It has been a relatively relaxing end to the year. Ahh. We had a very nice Christmas, and are trying to soak up the last several days of vacation time before work and school start up next week.
Jose and I have felt particularly handy lately as we tackled some hands-on tasks that we usually don’t like to do. We had to assemble the basketball hoop we got for Christmas, and that was non-trivial! It took two of us about 4 hours to get that thing put together…and then two more days to get it fully ready for play.
The base needed to be filled with either water or sand to properly weight down the hoop. We chose sand, because it seemed like water would get gross over time and also attract mosquitos (even though there is a plug). But the sand we got was damp in the bags, which made it very difficult to funnel into a ~2″ diameter hole.
We borrowed a tarp from our neighbor and over the course of two days we managed to dry it out a bit, and then transfer it shovel by shovel into the base. It was super tedious and honestly kinda sucked. But! At the end we were successful and the hoop has seen daily action ever since.
Jose also took on installation of a new car stereo in our 2012 Highlander. The Bluetooth on the factory stereo hadn’t worked in years, and lately the entire display was intermittently blank/non-operable. He found a new stereo, and was also able to order parts specific to our car to make the installation look as seamless as possible. It took him most of the afternoon but it was a rousing success! And now we know all the stuff that’s back behind that center console — pretty much just wires and a/c vents. Ha.
Several weeks ago, Emma became fascinated by Princess Charlotte — I think she must have come across an article or something on YouTube. She wanted to send her a letter, so we did, and then we all forgot about it.
Imagine her surprise and delight when she got a reply in the mail earlier this week! She was totally thrilled! It was 95% form letter (of course) but it did include 2 photos of the princess — one for Emma and “one for your sister Charlotte.” Someone really did read Emma’s letter and had the kind thought to send two photos! Pretty heartwarming and totally made Emma’s day.
In less fun news, today this alert got pushed out to our phones. Sigh.
p.s. I’m doing a 31 day blogging challenge.
That’s really cool that she got the letter from the princess! It reminds me when I wrote Fred Savage back in the day and months later finally got a form letter and some postcards signed by the Wonder Years cast back!
Chris got that push notification but I didn’t.
I’ve had multiple people rely similar stories about writing letters to celebrities and getting various types of responses. So fun!