Archive for January 4th, 2026

De-Decorating

January 4, 2026

Today’s primary task was to take down the Christmas decorations. Our yard waste pickup is Monday, so we wanted to get the tree to the curb.

The 2025 Christmas Tree

The picture captures a good percentage of the decorations from this year. There was a creche and some other bits and pieces around elsewhere.

Carl is showing off one of his presents, originally gifted by Mariner Mike Blowers to the craftsman who built a staircase for him. It was handed on by a fellow blogger. It’s a heavy bat.

The Christmas decorations all survived our basement flood because they had been brought upstairs. We did lose some Halloween stuff, but that was all much less important.

Most importantly, Carl’s mother’s ornaments were not harmed. That would have been hard to accept.

The Doris ornament wall. There are too many for the tree. Zoom to see details.

And we did get through the decision phase on our collection of cassette tapes. One or two have been retained, with the rest destined for a recycling firm, and potentially a few to a used record store in our neighborhood.

Decision Fatigue

January 4, 2026

A term I heard at a meeting this morning. It perfectly describes our cleaning up, and sometimes out, situation.

I’m trying to slow down, but not stop, take smaller bites when I should ask for input. My first area of stuff planned to go through is old cassette tapes and some homemade CDs. It’s only 4 medium boxes, and I know some will be easy to say it can leave the house.

One fun bit from today was taking the 2025 Filthy Lucre Funds to the winner. We allow each person in a household to enter a guess, and their house had 4 guesses. She described the different methods behind the guesses.

  • Used AI with the 2 pictures of the money provided as input. $81.00
  • Trying to estimate a value per inch based on what they could see, and then expanding to the whole jar. $48.15
  • 6-7 twice from a teenager. $67.67
  • Used the 2024 actual total. $75.69

As it turned out 2024 = $75.69 and 2025 = $75.40 were very close, but this is not the norm, so it might not work in 2026.

On the outdoor front, a mix of hard rain and partly sunny. So we went out for a medium walk. There are several lawns, including our parking strip, that are being torn apart by crows.

Our front yard

According to the article in the Seattle Times today, they are eating European Chafer grubs, who would kill the lawn themselves if left alone.

Start of the article,  and a Seattle park example.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Maybe find a ground cover that will fare better.