Winter is mousetrap time, and yesterday I noticed one of 2 traps I have in the basement is entirely gone. I know a mouse was caught in it, but it's nowhere to be found. I can clearly here when the traps go off, usually early evening, after the darkness and cold have set in. Very wierd. Same thing happened this morning with the other trap, although in that case, I found the trap...empty. They are getting very good at escaping.

Remember in my last post my belief that you can get around the "too many credit card offers applied for" scenario by applying for more than one credit card on the same day? I was wrong. I got the explanation from one of the two card offers I was turned down for. I was turned down because I had already applied for the Wells Fargo card. I should get the Wells Fargo card soon, and then, happy charging toward the $200 bonus.

Speaking of charging, I did go on a bit of a spending spree for myself. My father gifts each of his kids money, and so I spent only a very small portion of it, about 5% of it.

You see, I've reached a certain point in life. For many decades, i've just naturally been frugal. Well, probably because I HAD to.  I most often shopped with the final price being an important, if not the most important factor in making the purchase. Now, I want to treat myself a bit better, where it counts.

So I purchased some very nice Pottery Barn percale sheets, plus some other sateen sheets elsewhere. (I want to compare them and see which I like better.) Both cost substantially more than the bargain-basement sheets (often flannel) I would usually buy at some place like WalMart or Target. I am really looking forward to sleeping in some quality sheets.

I also very recently bought a nice gray chunky big weave cotton blanket. In addition, I have a very nice Pottrery Barn coverlet I bought about 3 years ago which has still yet to be used (!), as I knew the cat would sharpen his claws on it. I figured he is 15 years old, and that I would wait. He's still hanging in there.

The other thing I've been spending on is cute jeans/straight leg pants. Ever since I lost weight and found I wear a size 6 pant, I've been stocking up on whatever strikes my fancy. ..torn jeans, frayed hem jeans and other little embellishments. I love them all.

A much larger expense was another tree takedown, a towering white pine in my front yard. Now I can rest a little easier when the next storm arrives. I'll need to clear out all the weeds that were growing under the canopy, and now I have a roughly 25-foot diameter space to plant more pollinator perennials and shrubs. There's already a doublefile viburnum and a Japanese maple sapling in there that I will leave, but everything else will go: mostly poison ivy, some black locust saplings and mile-a-minute vine.

Wednesday I had my friend R. and her dog over for a glass of wine; she brought a bunch of her gorgeous and delicious Christmas cookies.

Yesterday I took my dad out for breakfast at Chip's. Today, Christmas eve, happens to be my friend D.'s birthday, and she is recovering from hip replacement surgery, so I told her I'd be over there with some cookies I made for her. I also brought her some homemade split pea soup last week. I won't be doing anything special for Christmas until end of day, when the new man I'm dating comes over. I knew he'd be spending the day with his family, so I suggested he enjoy his time with them, then swing over here when he's done.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Things are going along swimmingly.

I have not yet done my year-end reports on spending/income, but will do soon.

Today I noticed while paying a credit card bill online that they had already preapproved me for one of their new cards, which came with a $100 bonus.  I was going to go for it, but then figured I may as well check creditcards.com to see if I could find a card with a higher bonus. I did, a Wells Fargo card that gives you $200 bonus after a $1K spend in first 3 months. Of course, I had to temporarily lift my credit freeze at all 3 bureaus first. Anyway, I was approved. My credit is in the Excellent category.

I think I had read somewhere that it takes a day or two for a credit check to show up on your credit reports, so I thought I would apply for a SECOND card, soley for the bonus offer, especially since I noticed there was a Citi offer where you only had to spend $750 in the first 3 months, and I was confident I could hit the spend targets of both cards.

Unfortunately, I was denied the 2nd credit card application, and then a 3rd. So maybe what I thought I'd heard about the delay in credit checks showing up in your report was untrue.

Well, anyway, happy to get the Wells Fargo card.

Today is a rare day when I have nothing in particular I really have to do, plus the weather's a bit dismal, so I'm enjoying posting here.

I've been dating someone new for about the past 4 or 5 weeks now. He lives kind of far away (about 55 min) so I've only been seeing him once a week. He's a retired pharmacist (not in retail setting, in a hospital). We seem to have a lot in common including hiking, biking, kayaking and a love of travel.

Now that my knee is about 90% better, I think we've hiked every time we've met (except the 1st time, when we met at a Panera's).

It's kind of nice that my cousin, who's a few years older than me and widowed, ALSO met someone and will probably end up marrying him She actually knew him for 20 years as he works at the same engineering firm she's worked at since high school. He was more recently widowed. She told me she never expected to find love again. She's very happy, and he's whisking her away to see different concerts every week, Bocelli being the most recent one. So we are like 2 teenagers comparing notes, although they are about 6 months ahead of us.

I bought some matcha tea a while ago, and decided to make some today. Boy, was it awful. So bad, in fact, that it made my stomach unsettled and nauseous. I had to eat some crystallized ginger. Ugh. Might try again in a smoothie with other stuff, but definitely not straight. I would like to learn to love matcha, the way I did tinned sardines, for the health benefits.

My Christmas shopping was all done a while ago, and just one more thing to wrap.

I'm VERY happy to report I've returned to near daily walking for exercise, weather permitting. Tomorrow I'll make a split pea soup for the week ahead.