Quirky Cars and False Fire Alerts, a Ten Things of Thankful Post

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The first Thankful Day of the New Year finds me still thankful for the craziness of my life.

We’d ended Christmas Day by sending he turkey carcass home with #2 Son and his crew so they could make a gumbo.  I’m thankful he has also taken over that job, as it used to be mine.

It’s a thankful thing they showed up in NOLA the Saturday after Christmas while i was cleaning to bring a huge amount of the gumbo to Grandma and Grandpa.

My Sweetie, who always votes for ham over turkey and gets voted down every single time, is thankful the company which makes his favorite honey spiral sliced ham sells it by the pound, and one pound is the perfect amount for him to have a meal and then several sandwiches.

I’m thankful it’s much more affordable than a whole ham, which has skyrocketed in price.

Our one church service on Sunday was lovely.  We don’t have a choir, just a Christmas carol sing, where people call out favorites and we sing a verse or two of as many as possible.  This year, someone picked a selection which came from the Hallelujah Chorus, and we’re all thankful we know just enough of it to get through the small section.  It was fun.

GusGus die Fledermaus (my car, yes, we name our cars, don’t judge) has quirks.  There’s one really weird quirk for which i am thankful, all the dashboard lights stop working if the battery is about to go bad.  Yes, that is weird, no my mechanics can’t figure it out, but on Christmas Eve, my dash lights went out.  I didn’t use GusGus that weekend except on Sunday to take me and Becca to church, and after work on Monday drove straight to Kevin and Lenny’s place.

When i pulled in, i went and told them the dash lights were out and the battery needed replacing again.  One went out and checked, and sure enough, the battery was bad in less than one year after replacement, so it was under warranty!  I was very thankful there would be no cost for replacement.

Our little Annie is thankful i keep avocados around, as her very last avocado to snack on had gone bad and i gave her three.

Speaking of Annie, she was very, very afraid of her Dada when he was setting off fireworks.  She was unimpressed with the noise and he quit long before he had used up all he’d bought.  She was thankful he stopped, and i’m thankful he is so considerate of his daughter.  I’ve known fathers who would have just continued anyway and laughed about it, figuring it would “toughen her up.”

Work continued as usual this week.  While i’m not thankful Carl left a crayon in his pocket and i missed it and a lot of laundry had crayon on it, i am thankful Ms. V agreed some of the ruined items were so old and worn anyway they were not worth trying to get the crayon out.

Ms. G took us for a visit to Ms. Fiona and i was thankful to get to see her.  She’s doing well and we had a nice visit.

I’m also thankful we always stop at the day-old bread store on the way, i snagged a loaf of my favorite bread, which costs a lot at retail so i seldom buy any.

On New Year’s Day, Ms. V actually got up at a decent hour so i was thankful to be able to get the laundry going earlier rather than later.  I’ll be even more thankful when her exercise class starts again, since she gets up very early on those days.  (Very early being 8am or so for her — rather than 10 or later.)

While babysitting yesterday, Daughter-in-Law put something in the oven to start cooking it early and then it was time for Annie to nap.  She’d just gotten to sleep when the fire alarm went off!

I’m thankful their fire alarm has a button to make it stop called “Hush Mode,” Daughter-in-Law was thankful the supper in the oven was not really burning, and we’re both thankful the baby went down for her nap after that anyway.

The cat shelter adopted out a lot of cats over the holidays, thankfully, my shift went well Friday night and we are very thankful for three more adoptions that very evening.

Please write up your own list and link up to Ten Things of Thankful, where Clark and his co-hosts always have a warm welcome waiting.   

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Today is:

Day of Remembrance for Princess Olga -- Slavic Pagan Calendar

Earth at Perihelion -- 5:15pm UTC (closest point to the Sun)

Full Wolf Moon -- the wolves howl hungrily during this cold month, sometimes called the Old Moon or the Yule Moon; some of the following celebrations began yesterday evening

     Duruthu Full Moon Poya Day -- Sri Lanka

     Mahayana New Year -- Buddhist

     Pyatho Full Moon -- Myanmar (traditionally the time of equestrian festivals)

     Thorrablot/Thurseblot -- Ancient Norse Calendar (feast honoring Thor, guardian of Midgard, at the first full moon of the new year)

     Thaipusam/Thaipoosam Cavadee -- Tamil People; Malaysia; Mauritius (Tamil Hindu multi-day celebration of the birth of the god Murugan)

Hakozakigu Tamaseseri -- Fukuoka, Japan (ceremony of the red ball which brings good luck to the team which catches it)

Humiliation Day -- drawing attention to the fact that it's okay to be humble, but not to humiliate others

