Oregon Living 2025 – Blog #51 – Ending the Year

 

   

 

Sunday, December 28^th., 2025…… The weather is still pretty chilly this morning but no rain so far. As I mentioned, Heather and Charley were gone when we got up, headed out to breakfast and then back up to home in Seattle.  After walking and feeding the dogs, we ate our leftovers from yesterday, settled in, and spent the morning staying warm. Around noon, I went out and met Cherrelyn and Penny, who came by to help us with the wellhouse. Yes, it goes out there today! It wasn’t as hard as I had anticipated. We got it loaded on the truckster with no issues and I drove it out there and staged it and cleaned up around the area. I backed up close and the three of us (Penny is still nursing her shoulder) lifted it up and over the existing box around the wellhead. It isn’t exactly level but for now it’s good! Penny got a bunch of pics of the crew…..

 

Thanks to everyone for their help!

Cherrelyn left right away and went back home to watch her Steelers game. After a little time to visit, Penny left and we rested for the day. No class this week so we had the whole day and evening.      

Monday, December 29^th., 2025…… Cathye had me up and going this morning to go get my flu shot. I had made an appointment yesterday to go to Walgreens in Albany, so, after we walked and fed the dogs, I took off for that. When I got back, we started in on the task of taking down some of the Christmas stuff. Cat likes to keep things up for a bit, whereas I like to get it down and stored asap. I guess she agreed with me this year and started packing things away. For the most part we got a lot of the little things put away, including all of the items from the alcove. I am rethinking how to modify the railing I just built to incorporate the lights next time. Hmmm.  We did leave the tree up and will take that down in a few days.     

Tuesday, December 30^th., 2025…… Today it was rainy and cold! Temps are now in the low 30s in the mornings. We walked and fed the girls. I got a call from the vet checking on Jama. I told them she had some swelling around the main cut on her neck, plus she was bothered by the ones on her butt by the tail. She said to bring her in and gave us a time later in the afternoon for that. When we got her there, they treated the wound and wrapped her in a compression bandage and had us leave it on for 24 hours. She gets the stiches out next week so hopefully she’ll be ready for that!  Later, we changed into warm clothes – including ugly sweaters! - and headed north!  We would be meeting the kids and Josh at the Portland Zoo for the evening!  We took Josh’s gift – yes, an ugly sweater! – and gave it to him there. I paid for our parking at the kiosk and we met up with everyone and headed in. We took all of our pics on Cat’s phone because I forgot to charge mine! 

The kids had a great time and the little were really good too!  They were bundled up and were in the carriers and mom and dad each had one. Cat would take over later and said it was easy to walk around with that arrangement!  After walking the whole thing, we called it a night and left the kids with the elephants and headed back home. The drive was nice and the rain kept away for the whole night so it was the best. Except for one thing which I will talk about more later…..      

Wednesday, December 31^st., 2025…… We slept in this morning and then got up with the girls. Or rather I was up with the girls!  Cat slept in even longer!  We ate breakfast and did some more work on the Christmas stuff. But mostly we just hung around the house. Cathye went off to Walmart to get salad fixings for our dance tonight.  Later, it was time to get dressed up for our New Year’s bash! If you remember, last year we were the chairs for our club’s New Year’s dance. This time, it was a co-op from the Alliance of Clubs in the area. But, it was decided to have it at our senior center because we had the best hall. This year, we volunteered to come in and be on the hall setup crew as well as chairs for the sparkling cider toast. We  met at the agreed time and found that the hall was already set up!  Turns out Brittany and Jimmy had come in early and found the hall open and just started in!  They put out all of the tables and chairs for the meal plus lined up chairs around the dance floor. The rest of the team started in on decorating the tables and the walls, plus the food team got their tables set up and ready for the crowd. Later, we served a buffet dinner. With the other clubs involved, we had plenty of food. It would turn out to be a great night of food and dancing and celebrating. Turns out we were competing with the teen club up in Salem, so we had a smaller turnout than we had hoped for. So, we had plenty of sparkling cider for the toast. We did that at 9:00pm to celebrate east coast time. The dance lasted until 10:00pm and then we helped clean up and then slipped out to head back home. We watched some tv then went out to the spa with our own champagne to toast in the real new year!  

Thursday, January 1^st., 2026…… HAPPY NEW YEAR!   We slept in this morning. Actually, I was up and let Cat sleep. I walked Rylee (Jama would not leave the bed either!) and fed her then made coffee and breakfast. Cat stayed in her pjs all day. She watched the parade, which I had taped, while I watched last night’s playoff game and then the day’s bowl games. That took up most of the day, so we didn’t do much else.   

Friday, January 2^nd., 2026……  I was wakened by a text message at 6:45am this morning. I knew it wouldn’t be good…. It was from my bank. Turns out my debit card was hacked!  Yet again!  I knew right away it was from the parking meter at the zoo!  Or else it was the cocoa I bought inside. The zoo is cashless and they have ATMs in the park where you use your cash to get a temporary credit card to be used while there. That makes it a prime mark for hackers to use whatever they can to get into your account. I was also hacked a few years back when we parked to go on a river cruise in Portland.  For this one, they denied a charge in New Jersey and I confirmed it wasn’t me. So, they automatically close the card. I have had this happen to me several times as I’m sure you have read about already. I am learning that I needed to remove the auto pay features for my utilities (Directv, Verizon, gas, etc.) from debit cards and have them deducted from the bank account directly. I have most of them done now but I still will get a notice from others that my payment was denied.  Bummer!

We spent the rest of the day loading up the totes with the Christmas decorations and getting them out to the garage floor. We’ll get to the rest of it tomorrow.     

Saturday, January 3^rd., 2026…… This morning we got up and going and walked and fed the dogs. I wanted pancakes so I volunteered to take Cat out to Denny’s in Albany. We had a nice meal. They have a special apple pancake combo that I tried.

It was very good. With what we couldn’t eat, I will have leftovers for tomorrow! When we got home, we concentrated on getting all of the decoration totes up on the rack in the garage. I had to move two of the mowers but we got it done pretty quickly. We ended up giving the kids three totes worth of decorations so we have plenty of room there now. The only thing left for today was our regular Club dance. It was voted on at the last board meeting to go ahead and hold our scheduled dance even though we would be there three days earlier for New Year’s.  We were on the ‘no’ vote side, so when it came time to dress and go, we made the decision to just not do it!   We stayed in for the evening and relaxed and watched tv.