The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Bright and sunny, and not much wind chill. My husband was even up to going outside to feed the cats. I didn’t find out until today, that he did it in bare feet and with no coat! Yeah, he’s one of those people that wears shorts in the winter, but bare feet??? Yikes!

He’s been chastised thoroughly on that. He’s diabetic, and doesn’t feel his toes at the best of times!

Yesterday, I made a small shopping trip, giving my mother’s car a run in the process, to do the Walmart part of our shopping. Today, my younger daughter and I made it into the city and did a Costco trip – but not before swinging by the post office and picking up a very large, very light box for my husband. He ordered a whole bunch of plain, medium weight yarn, in bright colours, and plans to get back into knitting. 🙂

I haven’t been up to doing Costco in a while, now. With the colder temperatures, we did that part first. No worries about the van baking in the sun. Even with insulated bags and ice packs, anything frozen would be starting to thaw, just from the trip home. This time of year, the insulated bags are as much to keep things from freezing, as they are keep them cold! Then we hit the international foods store where, among other things, I was able to get a free turkey with my points. 🙂 We’ve already got a turkey thawing out for Christmas, and we’re doing prime rib from our quarter beef pack for New Years, so it’s just there for when we want something other than beef. 🙂 My daughter had her own shopping list, too.

Which means that we have been able to do the bulk of our monthly shop for January, and without having to buy much meat at all, it meant we had the budget to do things like finally buy a set of pans to replace the ones we’ve got that, after getting the new glass topped oven, we discovered were no longer flat bottomed! 😀

I even was able to swing by a Staples and buy the cyan ink I needed for my printer. The ruddy thing simply stopped working when it ran out, even when I just wanted to print in black and white. In fact, it wouldn’t even do the automatic head cleaning anymore, so once I installed the ink and did a test print, there were all sorts of gaps in the blocks of colour, and there was black in the yellow! I did 5 test prints, and it was still really bad. I couldn’t do a sixth test print, though.

I’m now out of yellow, and almost out of magenta.

I know head cleaning uses up a lot of ink, but not that much!

*sigh*

So we still can’t use our printer. None of the places we usually shop at carries the ink I need, so that means another trip to Staples. It might even be worth it to make the trip tomorrow.

*sigh*

I don’t remember the last time I’ve gone shopping this close to Christmas!

We have always had pretty modest Christmases. For us, it’s about celebrating the birth of Christ together as a family. My husband’s sister was finally able to move back to this province and get a house in the city (she had to back out of buying a house here earlier in the year, when the province she was living in clamped down on their police state and no one was allowed in or out of the province. At least if you were Canadian) and she’s having a Christmas dinner. She knows my husband can’t manage that sort of thing anymore, so we’ll be doing a Skype call with them, instead. With how crazy things have been this year, we aren’t doing gifts at all. Not even hand made ones. Maybe we’ll do some for Three Kings Day, our last day of Christmas, instead.

We got the last things we needed for our Christmas and New Year’s dinners. Since we normally make pretty much everything from scratch, we are all excited about getting boxes of mixed frozen appetizers. Our once a year treat! 😀

It did make things challenging when it came time to unload, though. Most of the stuff was small enough, or flat enough, to fit, but then there was that turkey… 😀 It was like playing Tetris with packages of meat to get it in there.

So, aside from a possible trip to get that ink (which might wait until after Christmas, but I’ll need to do it soon), we are DONE!

It feels good.

The Re-Farmer