things considered, having the first batch of cookies stolen was a good thing.  Ned made the gift much more special than I had done.

He also made packages of cookies to take to his sister-in-law's house.  She is giving food to people who need it, putting out food on a table once a week and Ned added our cookies to her collection, so that we won't eat all of the cookies ourselves.

He also suggests t hat since I have baking supplies left over, that I continue to make Christams cookies that we can share with his sister-in-law.

The spirit of Christmas is descending on this house.

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I had a sad job to do this afternoon, though.  As I mentioned in my Christmas letter, with no theater there has been no reviewer paycheck since March.  I am actually  quite lucky because when theater begins again, I will have my job at The Enteprise, but my colleagues, Patti and Jim were let go from the Sacramento newspaper and if there is any theater starting up, their current staff will handle reviews.

But for an indefinite period of time my meager salary does not exist and so my only income is from my Social Security check, which, after I paid the sponsorships for Compassion, Int'l., I had pretty much very little left over for anything.

In the summertime, I decided I would have to drop my sponsorships and wrote to Compassion to drop all but a couple of my sponsored kids.  They told me they had an arrangement where when people were in a situation like mine, they would take over the sponsorships for six months and you could decide at the end of that time whether you still wanted to drop the kids.

I noticed on my bank statement that the full payment had been billed to me at the start of December, so I had to think about all 12 of the kids that I've been sponsoring and decided that I would have to drop half of them.  I could afford to sponsor six, but not 12.

Compassion wrote back to confirm my dropping six of my sponsored kids and let me know how I could write a farewell letter to them.

So that's what I did this afternoon.  Two of the six I have been sponsoring since 2007 and the others for the last 2-3 years. 

The ones I kept for sponsorship I've sponsored longer.  The longest is Fred, from the Philippines who was a little kid when I took him on and is almost time to graduate from Compassion now.

The funny thing about Fred is that in his very first letter, he drew me a house with a tree.  He has been writing letters for nearly  20 years and he still draws a house with a tree! 

So anyway, I now have only 6 kids and a couple of  them will be graduating in the next year or two.  I won't add any new kids, unless I am reviewing shows again.