Holidays and Hurrying Around

The holidays are upon us and my life has gotten a bit odd. It's not exactly because of the holidays, though. My friend Pat's daughter, the mother-to-be for whom I've been knitting, is here for Christmas. What she doesn't know, but her mom and I know, is that there's a surprise baby shower for her on Saturday. Pat and I have been racing around town, shopping, running various errands, and trying to decide on our shower presents.

I had no problem picking out a gift, as a long discussion of the excellence of the baby swing convinced me immediately that nothing else would do. When I showed Pat the one I'd selected from Amazon, she decided to send another item in the collection, too. After intense discussion, we decided to send them to her daughter's home, denying ourselves the chance to see them in real life. However, we did have the diaper bags (a two-bag set) sent here. I'll tuck the sheets and descriptions from Amazon into the respective bags and she'll have something to unwrap and be surprised by. This whole thing has consumed more time than I thought it could, mostly on selecting the proper color and pattern.

We also spent a day getting our new toilets installed. This house was built in 1972 and I, in my youth and foolishness, put in two Harvest Gold bathrooms. When we bought the first house in Palm Desert we had Kohler Wellworth low-flow toilets. These were the first low-flow toilets we'd seen and liked. The second Palm Desert house had them, too, and now our Lancaster house has them. In white. Plain, glowing white. I'm a quick learner. Next I'm going to replace the Harvest Gold lavatory sinks, rendering one of my bathrooms into a white bathroom (except for the gold tile around the shower). I'll still have the Harvest Gold bathtub, though. I understand they can be painted or powdercoated or something, for a lot less than they can be replaced.

To add insult to injury, my dishwasher is making an odd noise and not getting the dishes as clean as I'd like. It's the second dishwasher we've had since '72, so it's not as if we didn't get our money's worth out of it. However, the expensive soundproofed dishwasher in the Palm Desert house has spoiled me. I'm going to try to hold out on this for a while though. Ditto on the washer (which doesn't always seem to spin well enough) and the dryer (which seems to have lost some of the intermediate heat settings). They're both quite aged and I knew this day would come. I'd just hoped it wouldn't come for every appliance in the house all at once.

I've been knitting like a fiend, between all these digressions. I finished my BIL's scarf last night and the what-not for what's-her-name is coming along nicely. As soon as I finish that, I can go back to my brightly colored shawl.

There's an excellent chance that the probate for my mom's estate will close this month. There hasn't been much action on the house, as my realtor expected, but we hope to see more action in February.