Time and time again, I find that TELLING YOU about something seems to be exactly the kick in the pants I need to do something about it. I think part of it is that it puts the task into perspective: it seems…odd…to spend an hour writing a post about why I can’t make myself take 15 minutes to handle a chore.

Anyway, this morning I tackled all the cleaning supplies and baggies/foils from my parents’ old house. I’d kept thinking I needed to GO THROUGH THEM and COLLATE and COMBINE and DECIDE WHAT TO KEEP and so forth, but all I REALLY needed to do was cram them all into the same places where I keep back-ups of those supplies. When I run out of quart-sized baggies, I will find my parents’ partially-used box of quart-sized baggies on the back-up baggies/foil shelf; when I run out of laundry detergent, I will find their partially-used bottle on the back-up laundry supplies shelf. This issue will now automatically self-resolve with time.

It took maybe 10 minutes to handle it, and that counts the part where I dealt with the bins/boxes the items had been in. And now an Oppression Spot is just GONE, and also I have eliminated a Housecleaner Anxiety Area (“They will think I am hoarding cleaning supplies!!”). Why did I wait months? Brains are a treat.

Additionally, I noticed that every single time I went up the stairs, I saw a spot on the landing floor that made me feel bad for not damp-mopping the entire house. So this morning I took a few squares of toilet paper, dampened them in the sink, and cleaned that one spot. It took less than one minute, and now it doesn’t bother me EVERY SINGLE TIME I GO UP THE STAIRS.

Abrupt subject change!

Are any of you already familiar with a charity that addresses homelessness in the United States? (Ideally an organization that doesn’t combine this pursuit with religious evangelism.) We’re doing a family project to try to familiarize the kids with making charitable donations (choosing an area of concern/interest, investigating the charity on Charity Navigator, etc.), and each kid is picking a charity for us to send a donation to. William has chosen United States homelessness as his category, but is having trouble choosing from there—mostly, I think, because he is kind of overwhelmed doing college online in a house of seven people, and would like to be done with this additional project now. It also may be that his scope is too broad and that he needs to narrow it down to a particular program in a particular state—but he would prefer something national. I am going to look into this myself, but I love having other people’s recommendations.

I want to tell you about this book, which many of you have already read; but some of you have not, and perhaps for reasons similar to mine, which I would like to talk you out of:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (Target link) (Amazon link).

This is a book that was recommended to me many, many, many times. Several people recommended it on the Books Worth Buying post, but Claire pointed out that something very bad/traumatic happens to children, which could violate this thing I said when asking for recommendations: “and nothing where a major plot point is the abuse and/or traumatic death of an animal or child—unless somehow the author pulls it off, and there ARE books where that happens,” and that is probably why I didn’t add it to my To Read list at the time.

For me, this was one of those books where the author did pull it off. But I want to tell you my actual reasons for not reading the book even when I saw it recommended all over the place, because I had forgotten ALL ABOUT Claire’s warning when I finally read it.

The first reason is the cover, which communicates that the book is being marketed as Chick Lit. I read a lot of books marketed as Chick Lit, and a lot of them are great—and a lot of them are what I will kindly refer to as “fluffy.” Another reason is the title, which is whimsical; another reason is that the name of the main character is deliberately over-charming and not right for her age. These things are not absolute deal-breakers, but they are common signals that I am not going to like the book. The whole package reminded me of Evvie Drake Starts Over, another VERY RECOMMENDED book, which I finally tried, and it was an absolutely competently-written book by someone who had decided to write a book, and I didn’t catch the magic of it at all.

But the thing that REALLY kept me from reading it before now was the description on the inside front cover, which, like the description on the inside front cover of A Prayer for Owen Meany, was so off-putting to me that I almost couldn’t even make myself TRY the book, FOR FREE, from the library:

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living.

So, absolutely not. This is a movie starring Zoe Deschanel or Maggie Gyllenhaal as Eleanor, and Chris O’Dowd or the serious version of Will Ferrell as Raymond. They will be beautiful people dressed as nerds, charming people being charmingly awkward, and we will get to know their separate lives a bit, and then they will meet awkward-cute and have an awkward-cute relationship, probably bumping into each other awkwardly and losing their glasses and so forth, and a charming old man with twinkling eyes will be involved. I’m out.

Okay, but finally TOO MANY people had talked about the book, and then Hello Korio recommended it and said it reminded her of Fredrik Backman books, which I generally love, so FINE: I will read it if only so I could say “Nope, I tried it, not for me.”

