A List of Stuff

 A random list of stuff I've been meaning to share.  Time goes so fast these days - which I'm grateful for given that we're in 'global pandemic' status still so staying home with not a lot to go out and do is a good thing.

• Working or not, my favorite part of pretty much any day is climbing into bed at the end of the day and waiting for the snuggle factor to take me to dreamland.     

•  Today, I picked up my first online order at Walmart and I have to say I am SUPER impressed.  AND the BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT EVER:  my order included a bottle of 409, a bottle of Clorox Clean Up and 3 bottles of WalMarts multisurface grease cutter/cleaner!  I ordered them fully expecting them to be unavailable when we picked up the order - but they DID have them in stock and so we scored!  I was so giddy about the cleaning supplies, J. was laughing at me.  409 has been completely unavailable for close to a year.  It was like the best Christmas gift EVER. 

• The order was complete and perfect.  I didn't allow any substitutions - partly because I wasn't sure what their parameters were for substituting.  I will research that.  For example, if I request ground chicken and they have none, will they substitute turkey?  If they won't substitute something completely different but would substitute a different brand (Jenny-O vs. Foster Farms ground chicken), that would be OK.  But chicken vs. turkey, not so much.  So I will continue to fine tune.  
  
• I am not a huge fan of Walmart but the prices are the lowest we have available here in Carson City.  I wish we had a Winco and maybe someday we will - and while I truly don't like a lot of things about Walmart and dread shopping there, we are on a budget so lowering our food costs is what we need to do.  
• J. and I are binge watching The West Wing on Netflix again.  The series leaves Netflix in two days so we're re-watching the first few seasons (our favorites).  I proposed on Christmas Eve we should try to watch all the Christmas episodes which are epic.  
• The electricians installed the dining room light fixture now that we have the dining room table.  It looks beautiful.  
• Just after Thanksgiving, one of our neighbors across the golf course decorated her back fence.  I hadn't even thought about decorating in the back - no reason to do that in our Tracy home - but since we back to a golf course and our house can be seen from a street nearby, it made sense.  I can't wait for next year and have already given J. a heads up that we have a LOT more decorations to purchase for the backyard next year.  WAY MORE LIGHTS.  And fence decor.  Bows, maybe - lighted bows and/or lighted scenes'.  
• As I type this, I remember that last night, we had HUGE winds here and we woke up this morning to find the two dogs, the llama and the dachshund decorations in the front in a pretty sad state AND the three lighted packages we had out front are gone.  We have no idea where they went - we drove around to look - but they are GONE.  Totally gone.  
• We're not sure that they weren't stolen.  Seems like they might have been 'cuz they had to be unplugged.  

I have to stop the bullet point format.  It's a PITA and I keep saving this update and then when I get back to it, the bullet points torture me - so I'm moving on.  Back to paragraph form.  It's a hodge-podge post and I'm OK with that.    

We've had numerous discussions with B. about being here for Christmas and we've decided against it multiple times.  It's hard on him - especially him - who got through months of being deployed in a not great assignment and not great area - and the thought of spending a minimum of two weeks with us got him through a lot - so to have that event postponed indefinitely is heartbreaking.  For all of us - but especially for B..  We have a Zoom call planned for Christmas morning and will spend some time sharing our plans for the day, reminiscing about Christmas' past and talking about what we're looking forward to in 2021.  Hopefully adding travel back into our lives will happen. 

Last night, we went to Atlantis - our casino host gave us a voucher for a free dinner (there was an issue which I will share in a future post) so we headed to Reno.  We arrived around 1:30PM and played until our 5PM reservation.  (One of the Covid guidelines in place here for all restaurants is 'must have reservations'.  It's a way to ensure the place doesn't exceed the 25% allowed capacity limit).  I played for a couple of hours on what I initially put in to begin to play - moving up and down on the range of 'in the red or in the black'.  Pretty typical day.  At 3PM or so, I headed to other machines to play my free play for the week - turned $200 in free play into $300 in cash and then headed back to my favorite Dragonlink machines.  I was shocked when I hit a Major jackpot at a little past 3:30PM - and then twelve short minutes later (moving to another machine), I hit a second Major!  It was epic.  Truly.  

Food was fantastic, service was awesome and we had a really fun time - got home a bit before 7PM. 

Also have freeplay on Saturday so fingers crossed there won't be weather that makes it impossible to get there.