Full moon for Advent

 Bit late for the actual full moon, but nonetheless welcome.  At this point I want to see what the whole thing will look like when we get there.  Meanwhile, it's really cool to come downstairs and see what today's about each day.

Today I got a really welcome email, from Cesar, one of the friends I made during my freecycling years.  A very nice man indeed, a saintly person, who used to collect good items from freecycle then personally take and give them to people in a very poor parish in Trenton.

I sent him a lot of the things from my friend Karen's house when she died and I was helping her sisters empty the place.  She was a world-class shopper, only the best, and Cesar literally took a carload of brand new teddybears and gave them to children personally.  And many unopened bottles of perfume, very good brands, the kind with the glass sculpture bottles, went to women who never had a luxury.

It was a good feeling to know Karen's stuff was going exactly where she'd have wanted it, she being the most generous of souls.  The bears had been intended for gifts to her students, also low income special needs, so she'd have approved.  Her clothes went elsewhere, too small for the people he knew!  She was tiny. And her massive collection of cookbooks still in the original shrinkwrap, not a cook, but loved good food, went all over. My cleaning family was thrilled when they took a stack of them.  I had invited them to pick some or all of a large bunch I'd left out for them.  They left just one, probably for good manners!

Back to Cesar: the reason the email was welcome was that he is usually in touch with good wishes at every holiday throughout the year, and I hadn't heard from him at Thanksgiving, so I was very anxious, considering our times.  But no, he's fine, his wife and family are fine, and I was so happy to return good wishes to him for the holidays.

A couple of years ago he was planning to try his hand at learning to bake over the winter.  They're a Chinese Filipino family, baking not high on their agenda usually, so it was new to him. I gave him books to get started, from the cookbooks I was downsizing, also some of them from Karen, still in the original shrinkwrap.  He was quite pleased when I insisted these were for him, not to give away again! He also said he was reviewing his Mandarin, since he'd got rusty with using English for so many years since he came to the US. His Spanish and English fluent. He's also a poet, in Chinese and English.  I like how he's always learning, despite getting up there in years.

And my last shout out today is to those readers who have been alone since March.  There are quite a few of us with no family at all in their house, some who literally have seen nobody from their family, if they still have family, for months.  I live alone, too, but I do have the huge luck of having a weekly brief distanced visit from Handsome Son.  However without even that, it would be hard indeed, and I just want you to know I know, and I'm thinking of you, and I know that pain when people talk all the time about "we".  Not saying they shouldn't, just that it's a pang for some of us to hear it.  And we need to acknowledge that, we have to deal with all this daily,  no need to keep silent on it. 

We're all hopeful now that a vaccine will soon taper off the pandemic, but realistic in that we don't expect that to happen very quickly.  But there's a glimmer of light.  And now that we seem to have seen off the bad guy in the White House, that's looking better, too.  Especially if we manage to see off the election runoffs in Georgia successfully. 

Hope is on the way for all of us.  

I have a birthday soon, and Handsome Son has been wanting to know what I want about it. I usually ask for a service or a meal cooked or something.  This year I'm asking him to reverse our usual routine when he visits, and he will provide the baked goods and organize the pots of tea and I'll just be a guest on my own sofa!  He's fine with this, and I'll enjoy it a lot. I told him not to bother with a card, to which he said, too late, you're getting one!

Remember that municipal holiday meal for seniors I had such a hard time getting registered for? It happens soon, and there's been a new email begging people to sign up, plenty of slots available, and here's how to do it. I suspect a lot of people were kicked off the website just as I was, and have given up!  I hope they get in touch personally and say sign me up, the website won't do it.  Anyway, I hope my vegetable lasagna is worth the trouble we all went to.  I'll let you know.