Mild Amusement

Whenever holidays roll around, the Mild Wife and I try to do something to celebrate. We don't necessarily go all out, but we do like to participate in the festivities. We put up Halloween decorations to let the kids know that they're welcome to trick-or-treat at our house, and there was a whole series of posts this last Christmas ( culminating with this one ) about the festivities. Basically, we like to partake in the holidays. Lunar New Year is no exception to this rule, so we usually end up having some form of a celebratory meal and handing out red envelopes to our nieces and nephews. Again, it's just one of those things that we like to do, to honor our heritages and get in on the celebration just a bit. It just makes things a tiny bit more cheerful. This year, we couldn't do some of the usuals. A family gathering seemed unwise given that the pandemic is still a thing, and we didn't want to go to a restaurant, either. So, that basically left us with having a mea...

Last time, I mentioned that the neighbors seem to have engaged in some sort of a decoration-off for the holidays . Well, they're still at it, folks. I can't actually take pictures of the whole thing because at least one set of neighbors seems to always keep their door open, so they would see me taking pictures of the set up. I figure that'd be an awkward conversation that I don't want to have. So, I'll just have to describe it all to you. I figure I can manage that. To begin with, let me paint the picture with all of the relevant detail. We live in a complex where the apartments are clustered into groups of four, so we have three immediate neighbors. There are a whole lot more neighbors in the vicinity, but they're not the folks we see day in and day out. And of these three neighbors, two have been there since we've moved in. So, we saw what their apartments looked like last year, and we have that point of reference to compare against. Last year, the nei...

One of the joys of married life is figuring out how to celebrate the holidays together. Sure, we've both individually celebrated holidays before, but now we have a family of our own. We get to decide if we go anywhere for Memorial Day, we decide what kind of candy to pass out on Halloween, we figure out what to have for Thanksgiving dinner, and so on. Yes, some of that is a matter of having our own place, but even so, we're starting our own traditions. Take last year, for example. For Halloween, we wanted to make sure that kids knew that we were passing out Halloween candy, so we put up this bad boy on our door: That's like a bright orange bat symbol for trick or treaters It was simple, but it got the job done. We had little kids knock on our door, and I passed out candy. In fact, the Mild Wife says I looked pretty happy doing it (there was a picture of the occasion, but I can't find it for the life of me). I seem to remember being the only ones in our corner of...