4 things: getting home, Yuletide, annual inventory, and Ardis

I am back in Ithaca. My mom and I drove up yesterday morning/afternoon, having left slightly earlier than we otherwise might have for fear of freezing rain and icy roads. But it turned out that other than a 6-10 mile stretch right where I-380 splits off from I-80 (where all the trees were coated in a quarter inch of ice, and bowed down under the weight), there was no ice at all, and even in the part with scary trees, the road itself was fine.

So I arrived safely and then went to work and closed the store.

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Yuletide Madness (the < 1000 word stories part of Yuletide) is now open, so all six of my stories are anonymously public. Yay! I have been browsing idly through the archive and doing my best to comment on most of the stories I've been reading, but it is mentally exhausting to come up with a comment longer than "This is cool; I enjoyed reading it." I may end up just leaving variations of that comment in a lot of places, though I am trying to add at least one further sentence saying something more specifically related to each story in question.

I will probably do a recs post in a few days.

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In work-related news, we usually do the first semi-annual inventory on the first Monday of January (assuming that is not New Year's Day itself), but this year our owner wants everything counter a little sooner, so we seem to be scheduled to do inventory tomorrow, on December 28th. Nobody is thrilled about this.

I have made up little gifts for my coworkers, which are basically a card-with-note, four cookies, and two rolls of Smarties. It is not much, but it is the thought that counts, right? And the cookies are tasty; I know this because my family does not reuse bad cookie recipes. *grin*

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We had champagne cocktails (of the Maharajah's Burra-Peg variety) in Ardis's honor on Christmas Eve. Also, on the way down Dad told me more details about what had happened as the angiogram went wrong, what the autopsy had revealed, and what the doctors speculated might have caused the problem. I am not a doctor, so my details are fuzzy at best, but this is what I understand of the situation.

( What happened, it seems, is that they went in and found an arterial blockage... )

So. At least Ardis was not conscious through this; she was under anesthesia for the angiogram, and then in a coma because they had her on a respirator, so she was not in pain and just never woke up. And she never had to leave her house, or give up her car, or anything like that. So for her, it was probably a decent way to die, as these things go. It's just the rest of us who are finding it hard to process.

...

When I got home yesterday, I found my Christmas gift from Ardis waiting on the porch; it had arrived in my absence. She gave me a gift basket of instant soups, plus two very nice bowls to eat the soup in. (And, of course, the nice basket to hold the soup and the bowls.)

The auto-printed card from the retailer said, "Form Ardis," instead of "From Ardis."

She would have laughed about that.

She'll never know, now.