They tell me that when I was very little I would sit for long periods of time just watching the bubble lights do there thing. Hey, I was a little girl – little girls concentrate better than little boys. I watched them a little this year, but because the tree was located where it could be seen from many places in the house, it worked out that none of those places was a sitting area where the seats faced the tree. So most of my watching was a pause in my walk-bys. I need a little tree with about seven bubble lights on it just for me – maybe next year.

It’s still this year, though, and soon I will be taking the bubble lights off the lower and stronger branches of our Frazier fir and packing them away. The colored lights all come down, but the white ones I usually leave where I have placed them haphazardly on fake ficus trees and tumbling down from the crook of a goose-necked floor lamp.

I call these remaining white lights “Winter Lights” or “Northern Lights” and they usually last until the days start to lengthen and the sun itself shifts and begins to brighten the house with new angles.

And speaking of changing seasons, here comes Summer.

Normally, I get lots and lots of notifications of special offers in my email. I let them come and scan through the senders because I have learned sometimes a retailer will offer stubborn resisters of email offers a really, really good deal . . . before the offer goes more public a day later or whatever. I do not turn my nose up at 50% off products I really want to buy anyway – oh, like Yankee Candles and Easy Spirit shoes/boots.

But what makes up my email is not my point here; my point the amount . . . and what happened yesterday. From the magic number of 2:22 pm until way after 11, I received not one notice, alert, or anything at all. Now, just three days after Christmas, I found this extremely odd. For nine hours, nobody wanted to alert me to any deal, anywhere, at any price.

In today’s world, that might almost be a sign that the world has ended – sort of a sky is falling scenario.

I have been thinking about today’s world and how short amount of time it takes to make something an “antique” – and I am not talking about moi. But surely duct tape is forever as the fixer of anything . . . but then we thought that about baling wire. Sigh.