Yeah, and I also -- not only getting gifts, but I do love when-- when I know I’ve got a gift for somebody that I know they're gonna love. And for my girlfriend, I can't recall if I mentioned this in the first diary, but her first cat passed away in November, suddenly, and pretty awfully, we found her dead in the middle of the night. Not to be all depressing about things. But I came up with an idea of creating a book, like you can on like on Shutterfly or Snapfish, kind of creating like a children's book, but about her cat Rory. So I went back and using all the -- all the resources I could find, whether my own pictures or going through her Facebook page, and going back to 2008 to find as many pictures of Rory as I could to string along a narrative of her life. And I kind of made a children's book about Rory out of it. And I knew that was going to be a home run, and I actually teared up making it. And yeah, and I saved that one for last because I didn't want to like bring down Christmas. I knew she would love it. But I also knew she was going to cry when she saw it. So I saved that gift for after we had opened mostly everything else. And yeah, she cried and I cried. And I read it to her and it was pretty great. And so we have that Rory book is kind of one of our -- it's on our bookshelf kind of propped up in a pretty visible position. Luna our new cat sometimes knocks it over. I don't think because she doesn't like Rory but just because it looks like a fun thing to knock over. But yeah, I think that's gifts.

My wife and I had a interesting date night last night. We did a COVID wassailing. It involved picking up a package from a local cidery, Tandem Ciders of Suttons Bay, and it contained two bottles of cider, two pint glasses, a piece of toast and the instructions. And traditionally the wassailing would be through Orchards, it'd be a group of people drinking and singing and scaring away the bad spirits and waking up the cider trees, to produce a bountiful harvest of apples. And we can't do that right now. So, we got a to-go packet, we put our son to bed and then opened up some cider and had a delicious little cider and then sang wassailing songs and walked around the yard and then hung a slice of toast on our oldest tree. We don't have any apple trees in the yard, so it's on a old maple. And then we gave a toast to the tree, a toast to ourselves and that was it. It was weird. It was good, it was something to break the normalcy of a -- kind of not doing things. But it was just odd that the whole point of a wassailing was getting people together and so doing this activity that we've done before in Orchards with friends and strangers was something we had to do by ourselves.

Jingle Bells Batman Smells… Do you know the rest of this song? How does it go? Of course I know this song, Michigan Diaries. Our little demographic stuff. You probably have it written down but for the sake of a stand-alone recording, I was born in 89 grew up in Ann Arbor. The song goes like this. Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel, and Joker took ballet. Jingle bells, Batman smells Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel, and Joker took ballet. Yeah, of course I know that song Michigan Diaries. I love it.

I do have awesome news from -- the reason -- one of the reasons this week has been so amazing for me is the hospital received the Pfizer vaccine last week, Tuesday. And started vaccinating our front-line health-care workers on the COVID unit. And it was so emotional and amazing to see people's reactions. I do some video work for the hospital and so they had me doing some things for the news -- for us to send out photos and videos of people getting -- the first sets of people getting their vaccinations done. So I got to be kind of involved in that which was really, really cool. I know that's the kind of like a historical moment that I got to be involved in. So I was really, really happy about that. Seeing people crying and hugging and all these emotions that are coming out. People who have been struggling and distressed and mentally taxed and just all of these things, for these last nine months, you know, and finally feeling this glimmer of hope with this vaccine coming.

Have you ever been to a parade? Such a change of pace there. Have you ever been in a parade? What was the parade for? Does your Town do a New Year's parade? I was in a parade in third grade. I live in Northville, Michigan and this town does this thing called The Victorian Festival because we have some historic houses built in the Victorian era, and for some reason that is like noteworthy enough to hold parades and festivals for. So it's like a weekend-long thing, and everyone dresses up in Victorian era like clothing and there's like a little like march through the town. And the kicker is that in third grade you're required to participate in this parade, and you are also required to dress like a Victorian child. So -- there's like basically, like a communal closet, that just like people will borrow kid Victorian clothes from other people, because nobody knows -- like where like -- where do you buy that, right? But like I wore the same dress that my sisters both wore. I wore the same dress that my neighbor wore. I wore the same dress that like the girl down the street wore. Like it's like the most ridiculous tradition ever. But yeah, it's -- it's definitely an experience to see, a sight to see a bunch of third-graders running around in that clothing.

We had been celebrating Christmases in Michigan until our older daughter and her husband and their children moved to Texas in 2016, for a work opportunity for her there. Since then we had spent four Christmases together in Texas. With my husband and myself flying into Texas from Michigan and our younger daughter also flying in from the state of Washington. Because travel is unwise in this year of 2020, we celebrated by way of Zoom this year and our gifts to each other were mostly by package delivery. Our Christmas dinner was held separately in our three different households. Only our younger daughter is a vegetarian but all three of our families households included a Special K roast on our menus this year because all of us adults like the taste of that vegetarian dish. My husband can give a list of reasons why it is better for us to have Special K roast than it is for him to roast a turkey. The seven of us in our family meant by zoom on December 23rd, to have an Advent wreath devotional and to play Trivial Pursuit. And we showed off our Christmas trees to each other. That is two artificial trees and one live Norfolk Island pine with tiny ornaments. On Christmas morning we opened our gifts together on Zoom. Then the day after Christmas my daughters and I had a 5 and 1/2 hours long anagrams game by way of Zoom, using a cell phone taped to a tripod arm and suspended over the game board. Anagrams was a favorite game for my family of origin and this year I used the original letter blocks from the game I played as a child.