END-OF-YEAR

We were careful this year. The condo is a new expense and the beach house needs a new roof.

Our goals were modest. We would walk, pay our bills, do our best to avoid covid, and stay in touch with family and friends. We covered over a thousand miles, mostly on the beach. I ran nearly a quarter of those miles in 2022, a 10k in October, and have two fiction stories due for publication. Together we visited family, took the train to Seattle, and drove back and forth most weeks between Portland and the coast. Gary spent a lot of time in the garden and taking care of his wife, who is lucky to know him, not to mention to love him.

Sandstone at the headland north of our beach home.

We were mostly frugal.

Still, we made two replacement-appliance purchases for ourselves for Christmas: a microwave and a TV. This felt extravagant. The microwave still worked, after all, at least it turned on—though sometimes it did not heat things and other times it would not turn off. If Gary hit it just right, he could shut it down. We kept it unplugged. The television in the condo worked but had its own quirks. Hulu couldn’t talk to the television, which failed to update software for other channels, and the last minutes of most Netflix shows played without sound. This was… inconvenient but we lasted a year, longer for the TV. One afternoon recently we got a little crazy and ordered.

The new micro is a bit larger, heats faster, and turns off promptly without a thump on the control panel. An abundance of caution leads us to at least turn off the surge suppressor it’s plugged into.

The new TV is even better, the next size up from what we had, and miraculously, it turns right on. That might not sound like much, but the old one required a warm-up period with static and then considerable clicking about to get to an actual program. We thought some of the issues we’d been having were due to our internet connection. But it seems to have been mostly the old TV, which is going to the beach to be used with the DVD player. The new picture is so much better than the old one, it’s a bit disconcerting, as if people were in the room with us on the screen.

Among other good news, I sold several handwoven shawls this year without a great deal of effort, but I failed to revise the novel I drafted in 2021. I stitched a lot of leaves sent out over the holidays. (A couple people thought they were feathers, even though the note they came with called the object a “leaf.”) I did not sew new cushion covers, which I’d meant to do. Not everything was done.

Leaves stitched from scraps of batik fabric leftover from quilting, and from scraps of scraps.

We stayed in the Nye Beach Hotel for two nights for our 48th anniversary. I baked three Dundee cakes and made a steamer of tamales for Christmas. Earlier, I canned about one hundred jars of jams, marmalades, and chutneys, fermented rhubarb cordial and limoncello, baked birthday cakes and fried latkes, and knit most of a pair of socks. By tomorrow night, I will be able to say I read 42 books this year and stayed within 4 pounds of my goal weight, though that goal may change again. We managed to finish furnishing our condo while actually saving money for the new roof, but we are not optimistic about the condo repipe. Almost everyone we know has had covid, but we are fully boosted, regularly tested, and we have not been sick. I cut my hair recently, shorter than it’s been in over 55 years. We voted by mail because that’s the way it’s done in Oregon. The straw goat remains unburned in Sweden, and I have a genuine passion for Korean fantasy from Studio Dragon.

The cast of Alchemy of Souls… my favorite series just this moment. There are just a few episodes of Part 2 left this weekend and next—I suspect it was meant to have only the first episodes but was so overwhelmingly popular, the producers had to extend the story. But that is just me extrapolating. I will be sorry when it ends.