Monday's X Factor

Normally Monday blogging means a weekend recap, but we're riding the tail winds of the A-Z Blog Challenge this week so I'm going to do a bit of both here today. It's a little bit long but that's pretty much how I roll. 

We had a fairly quiet weekend. I guess? Towards the end of last week this happened-

They have been begging to get in the water since they arrived mid-January, and this week we finally said yes. It was a warm (relatively speaking) sunny day with lake temps a balmy 70 degrees, but kids do not care. 

I asked hubs if he was going to put on his swim suit and he said no. If they needed help he'd jump in in his clothes. Our lake will be 80 by sometime in May so we'll wait thank you very much. It will be like bath water as the days get longer. 

This was a short swim, but a happy one. Summer is almost here-whoohoo! 

And now for the weekend recap with Holly (Pink Lady Blog) and Sarah (Sunshine and Books)-

Friday the 'kids' closed on their new home. So exciting! I had the grands that morning while mom and dad went to sign papers and make it all official. Hubs went too because he was their realtor. My daughter had arranged to have the upstairs carpet cleaned right after the closing (the lower level has wood floors), so she and the hubs (mine, not hers-hers had to get back to work) went straight to the house and I brought the kids over right after. 

They had so much fun exploring every nook and cranny and running around the backyard. Their furniture has been in storage since before they moved to England and won't be delivered until later this week, but they're on the home stretch now.

My son-in-law's dad brought his truck to our house so we could load up a sofa the kids are taking. They wanted it cleaned along with the rugs, and of course by 'we' I mean I held the door and hubs and my daughter's father-in-law did the heavy lifting.  My son-in-law was conveniently back at work by this time lol. I had all the kids in my daughter's van, plus two additional chairs they're also taking from us.

Nothing about moving is easy. 

We dropped the furniture then hubs had to drop off some of the close paperwork at his office. Before he left we took the kids to Firehouse Subs for lunch and to get them out of the empty house and away from the carpet cleaning. 

The boys had baseball that evening followed by a movie night at their church so once my son-in-law was home he managed that. Daughter1 and little Miss stayed here for bath and bedtime and hubs and I took ourselves to our favorite wine bar to relax. Whew. We ordered a charcuterie for dinner and ran into some friends there which is always fun. 

No pictures of any of it but that's just how the weekend went. 

Saturday hubs was 'working' the boat show. He and another realtor had a booth at the local show so that was his day. The kids were at baseball because every day is baseball, then my son-in-law's sister, along with his parents, went to see the new house. His dad had seen it that morning when he was moving the couch, but his mom hadn't been inside. They all went back to the in-law's lake house for dinner. 

Here's the thing...you think one day you'll be done moving furniture for your kids, but I'm here to tell you that's not necessarily so. Carry on. 

I had my whole house and the entire afternoon to myself. I cannot remember the last time that happened, but it's been a very long while. I was out running errands all morning, but spent the afternoon catching up on my blog and some HGTV and maybe a short nap. I feel like I should have been doing something productive, but we're all pooped here.  

Wait. I did six loads of laundry. That's not nothing. 

Saturday night hubs and I shared a frozen pizza and watched a movie we'd seen before, but not in a long long time-Begin Again with Keira Knightly and Mark Ruffalo. It's cute. 

On Sunday hubs was back at the marina for another day at the boat show, and I went to church with the kids, then out to breakfast/lunch with them right after, then a quick grocery run, then home to an iced coffee on the porch. The pollen is mostly under control now so I put the cushions out on the upper deck and sat outside all afternoon. 

This is pretty much where you'll find me every Sunday afternoon from now until Christmas. Sunday nights too...

Now, about that A-Z challenge and today's letter-X.  Always a tough one, but let's see what we can come up with...

X is for Xerox

'to copy on a a xerographic copier' 

The first word that popped into my head was xerox. As in xerox machine. Does anyone still use this phrasing? I mean other than people who work for the company with that same name? I think now we use the word copy, but there was a time when xerox was the preferred term. These days we print, right? 

Anyway, it got me thinking about some of the things from 'my day' that were common, but are not so common anymore. 

Film developing. I think amongst professional photographers this is still a thing, but most people now are snapping pictures on their phone. Which is great, but definitely lacks the excitement of waiting two whole weeks to get your pictures back from the developer, only to discover you had your thumb on the corner of the lens. That's how you learned-ha! 

Banking. I don't know about you, but I avoid going in to the bank if I can possibly help it. When I was growing up you had to physically take your check to the bank to cash it. No such thing as an ATM or mobile deposit. No mobile phones for one thing, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole right now. 

I loved going to the local bank with my momma. It seemed like a place I'd enjoy working. It was quiet and tastefully decorated and it felt important. If you didn't get to the bank by Friday afternoon you were not going to have any cash to spend over the weekend, so banks were a happening place. 

Encyclopedias. We had a whole set on a bookshelf in our den, and we really did look things up in them.  Kind of like the Internet before the Internet. We liked just reading them too because you learned things. At the end of every year the encyclopedia publisher sent out a yearbook with highlights of events from the year that was ending. 

Sometimes you would have a school assignment requiring research and you would have to go to the library and look in a different encyclopedia to see if it added anything yours missed. I'm not sure which set we had but I want to say Encyclopedia Americana. I imagine my parents bought them from someone selling them door-to-door, which was not unusual at all in the 1970's. 

Memorizing phone numbers. Not gonna lie, I'm kind of glad I don't have to do this one anymore. 

Busy signals. Speaking of phones...this one I do sort of miss. You'd call a friend on the house phone (because that was the only phone game in town) and if they were on the phone talking to someone else you would get a busy signal. 

It was super annoying to get a busy signal just fyi. 

If you got a busy signal, you'd hang up and then immediately redial the number. If it was still busy you'd call again. And again and again and then you'd wonder who in the world they could be talking to and you might just give up and talk to them at school in person the next day. 

I don't think we appreciated being unavailable until we entered the era of being available 24/7 365 days of the year. 

Smoking sections. It sounds crazy to us now, but everywhere you went had a smoking section. Airports, airplanes! restaurants, and my high school, although I'm not sure that one was official. Seriously though, we used to get on an airplane and be seated in row 12 and the smoking section might start at row 13 so yeah. Not great if you were a non-smoker. 

In my high school C-wing was where everyone smoked. And the lavatories too. Do we still use that word? If you weren't a smoker you avoided C-wing. I know some high schools had parents sign a permission slip allowing their kid to smoke but I don't remember that being the case at my school. I've never been a smoker. 

The corner mailbox. We had one about a block and a half from our house and we loved being sent to the mailbox to mail a letter. Speaking of uncommon things...letters. Do you still write them? 

Postcards. It was fun to travel and mail a postcard back home or to a friend or your grandparents, and it was fun to be on the receiving end too. Of course there are still postcards available, but most people text a picture or message instead of bothering to buy a postcard, buy a stamp, and find a place to mail one when they're away from home. 

Communal viewing. We never watched anything alone. Most families had one television set, wall phones in the communal spaces in their homes, and no computers. We chose a program everyone could watch and then we all settled in to watch it together. Family togetherness. It was nice. 

"I remember, I remember 

The house where I was born, 

The little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn..."

Thomas Hood, from I Remember, I Remember