It’s time for our family performance evaluations. I requested everyone’s self evaluations, but I didn’t get any back. No raises for anyone this year. Here’s what we said we’d do this year. (Or what I said people would do in the case of everyone but my mom.) The italicized items were done or at least worked on.

Dad

+ Quit complaining (Not totally, but Mom says it’s a lot better.)
+ Help Mom paint the bedroom by Mom’s birthday (A few months late, but done!)
+ Get the floors done
+ Finish painting the kitchen
+ Fix the microwave handle
+ Build a pond and waterfall in the yard

Mom

+ Sew Carol a knitting needle case before the end of January
+ Get three estimates for bathroom remodel
+ Make winter pajamas for Anya before September
+ Make two jumpers for Anya
+ Work on Craig’s afghan with Carol (Done and being used!)
+ Finish Carol’s bathmat

Craig

+ Do well in school
+ Learn to juggle flaming torches
+ Teach Chewy to run an agility course
+ Bench press 300 pounds
+ Write memoirs
+ Join a woodwind ensemble

Carol

+ Finish Anya’s year 1 scrapbook
+ Finish Anya’s year 2 scrapbook (Half done.)
+ Enter something in the county fair (Didn’t even go to the fair!)
+ Work on Craig’s afghan with Mom (Done and being used!)
+ As a family, go on a hike or camp once a month
+ Complete a 5k walking race

Andy

+ Finish the plant room
+ Finish laying the floor, putting in the trim, and painting the “hallway” area of the basement (Floor done, trim almost done.)
+ Refinish the floors in the sun room and Anya’s room (And painted Anya’s room!)
+ Take a beginner’s blacksmith class
+ Finish prepping the wood for the kitchen / living room floors (Went with purchased flooring, installed and finished it, took down a wall, replaced base cabinets, made calkboard wall, started painting.)
+ Get the generator fixed up

Kenny

+ Make a five course meal from scratch
+ Paint a picture for Carol
+ Learn to play the guitar
+ Go on a date with the captain of the cheer leading squad
+ Get an A in English
+ Ride across the country on a bicycle

Anya

+ Ditch the diapers
+ Learn colors
+ Learn shapes
+ Learn to ride tricycle (To be fair, our driveway isn’t very conducive to triking.)
+ Paint a picture for Mommy
+ Learn to play the bongos, eukelele, and recorder

Looks like Anya is the winner! For her accomplishments, she wins a nice crunchy pickle! Soggy pickles for everyone else.

I don’t know if Andy and I are gonna pull off this Santa thing. There are so many details to keep track of! For those Santa newbies like us, here are a few tips:

• Don’t put packages of crisps in the stockings when she’s seen stacks of them sitting around the house.
• Make sure to set aside some presents for Santa to deliver. If you put all the presents under the tree as you get them, you find yourself sitting around on Christmas Eve thinking, “Huh. What is Santa going to bring?”
• Don’t discuss how you bought that salsa verde Santa put in Bubba’s stocking for real cheap in a case deal on the Kmart website.
• Remember to put out cookies. Then remember to eat some/part of the cookies. Do not move the cookies. Santa does not move the cookies.

I find myself wondering if the whole Santa thing is really even worth it for this kid. She doesn’t seem to really talk about Santa much, and I think if there were no Santa for her, she’d probably just go about Christmas merrily as ever. But, it seems sort of wrong to not have the jolly old dude be part of Christmas, so I guess we’ll keep working with him each year. Maybe if Santa was a fairy instead of an elf, Anya would be more interested.

This was definitely A Very Fairy Christmas.

We have to build an annex to the house for all of Anya’s new fairy and princess stuff. Oh wait, she got her own house, too!

Some solar panels and a composting toilet, and she’s set! First, though, she needs to get a dumpster delivered, so she can clean up her homesite.

These days, Andy spends his free time searching for great deals on Hello Kitty slippers and salsa, but back in the day he was a regular on the local humane society website. He would look at the new cats and ooh and ahh and send me links to cute ones. (Are there any kitties that aren’t cute?) I was working at the community college and otherwise being a big slacker when Andy sent me a link to a cat called Alonzo. Andy really, really, really wanted Alonzo. We already had Big Kitty, Little Kitty, Bob, and TreeFrog, but I thought, what the heck. Five is a good number. I went to the humane society while Andy was at work and checked out Alonzo. He was a big cat and pretty and not all that friendly. I think he had a cold. I started the paperwork to adopt him.

We named the kitty Buddy. Everyone said it looked like he had peanut butter on his nose.

He had to go to the vet early on because he was sick. I remember sitting in the waiting room and hearing a cat hollering and howling and thinking, “Huh. That can’t be Buddy!” But it was. He was not happy and wanted everyone to know it. That never stopped. He became known at several vets as the psycho cat and drew vet blood on several occasions. A few times he was muzzled at the vet, and I remember having to give him a sedative back in the day before taking him in for an appointment.

I think Buddy was taken from his mommy too soon because in the early days he loved to nuzzle up to an armpit and lick and chew on your shirt…sort of like he was nursing. He also seemed to be a bit wacky and would freak out every now and then. He’d get twitchy and you knew to stay away. His occupation almost from the start was to terrorize Little Kitty. I used to say Buddy was TreeFrog’s muscle. TreeFrog wanted to be alpha female cat, but she couldn’t take Little Kitty. When Buddy showed up, TreeFrog convinced him to take LK out of the picture so TreeFrog could be top girl. Part of his reign of terror included marking his territory. If LK found a spot she liked to hang out, eventually Buddy would pee there. He peed a lot. There were several times we thought about finding him a new home, but we just couldn’t because he was our Buddy.