Well, and of course I loved it. LOVED IT. It was EXTREMELY MY THING. I totally agree that it’s like Fredrik Backman, especially the one with Britt-Marie and the one with Ove, where you start by thinking the person is so unpleasant you don’t want to read about them at all, and then after awhile you find yourself succumbing to their charms and to the charms of all the wonderful imperfect lovable human beings around them. (If you never got the magic of Britt-Marie or Ove, Eleanor Oliphant may not be your thing either.) Or it’s like the TV show Schitt’s Creek, where everyone tells you to PERSEVERE through the first season where you hate everyone, to get to the part where you only hate Roland.

And, as Hello Korio points out, there is an unreliable narrator thing going on—and it’s the kind I LIKE, where the narrator is unreliable to THEMSELVES in a way where YOU start thinking “Wait…wait a minute here…” and feel smart for noticing. The book gradually REVEALED ITSELF to me as a totally different book than I’d thought it was, and I felt amazed by it, and I enjoyed the whole thing, and I liked everyone, and I want MORE BOOKS ABOUT THESE PEOPLE.

I am feeling empathetically sad today: something sad happened to someone else, and I keep thinking about it and feeling sad. I was wondering if we could balance that with some empathetic happiness. Maybe you have a treat tucked away for later and you have been thinking about it happily. Maybe your tulips are coming up / about to open. Maybe you have something good on its way in the mail, either from you or to you. Maybe you have something fun you’re looking forward to. You could tell me! And then I can feel happy about that with you.

We are having a little bit of a scramble, because we realized at this late date that we need something to REPLACE the Egg Hunt this year. We have done an Egg Hunt to one degree or another since Rob was a preschooler. First it was just Paul and me hiding a few eggs for Little Rob; and then we hid them for Little Rob and Little William; and then my parents started coming over and sitting in lawn chairs to watch, and the adults would pass around buckets of candy; and then my brother and sister-in-law had kids and started attending too; and then Rob and William were too old to want to hunt and so they started helping with the hiding; and then it was the pandemic.

And last year, the first year of the pandemic, we found that our kids seemed to have outgrown the hunt entirely: the younger three looked for eggs for awhile and then were sort of floppy about it—like, “HOW many more do we have to find??—like that. Which is not a fulfilling thing, when you as the parents have spent considerable effort to put together something fun. But on the other hand, our youngest is a teenager, so we can’t say it was a total surprise.

I guess, though, that I was cruising along picturing us all just eating the candy out of buckets as usual. But without the hunt first, that doesn’t seem right. So instead I want to do Easter Baskets. BUT: ABSOLUTELY NOT the Christmas-stocking kind of Easter basket, with presents and toys. I am not up to it, and don’t want to start with that; it’s PLENTY to do it once a year with stockings. What I want to do is the kind I grew up with: chocolate rabbit plus miscellaneous candy, and the basket was hidden somewhere in the house. I remember one year my brother and I made our parents re-hide the baskets because we found them immediately and felt not enough effort had been put into it.

We are all set on baskets: they’re not gorgeous or anything, but the kids used baskets to collect eggs, so I don’t need any of those. I am not buying Easter grass: I was charmed by this lovely green-and-flowers kind, and used it for an Easter package for my niece and nephew—and as soon as I emptied it into the box, I realized my mistake. And that wasn’t even the clingy plastic kind! ANYWAY, I am using tissue paper. I had some trouble finding a package of just green, so I am changing tacks and I will use different colors to code the baskets: Edward should search for the basket with RED tissue paper, and Henry the basket with ORANGE tissue paper, and so on.

I have ordered chocolate rabbits, and have made what is probably a mistake by having them shipped; is there ANY chance that hollow chocolate bunnies will arrive unbroken? Well, in the moment it seemed like the right thing to do: getting them ON THEIR WAY. I would have chosen a solid-chocolate option but oddly none of those were available for shipping.

All the kids sleep late now, so Sunday morning I will get up and assemble the baskets and Paul will hide them, and it will be a little Easter surprise! And kind of fun to do a holiday a different way.

A happy thing is that the little bowls I made in pottery class a few years ago are getting almost constant use: they are so small I thought they’d be useless, but William in particular is using them daily as snack/ketchup/mustard bowls. A sad thing is that so far three of the bowls, plus one of Elizabeth’s (she took a pottery class, too) have been broken. It is difficult not to HOARD special things, never using them so that they won’t be broken, but that is not the strategy I want to use here. Still, it’s hard to see them disappearing one by one.

Paul was able to glue one back together so that it can be used as a trinket bowl even though it won’t work for food anymore. The others were shattered to smithereens; I don’t think I’ve ever typed that word before. I don’t know what our kitchen floor is made out of, but anything dropped on it is absolutely toast. Even PLASTIC bowls have shattered on it. Our old kitchen floor was 1950s linoleum, and dropped items would bounce lightly before coming to a gentle, unbroken rest.