J.R.R. Tolkien Day -- birth anniversary

Memento Mori / "Remember You Die" Day -- Wellcat Holidays suggests putting these words where you can see them often, to remind you to cherish what you have today

National Chocolate Covered Filled Cherry Day

National Write to Congress Day -- US (the new session begins today or, if the 3rd is on a weekend, the following Monday; write your Congress-persons and Senators and tell them what you think)

Revolution Day -- Burkina Faso

Shigoto-hajime -- Japan (first work day of the New Year; work begun well today will prosper)

St. Genevieve's Day (Patron of females in the military; Paris, France; against plague, disasters, fevers)

Tamaseseri Festival -- Hakozaki Shrine, Fukuoka, Japan (men in fundoshi - loincloths - compete for the ball; if the winning team is from a seaside town, it will be an auspicious year for fishermen, if the land team wins, there will be a good harvest)

Tenth Day of Christmas

Anniversaries Today:

Alaska becomes the 49th US State, 1959

Establishment of Wind Cave National Park, SD, US, 1903

Birthdays Today

Eli Manning, 1981

Danica McKellar, 1975

Joan Chen, 1960

Mel Gibson, 1956

Victoria Principal, 1950

John Paul Jones, 1946

Stephen Stills, 1945

Van Dyke Parks, 1943

Dabney Coleman, 1932

Robert Loggia, 1930

George Martin, 1926

Jan Walsh Anglund, 1926

Maxine Andrews, 1918

John Sturges, 1911

Victor Borge, 1909

Ray Milland, 1905

Zasu Pitts, 1898

Marion Davies, 1897

Clement Richard Attlee, 1883

J.R.R. Tolkien, 1892

Father Joseph Damien, 1840

Lucretia Coffin Mott,  1793

William Tucker, 1624 (first African American child born in North America)

Cicero, BC106

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"The Arsenio Hall Show"(TV), 1989

"Queen for a Day"(TV), 1956

"Look Up and Live"(TV), 1954

"Symphonic Dances"(Rachmaninoff, Op. 45), 1941

"An Ideal Husband"(Play), 1895

Today in History:

Joan of Arc is handed over to the bishop for trial, 1431

Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine, 1496

Martin Luther is formally excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, 1521

The first theater in Amsterdam, the Schouwburg, opens, 1638

Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont as a separate state, 1749

Stephen F. Austin receives a grant of land in Texas from the government of Mexico, 1823

Joseph Jenkins Roberts is sworn in as the first president of the independent African Republic of Liberia, 1848

The Meiji Restoration returns authority to Japan's emperors, 1868

Oleomargarine is patented by Henry Bradley, Binghamton, NY, 1871

The wax drinking straw is patented, by Marvin C Stone in Washington DC, 1888

The refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory, then the largest in the world, is put into use, 1888

The first known use of the word automobile was seen in an editorial in The New York Times, 1899

British explorer Howard Carter discovers the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, Egypt, 1924

Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy, dissolves the Italian parliament, 1925

Minnie D. Craig becomes the first female elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States, 1933

Frances Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress, 1953

Edmund Hillary reaches South Pole overland, 1958

The West Indies Federation is formed, 1958

Apple Computer is incorporated, 1977

Margaret Thatcher becomes the longest-serving British Prime Minister in the 20th Century, 1988

In Moscow, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), 1993

More than seven million people from the former Apartheid Homelands, receives South African citizenship, 1994

The People's Republic of China announces it will spend fight erosion and pollution in the Yangtze and Yellow river valleys, 1977

The Mars Polar Lander is launched, 1999

Australian researchers discover the 1912 plane that was the first taken to Antarctica, 2010

The Ezadeen, an abandoned ship carrying 450 Syrians, is rescued from choppy waters and brought safely to shore in Italy; the ship is the second to be abandoned by human traffickers off the nation's coast in the last four days, 2015

Scientists in Rome unveil the first bionic hand with a sense of touch that can be used outside of a laboratory, 2018

Archaeologists in Mexico announce the discovery of a pre-Aztec (around 900-1150AD) temple to god Xipe Tótec in Puebla state, 2019

The Chinese Chang'e-4 spacecraft becomes the first ever to touch down on the far side of the Moon, 2019

Apple becomes the first US company to be worth $3 trillion, 2022

Lowest January temperature recorded in Sweden for 25 years in Kvikkjokk-Årrenjarka, Swedish Lapland, of -43.6 C (minus 46.5 F), comes amid a very cold spell across Scandinavia, 2024

At age 17, English darts prodigy Luke Littler becomes the youngest-ever world champion when he beats three-time title winner Michael van Gerwen, 2025