Friday, January 4, 2019

7 Quick Takes about New Lighting, Holiday Traditions Involving Meat Mallets, and Phishing Scams That Don't Seem Very Well Thought-Out

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

1


The kids are back in school, but I'm still riding the high of Christmas break in all its low-stress glory.

We had very few activities to ferry people to and from. We went on a hike nearly every day.  We played board games. We watched movies and ate every meal together. We had fun.

I feel less stressed out now than I have in a long time, even though we're back to real life. I hope it lasts.

2


As is our annual tradition, the kids made me a calendar for the new year and did the artwork for every month.

There was everything from a green blob and a blue blob that my 2-year-old insisted were boats (January) to a beautiful watercolor painting from my 14-year-old of a little boy in a raincoat (March.)

And September's illustration made me smile:

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I really love my blog's logo and I noticed here I'm wearing my favorite sweater in the exact same color. Go figure.

My 12-year-old knew September was the blog's birthday month so she creatively reimagined Unremarkable Files's logo.

Maybe this will help me remember the blog's birthday because I totally forgot last year. Oops.

3


We installed new light fixtures, something for which I started a Pinterest board in 2014 so we've been meaning to do it for a while.

I guess this is a first world problem, but it's pretty hard to take photos of your light fixtures, because if they're on then they cause too much glare to really see them but if they're off it's too dark to really see them.

Old:

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Our entryway used to look like a portal straight to 1980.

New:

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Much more our style.

Watching Phillip taking down the hanging light fixture in the stairwell was a little scary, but all's well that ends well.

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4


Another Evans holiday tradition the kids really look forward to is making a gingerbread house.

Or more accurately, smashing the house with a meat tenderizer when we're done with it.

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The smashing is always performed with the utmost ceremony, going in a circle with everyone getting one turn with the mallet. We do it on New Years' Day and record the proceedings. It's all very serious.

Some years, we've done a gingerbread train from a kit, or one big house they all do together. This year, the oldest two collaborated on a big house and the younger 4 each got a mini-house from a gingerbread village kit.

At first they were disappointed with the small size of the houses but put them on paper plates and got really into decorating walkways on the lawn.

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Next year we're thinking about doing our own village with graham crackers, which sounds good in theory but I think I'll be regretting that decision in December when I've got 5,032 things to do PLUS whipping up a batch of homemade icing for gingerbread houses.

5


I've also been working on a Christmas music playlist. Most people would consider January the wrong time to do that, but right now is when I'm thinking about it so my choices for getting it done are 'now' or 'never.' I choose now.

Of course we have the radio, but I'd like to be able to throw on our own custom list for background ambiance when we're decorating the tree or whatever come December.

I spent a lot of time on Spotify over the last few days listening to music before I realized that most of the songs going on my playlist are just the ones I hear on the radio, anyway. I'm basically doing hours of work to avoid ever having to listen to Wham! sing "Last Christmas" again.

Which is probably worth it.

6


I received this spam text the other day and wasn't sure what to think about it.

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I don't get it. What's in it for them?

Are they sending out a million of these, taking a gamble that they'll actually reach someone whose name is Ashley who has a friend named Emma and will respond, "Oh, Emma! You must be devastated, I can tell by your erratic use of periods  let's meet at the Applebee's on 7th and Washington" and then they mug Ashley when she shows up?

Or are they hoping I'll text back "you have the wrong number" which would then be a perfect segue for them to ask for my bank account information? I just don't understand.

All I know is, Noah sounds like bad news.

7


At my daughter's last band concert, they played the theme from Ghostbusters and it made me think "we should watch the 1984 original with the kids!" It was even rated PG. What could go wrong?

Well, a lot.

First of all, I apparently never saw Ghostbusters. All my childhood memories either came from Ghostbusters II or the cartoon. Probably mostly the cartoon.

It was wildly inappropriate (on further research, I discovered PG-13 hadn't been invented yet) and other than Sigourney Weaver writhing around nonsensically for the entire movie there wasn't even that much to it. I was so unimpressed.

Apparently it wasn't just us who felt this way, because over the next few days it became clear that the Universe was trying to destroy the DVD.

I'd slipped it back in the bag of library items to return, but it somehow it got dropped off with some things we were donating. I noticed and grabbed it out of the donation drop box at the very last second, only to have my 2-year-old snap it in half on the way home.

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I love how this ghost looks distressed about being decapitated.

On that note, my to-do list for today includes "buy replacement copy of worst movie ever." So excited.

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4 comments:

Rosie said...

Meat tenderizer! Brilliant! Especially considering I only use ours like, twice a year otherwise...

Jenny Evans said...

Would you judge me if I said we'd never used ours for anything else?

AnneMarie said...

I think it is so cool that you guys make gingerbread houses! I love the idea of gingerbread houses, but then I honestly don't ever feel like going through all the work. Maybe next year?

On #7-so I've heard similar things from other people when they revisit cherished movies from their youth. My parents were very strict about what they showed us growing up because so much off-putting content was in some of those 80s and early 90s movies, but even in the movies we did watch, when I got older I saw things that had totally gone over my head.

ALSO, we went to a Christmas walk-through light park the other day, and it made me think of you later because there was this stand-up box display that totally had an elf hanging upside down from a hook on the ceiling, making it look like a butcher shop (as my husband pointed out). It just seemed like the kind of random, somewhat hilarious thing that you would totally blog about ;)

Jenny Evans said...

Yes to being horrified at rewatching childhood movies with your children! (Hello, sperm sample scene in The Right Stuff.)

And the Christmas elf? I would absolutely blog the heck out of that.