Coming To Your Christmas

JWise Photo of the Day

Caleb and Jessica Aldridge, Caroline Wise and John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

If we were to celebrate this annual American ritual of Christmas, this would be the image that would have accompanied our Christmas cards. On the left are Caleb and Jessica Aldridge, our son-in-law and daughter/stepdaughter, who were returning to California from a two-week cross-country road trip that took them over to Florida. Due to circumstances related to Caleb’s naval service and being stationed abroad combined with the natural forces of life that take people here and there, we’d not seen him in about ten years, and while they were only able to spend a few hours with us, it was a great reunion, and we hope it won’t require another ten years before the four of us get together again. The funny thing is, this photo almost didn’t happen as we were all so happy to see each other and talk about their big adventure that I forgot to take a photo of the happy, possibly weird, and maybe a bit dysfunctional family. Caroline and I ran back downstairs after them to pull them from their car as they were heading out and insisted on showing the world our happiness.

The Importance of Grammar

JWise Thoughts

Editing with Grammarly

Oh my. Over the past weeks, I’ve run well over a thousand blog posts through Grammarly and discovered literally thousands of blunders, omissions, and written faux pas. I want to be embarrassed by these mistakes, but it’s no easy feat ensuring that millions of words have the proper punctuation, that sentences don’t take turns that make no sense, or that the context of what was shared is not lost to the passage of time.

There are so many things I could blame, such as my editor, who also happens to be my wife [-_- Caroline], but I could also offer up my lack of formal education and having dropped out of high school. I could blame the drugs consumed long ago, but those are the least likely contributors. Expediency to get posts done or inexperience in writing when I started this blog might find an attribution of cause. Maybe I should blame artificial intelligence bots that have hacked my site in an effort to gaslight me and demonstrate to the wider world my stupidity, but that likelihood is absurd.

Something I’ve gained from reviewing so many posts, and I’m not done yet, is that I’ve stored an incredible wealth of memories on the internet that Caroline and I have ready access to that take us into the nooks and crannies of our minds that would otherwise be inaccessible, so in this circumstance, these thousands of posts have taken on treasure trove status…

…except when they are not. Going over so many posts, I also encounter my oldest missives, which hardly register as anything more than guttural utterances. In 2005, when I embarked on this blogging adventure, not only was my grammar atrocious, but so was the near-total lack of meaningful content as I forced myself to grow accustomed to sharing my thoughts on a page but could only manage brevity that verged on nothingness. So, had I named this post appropriately, the title would have been too long with The Importance of Grammar and Meaningful Musings.

On the other hand, posts that are between 3,000 and 11,829 words are a bit of an ordeal to correct as they require a good amount of time. It’s inevitable that by the time I get to the end of the document, one to three errors remain, but my eyes struggle to detect the tiny red underline highlighting a misplaced comma near the margin, thus forcing me to scrub through the 127 paragraphs trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

First Gingerbread House

JWise Photo of the Day

Caroline Wise decorated her first gingerbread house

Go ahead, Caroline, overthink things, build up a bunch of stress, and convince yourself that this was a bad decision, but then finally accept that you committed to something and get on with it. And so it was with the first ever gingerbread house my wife decorated. What compelled her to do such a thing? A competition at work to celebrate Christmas cheer. Aside from minor engineering issues surrounding the effectiveness of using icing to glue the walls together, she ultimately had fun and was proud of her creation. And although she didn’t win, I believe she looks forward to potentially decorating another gingerbread house in the future. [I did get compliments for the roof because I added frosted shredded wheat cereal pieces – Caroline]

Big Sur Eucalyptus Soap

JWise Photo of the Day

Big Sur Eucalyptus Soap

It’s likely somewhere around 20 years now that we’ve been using Big Sur Soap and specifically: its eucalyptus scent. We’ve tried other fragrances from them, but this one is a great reminder of all our moments driving along the Pacific Coast on Highway 1, admiring the towering eucalyptus trees, and basking in their beautiful aroma, ensuring that they are never far. Sheila Hillman, the proprietor of this brand, can’t always predict the popularity of the various scents in her repertoire, and it has often happened that while in the Big Sur area, the shops we relied on were out of eucalyptus, and we’ve come rely on ordering directly from Sheila. Even then, it’s not uncommon that she’s sold out until the next batches are done, so this time, I put in an early order for ten bars. Upon their arrival, I stored them in vacuum-sealed bags to prevent further curing and evaporation. Depending on how well this works, I might buy another ten bars to ensure we have the wonderful scent of the Central California Coast for many years to come.

Christmas Cookies, Cat Butt Style

JWise Photo of the Day

Christmas Cookies, Cat Butt Style

It’s just after Thanksgiving, and considering we chose not to travel this fall, what was left to do but make Christmas cookies, cat-butt style! Obviously, we do not care if Santa leaves us a lump of coal after he sees that we signaled him to stare at a cat butthole and sip some almond milk because we’re holding out for a visit from his transgressive wife Mrs. Claus who turned bad over the last years.

Thanksgiving in a Box

JWise Photo of the Day

Thanksgiving in a box

Less than two weeks ago, the four-month intensity that included planning, the actual vacation, and the subsequent 60 days of writing created a situation where I was not ready to jump back into traveling. This is only the third or fourth time in the past nearly 25 years that we’ve been in Phoenix for Thanksgiving, and in celebration of that, we spared no expense and went all out. Yep, we skipped the Chinese restaurant and made dinner at home after buying a box of gravy, a box of stuffing, and a tub of cranberry sauce from Costco, rounding it out with a vegan Field Roast from Whole Foods.

As for fresh food? We passed on that because that’s just too much work when trying to capture laziness, which we did perfectly. Was the dinner ideal? On one hand, of course, it was, as it appealed to our sense of doing as little as possible, and like the year we tried Tofurkey or the Cajun Turducken, it was something out of the ordinary.

Also out of the ordinary, by foregoing our almost ritualistic Thanksgiving visits to the Oregon coast, we’ll have ended up not visiting the Pacific Ocean even once during 2023, the first time since 1995 that we didn’t gaze upon that vast body of blue-green water at least once over the course of a year. Noting this, I’m opening my 2024 travel itinerary and penciling in a reminder to visit the western coast of the U.S. next year.