I am drinking a cup of Starbucks Spring Day blend, which tastes exactly like regular Starbucks coffee to me, but it comes in a pretty bag and I appreciate the pretty bag every time I see it. And it is satisfying to use a SPRING coffee, no matter the actual weather, as a little defiance in the face of continued cold, and/or as a little spell cast to coax the daffodils.

I am reading A Prayer for Owen Meany (Target) (Amazon), which I thought I had read BUT IT TURNS OUT I HAD NOT. I was so sure I had! But then some of you were discussing it on Twitter, and posted some excerpts, and I read the excerpts and thought it went beyond my usual inability to remember a book after reading it: I didn’t recognize the excerpts AT ALL, and in fact ANTI-recognized them. So I got the book and am reading it and I can see why people like it so much. I’ve definitely never read it before. Wonder what book I was thinking of!

This book was such an odd/surprising reading experience:

Little Weirds, by Jenny Slate (Target) (Amazon)

I started reading, and almost immediately was like oh, yeah, no: this is one of those PAY ATTENTION TO ME PAY ATTENTION TO ME PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEE books where the author says gross things and bizarre things, and talks about her body and how horny she is, because she’s learned that those are good ways to get a lot of attention, and actually I think she’s had enough already.

By the end of the book, I was completely enchanted. She is a darling and a sweetheart, a brilliant and sensitive person, and no man is good enough for her. I felt like those memes where someone posts a picture of a cute little animal and writes “I WOULD DIE FOR THEM.” I went from “Whoo, good thing I got this from the library instead of buying it, because I don’t think I’m going to make it through the second essay” to PUTTING THE HARDCOVER IN MY ONLINE CART.

You know how some of us get all choked up at terrible school band/chorus concerts because of how PURE AND EARNEST the whole thing is and how so many people have worked so hard to make this happen? And how some of us almost can’t bear the sweetness of society deciding to go to considerable expense and effort to make playgrounds—with grown adults even specializing in playground equipment and playground design and so forth? That is how the author sees things, too. Her use of the word “little”; her references to treats; the way she felt about other passengers on the plane; the way she talks about her house; how charmed she was by other people putting effort into a little surprise for her; the way she felt about a question the landscaper asked her.

Anyway. I still recommend getting it from the library to begin with, because for all my change of heart, there is still a hearty measure of my first impression. But by the end, I was seeing it as The Artistic Temperament, and finding it a very valuable temperament indeed when combined with the intelligence and self-awareness she shows throughout.

I have sent the last of the Galentine’s Day care packages, and it seems perfect that it is one month exactly after Galentine’s Day. I am trying to be happy than it happened rather than sad that it’s over, but last night while making dinner I was talking to Paul about how I could just keep sending packages forever. It was just very, very fun.

I’ve seen other people mentioning that their faces have noticeably aged this past year, and it was a relief to know I was in good company. This morning I peered at my face in the mirror: was the skin EVEN MORE delicate/fragile/crinkly-looking today than yesterday?? I did one of the face masks (remember when that meant a beauty treatment? that is how I mean it here) that build up in the medicine cabinet because it never seems like enough of a special occasion to use them, and it was a fun peeling gold-glittery one, and I would say it made a 0% difference but it was pretty fun to hope for 20 minutes there while it dried. Peeling it was also fun, and made me want to put Elmer’s glue on my hands.

I keep writing this paragraph and deleting it, because it keeps sounding so stupid to me, but what has happened is that I have several favorite walking routes that all include a certain stretch of road, and I’ve had to stop doing those routes because of some guy who keeps talking to me. He seems friendly/harmless, heading for Lonely Chatty Older Man territory, but I should never have taken off my headphones the first time he said something, because now he wants to chat for an extended period every time we cross paths, which is pretty much any day I use that part of the road, even if I go at a different time. It’s a little extra difficult because he has a dog with him who wants to say hi, too, and he will let the dog off its leash to come run to greet me, and then he follows. I see him talking to lots of other people, women and men also, so I get more lonely vibes from him than creeper vibes—but I am not even talking to my FRIENDS in person right now, so I don’t want to talk to a relative stranger. But I feel upset about losing the walking routes, and upset that somehow even by my age I couldn’t/didn’t stop this from happening. I get stuck ALL THE TIME talking to strangers/acquaintances because I can’t seem to say “Welp, gotta go, see ya, have a good day!” and walk away, and I feel like the visibly aging skin goes with someone who should be able to do that. But also: today I DID say “Well, see you later, have a good day!” and walked away, and he walked with me, so now I am more angry at him than angry at myself, but I’m still losing the walking routes because I don’t really have anything between the level of what I did today and the yelling/pepper-spray level.

