I don’t have a ton of delights this week. It’s been a rough few days culminating in me once again not spending Christmas with my family. I am so tired of missing out on things and feeling like I live in this weird alternate reality where everyone else enjoys life as if COVID no longer exists and my health concerns keep me trapped. In some ways things have gotten a little better in that I’ve decided that for mental health I at least have to up my risk tolerance to include things I can do masked even if no one else is, but that still leaves out a ton of things because you really don’t realize how much of social life revolves around food and drink until you don’t want to be maskless in public. In other ways it’s worse because I feel completely alone in this now as everyone else has gone back to living normal lives, and in the past there has always been some hope that some vaccine, some treatment, some wave is going to signal not an end but at least the low case numbers that make it more reasonable for me to let my guard down a little. There is no hope on the horizon anymore. This is it. Probably for a good long time. I read something recently that was talking about for most part for most people with vaccination and previous infection COVID is not that much of a risk anymore, but for the people who it’s still a risk for it’s bad. It’s hard to know exactly where I fall in that. I’m worse off than people without multiple autoimmune disorders and on a bunch of immunosuppressants, but better off than people who didn’t mount any immune response to the vaccines because I know I did. It’s hard to know how much of an issue long COVID is at this point, and I do know that getting COVID puts me at a much bigger risk of sending my Crohn’s or arthritis into a flare. The thought of that alone makes me want to continue to avoid COVID even when I feel insane. Anyway, none of this is what we’re here for. So let’s see what good things we could find in the week.

• I like eggnog. It’s terrible for you, so I usually allow myself one half gallon a year. I’ve been drinking that with some ginger cookies I made, and it’s the perfect combination. I am cheating a little this year because I made an eggnog cheesecake for our work holiday party last week and bought a second container because of that. It used way less eggnog than I thought it would, so now I have a lot more eggnog to drink.
• Speaking of our work holiday party, we were encouraged to dress festively. I have this dinosaur sweater that is not strictly a Christmas sweater, but the pattern on it is Christmasy enough that people assume it is. I wore that and surprisingly 3 of the around 25 people there were wearing dinosaur themed Christmas attire. Who knew dinosaurs and Christmas were such a thing.
• There is a hot dog place around the corner from house that opened sometime in the past year. I haven’t eaten there because hot dogs are really terrible for you, and I don’t like them enough in general to justify eating one. I do enjoy an occasional hot dog on a grill at a bbq, but if I’m getting food from a restaurant I am never going to choose a hot dog. I don’t even get them at baseball games. Anyway, as I was walking by the hot dog restaurant the other day some woman was coming out and started loudly exclaiming to me and all the other people on the sidewalk near me how amazing the hot dogs there are and we should all go get one. I appreciated her enthusiasm and am glad she enjoyed her lunch even though I will probably never follow her advice.
• I really should have played the lottery earlier this year when it was up to crazy levels because I feel like I have been extra lucky at winning things this year. I already won tickets to the Shriver Hall concert series and a Courtney Marie Andrews album with a hand painted cover earlier this year. This past week I won tickets to see Dawes in concert in DC in March. I had been debating buying tickets because I really like Dawes, but I also really hate driving to DC for concerts. So I was just sort of waiting to see how I felt closer to the date and if it wasn’t sold out I might go. Then I saw that a local radio station was doing a Tixmas giveaway. They had a handful of concerts you could choose from to try and win, but you could only choose one. I already have tickets to the Maggie Rogers concert that would have been my first choice, so I figured I would try for the Dawes tickets and if I won then my decision was made for me. I got an email that I won over the weekend. So yay!
• I was out for a walk yesterday and an old timey fire truck from the Fire Museum of Maryland drove by with a guy dressed as Santa Claus hanging out the window and waving to people. He waved at me and it brought a moment of pure joy.
• And we’ll end with a little Christmas music for you. I wrote about Hiss Golden Messenger’s new Christmas album when it came out last year for one of my New Music Friday posts. I still stand by everything I said. And I’m going to leave you with the exact same song from it. I know it’s only been a year, so I can’t say for sure that it will have staying power forever, but for now it has quickly become one of my favorite Christmas albums. It was the first Christmas album I played this year. It doesn’t hurt that the colored vinyl is my favorite of all the colored vinyl that I own too. It’s sort of this cream color with red and green splotches on it that sort of look like Christmas lights. I love it.