When we moved to the boonies, we decided Buddy should be an outdoor cat during the day. He loved it. He started acting a bit more normal, and he didn’t pee on things as much. He’d bring us mice and moles and voles and even that weasel that one time. He kept us company when we walked down to the mail box, he let Anya chase him around the yard, and he amused us by climbing trees and hopping and leaping and living it up. Living outside (even just during the day) can be dangerous. One time he didn’t come home for three days. Another time he was gone a while and came back with a swollen face from a snake bite. We always worried about him, but we knew that the risk was worth it. Buddy was really happy outside, and we were all happier when he was outside, too.

Sometimes, Buddy didn’t want to go out in the morning, and we’d have to grab him and pitch him out. Sometimes he didn’t want to come in at night. Usually, though, he’d run out in the morning and be waiting for us in the evening.

Tuesday, December 21, we put Buddy out in the morning, and he wasn’t waiting for us when he got home. We called and wiggled the door handle and sang, “Buddybuddybuddybuddybuddy!” We kept the porch light on for him and peeked out the door for him over and over. Wednesday morning, he wasn’t there. Wednesday evening, he wasn’t there. Andy searched for him all over the property and looked in the shed and the workshop. We called and called and waited and waited. I sent a lost ad to the local humane society and got ready to call neighbors and the vet. And then we decided to look for him one last time.

I found him under the tool shed. We aren’t sure what happened. He didn’t have any visible injuries. It sort of looked like he laid down to go to sleep. Maybe he ate a poisoned mouse or found some antifreeze or maybe he was sick and we didn’t know or maybe he had a heart attack. We won’t ever know.

Bye, bye, Buddy Cat.

If only every home project was as simple as recovering the seats of the dining room chairs, well, we’d definitely be done with the kitchen by now. Problem with the kitchen is that it’s past that horrible place where IT MUST BE FIXED NOW OR I WILL NEED TO BE COMMITTED. Pretty much all that’s left is painting and curtains, and I can mostly ignore that most of the time.

But I digress. Chairs.

The chairs were icky, where icky is what happens when you mix off-white fabric good for digging yer claws into with eight mostly dark-haired, clawed cats.

A few months back, we bought some upholstery fabric when it went half price. It’s been sitting ever since, collecting stink bugs. We were snowed in today, and I suggested maybe we could fix the chairs. Andy made a grumpy face, but then the compressor and staple gun magically appeared. It took us about an hour.

Maybe we need to be snowed in a few more days?

We are in Day 3 without a working fridge. The repairman was supposed to come today, but the snow, sleet, and freezing rain have closed everything. (Except our place of employment, Darn Them! At least we can work from home.)

Tuesday I was home with a sick kid, and I went to the freezer to grab some ice cream for me for brunch. (Hey, don’t judge! It’s mostly milk!) The ice cream was melty. I figured someone hadn’t closed the freezer door all the way because sometimes it does stick. I forgot about it until Andy got home from work that evening, when I casually mentioned the melty ice cream. Andy opened the freezer, and checked the ice cream, and it was even meltier than before. He opened the fridge, the inside of which was pretty much room temperature. Maybe even warmer ’cause it’s a pretty cold room. Andy used his keen deductive powers to realize the fridge and freezer cooler parts were not working. Yippee!

We are lucky because:

1. the fridge is still under warranty,
2. there wasn’t much in the fridge,
3. we have a big freezer we could move some stuff into, and
4. it’s realllllly cold outside, so we put stuff in coolers and stuck them on the porch.

One good outcome of this event is that I removed a bunch of old, dried up, nasty frozen stuff. I’ve been meaning to for a while, but, um, think of all the energy that would waste having the freezer door open. Yeah! That’s it!

In other news, Anya’s last day of school for the year was supposed to be today. They were going to have a winter celebration, and Anya made cards for all her kids and her teachers. Everything was canceled, so now we have to wait until the New Year to pass out the cards and small gifts we had. This makes me sad.

We took Anya to see Santa on Saturday. The day before and all that morning we kept asking her what she was going to say to Santa. First she said she wanted to ask Santa for a doggie, “and a bowl for food and a little ball that I can throw for the doggie to go get.” Then she wanted a doll. The last time we asked, she wanted a firetruck. When we were finally there in front of Santa, Anya froze up. She hid behind us and didn’t want to go in the room he was in. We tried bribing her with a candy cane, but she doesn’t like candy canes this year. I have to admit, the Santa was a bit scary. His eyes were smiley, but he didn’t say, “Ho Ho Ho,” or talk about Rudolph or anything. I tried to engage him in some small talk about how I wanted a working dishwasher for Christmas and were the reindeer behaving, but I think he was listening to the game on a tiny radio hidden in his beard.

We finally got Anya to sit with Santa by having all of us sit with Santa. She still wouldn’t talk to him, but we got a picture. It’s not the picture I’m going to show you because I am too lazy to scan that photo.

A frozen fish bowl, of course.

It is hard to tell, but the sides of this bowl were rather thin, and the inside water was still liquid. There is a leaf swimming around like a real fishy.