I was not entirely honest with you yesterday and it is niggling at me. I think it would have been fine if it were merely a case of being dishonest by omission, but, if you remember, I mentioned that the spring/Easter plates had matching mugs, and then I said “I DO NOT NEED MORE MUGS.” While that statement is true (I DO NOT need more mugs), and while it’s true I did not buy THOSE mugs, I think those words misleadingly implied that I righteously avoided buying ANY more mugs. Which is not quite the case.

Cup of Happy mug. This is a mug I’ve included in some of the Galentine’s Day care packages. I love the color especially, but I also like the frank equating of imbibable substances with emotional well-being. And I like the little swirlies, and how the words/swirlies are carved out of the glaze. I was resisting buying it for myself—but then suddenly it became unavailable for shipping, and I am apparently unable to resist the siren song of unavailable merchandise. I had to go-actually-inside Target yesterday to pick up a prescription, and the mug section is right across from the pharmacy, so I thought I would just CHECK to see if MAYBE they had the mug on the shelf—AND THEY DID.

They ALSO had ANOTHER mug that I’ve been pining for, which has been unavailable for shipping as long as I’ve been looking at it, so I bought that too:

Stunner mug. I don’t know why I like it so much; I’m not particularly fond of peacocks, or of the proportions of the mug/handle, or of that font they chose. But something about the choice of the word “stunner” is so appealing. I like the way it applies to the peacock and to its stance, but also to the person drinking from the mug. And with time, I’ve come to appreciate the little HITCH of the font from the T to the U, and how that adds to the whole effect.

I dreamed last night that I bought a truly enormous boat, like a multi-level boat with numerous rooms/cabins, and I invited extended family to join me on a delightful boat vacation, without realizing until we arrived at the boat that (1) I did not know how to drive a boat, nor did I know the correct verb for driving a boat; (2) I had not taken into account various Important Boat Issues such as How To Get the Boat to/into the Water; (3) I had not taken into account various boat-related expenses such as storage, docking, supplies, fuel, crew; (4) I had not realized I would need to NAME the boat, and apparently the naming had to be done Right Now before we could put the boat into/onto the water. (I named it “The Cautious Optimist” and then fretted that I should have chosen something else.)

I was so, so relieved to wake up without a boat. Even now, hours later, I keep having an anxious unhappy feeling and wondering what it is, and then realizing I’m worrying about the boat situation.

My Target account is still locked. I called again this morning, because the person I talked to on Sunday said it would be a couple days, and I didn’t want to find out I’d ended up locked much longer than necessary by not calling back. I pretended I was a person who “just picks up the phone” and I called after I had the impulse but before I could change my mind. The person I talked to read the notes on the situation, and then said she would leave a message on the desk of the person who is supposed to be handling this, letting her know I’d called. She said it CAN take up to seven business days to fix something like this, so I shouldn’t worry yet. Well clearly I AM going to worry, considering I am still a little worried about a boat I bought in a dream, but it’s still nice to be told there’s no need. (No need “YET.”)

Still nothing from Target on my locked account. It’s fine. It’s fine! They locked it on a Sunday; nothing is going to get fixed on a Sunday. Then Monday was a federal holiday. So we won’t worry. Even though some of the things I was including with care packages are now on clearance and will probably sell out before I can order again. It’s fine! We won’t think about it!

I HAVE heard from Target on other topics:

This is the first batch of care packages! Or rather, this is a bunch of individually-wrapped items from the first batch of care packages: notice how many of those emails say that “Your item” (singular) is out for delivery today. If you receive a box with, like, one or two items in it, that is not your entire care package, it is one of what will apparently be quite a few installments of your care package! If you chose for someone else to receive the package, you may want to let them know that this is the way it’s going down.

Oh! Speaking of which: IF AN ITEM ARRIVES BROKEN OR BADLY DAMAGED, do let me know. I can see how that would be an awkward thing to decide what to do about, so I am telling you ahead of time: DO LET ME KNOW. I can think of few things as disheartening as having a cruddy Valentine’s Day, and looking forward to a comforting care package, and then having the care package arrive and things inside are broken/ruined/unusable. We have had situations such as a jar of pesto leaked, a bag of chips exploded, a mug broken, a bag of rice exploded, a bag of GROUND COFFEE EXPLODED AND COATING EVERY BLESSED THING. These things happen, and Target is good about sending replacement items. You may have to wipe and sweep coffee grounds off everything, but at least you will get a new bag of coffee.