Monday, Jan. 3

Up late, around 8 a.m., and did a treadmill session and weights exercises after breakfast. While I was doing this, Hubbie undecorated the large Christmas tree in the sun room. He got all the ornaments off, and stored the tree in its box. Mother came over, but she was in no mood to work on her jigsaw puzzle this morning, so she just relaxed.



Once I was ready for the day, I gathered holiday shirts and sweaters to be washed and stored. I also finished taking winter sweaters and shirts out of storage, making space to store the rest of the summer wear.



After lunch, Hubbie and I ran errands...to a grocery store for cottage cheese, to the dry cleaners, to a health food store for a buy-one-get-one-half-price (plus 20% discount) containers of fish oil gels, to the WDCS, and back to the grocery store, because there were no heads of cabbage, red potatoes, or russet potatoes at the WDCS.



After we got back home, Hubbie and I took all the hooks off the Christmas tree ornaments and then stored the ornaments in a plastic tote. We estimate that we have around 300 ornaments for that tree, so its quite a job to remove the hooks. But it's worth it to keep the ornaments from tangling.



The ornaments were spread out on the top of the hot tub, so I was glad to get them stored so I could use that space to lay out holiday sweaters that I'd washed. Around here, everything has to do double duty.



Mother worked on the jigsaw puzzle a little this afternoon. It's a go-slow project for her, because this Christmas puzzle, featuring a Teddy bear in red, and lots of red and green decorations, not only has sameness of colors, but the pieces are all oddly shaped.



Around 4:30 p.m., my Literacy Council student called to cancel our sessions tonight and tomorrow night, because she and her family are out of town. We scheduled to meet on our usual nights next week.



For supper, we had leftover beef hash, with fried eggs and toast. Mother went home afterward, and Hubbie and I settled in front of TV, as usual.

The past couple of nights, I've wasted some time during programs playing a game I found at the AARP newsletter site. It's called Sumatra, and it features a gorilla climbing up or sliding down a jungle vine. The player has to quickly match three items in a row to keep the gorilla climbing up to the bunch of bananas. If the player isn't quick enough, the gorilla falls into the mouth of a tiger. So far, I've gotten to level four.

The site has lots of brain games...cards, words, strategy, reflex. I like word games best, but have been trying some of the others.

The movie we watched was the 2008, PG-13 movie, "The Other Side of the Tracks," starring Brendan Fehr, Chad Lindberg, Tania Raymonde, and Beatrice Rosen. A young man loses his high school girlfriend to a train accident and is unable to move on. Ten years later, he meets a girl who is the spitting image of his lost love. But the former love keeps showing up as a ghost, while the current girl is not interested in sticking around.