December 1st. The first Sunday of Advent. I don’t have an Advent calendar, or even a wreath with candles. I don’t know that they’re all that popular anymore. Even the calendar seemed to have fallen out of favor until recent years. 80’s Christmas was all about gaudy bulb lights, tinsel and tinsel garland, and those plastic bubbly looking Santas. And Jell-o molds. Sean Dietrich’s daily column was lamenting the ignorance of the population on Advent candles. Welll… guilty here, too.
I do observe the reason for the season, though. I have a nativity, front and center of the living room window. I never was a Santa fan. Even to this day, I prefer snowmen, reindeer, and penguins. I’m ok with gingerbread men. Nary a Santa or elf to be found here. My candles are red and crème.

Anyway. To each their own.

You will never believe what I got into. I had a variety of less taxing things I could have done today: go turn out cows at JA’s, go help Aunt Bren with her closet and decor, lay on the couch and read and bask in all the things I accomplished on this long weekend. Did I do any of those things? Nooooo.
I took it upon myself to clean my cabinets. “But Amy, you just cleaned your cabinets!” Well, sort of. But no, not clean out. Clean the fronts. I don’t want talk about how long its been since I commenced in this particular endeavor, but I knew they were needing it. The ones over the stove were looking particularly gummy.
But I have better things to do with my time! Or that’s what I tell myself. Things like playing with my dog (he won’t be here forever), reading (I won’t be here forever, and I’m not sure eternity has books), and drinking wine with Kay (neither one of us will be here forever!).
But today was cabinet cleaning day. I’ve procrastinated long enough.
I was sorta finished by 12:30. I say sorta because I also took some of the copper knobs off, thinking a good soak in baking soda and vinegar would cause the grossness to slide right off.
Well, not really. And I didn’t have it in me to scrub anymore. I felt like my sugar was getting low since I got too involved to eat breakfast. I had been thinking about fajitas for a few days, so I got them all fixed up. My chili powder was old, so I figured less potent, and I doubled up from the recipe. Oopsie. My eyelids are sweating and my nose is running.

The writing prompt from WordPress today is “what are your feelings about eating meat?” 🤣🤣🤣🤣

My feelings are love and hunger. Not sure what they’re looking for here. I try not to think about veal on the rare occasions that I consume it, and the only time I eat lamb is at the fair in the gyros. I wonder….what’s the age of sheep when they go to slaughter? Are they truly lambs? They might could use better marketing. (Ha, marketing). Anyway, any other time I’ve had it, it comes with a strong smell and it just puts me off. It’s pretty gamey. I love deer, but I sure don’t care to eat one. I don’t particularly care for seeing the bull wagons full of hogs headed to Swaggerty’s…or would that be a hog wagon? I had to call JA for a consultation. Naturally he laughed at me. It’s just called a pot. So a pot truck. This is getting confusing.

And of course I have a soft spot for cows, but like I always say, if I got hungry enough, I’d eat you. Vegetarian, I am not. I mean, I like vegetables very much. Just not cauliflower. And I’m not wild about asparagus or broccolini. Or hominy. But everything else is tasty. But it ain’t the star of the show, you know.

So, now that the house smells of oranges and I can’t think of anything else that’s bothering me enough to clean, I believe I’ll call it a day.

Love from Appalachia,

~Amy