"You're already flying upside down." And now... the dishes

It was extremely cold last night, Christmas Eve, but I didn't have to go anywhere! Five guests came here.
The price for hosting?
Dishes all the next morning... (Such pretty dishes, though.)

I. Sprucing Up

Since I moved into my new place with almost no kitchenware six months ago, I've brought a lot home from the store––(much free-to-me, on staff's store credit). I put almost every piece to use for last night's dinner. There was *squeakingly* enough for six place settings, if I gave myself non-Dansk silverware and served whiskey in Star Trek water glasses.
I don't care if stuff matches, I care that I like each piece.

This out of focus photo catches the overall glowy mood.

bink's crackers worked, with loud explosions that threw the contents halfway across the room. Good stuff! The hats were perfect.
Me, below, reading one of bink's cracker jokes. I liked the ones she chose.
Q: How does a Christmas tree get ready to go out?

A: It spruces up.

For the first time, my pot roast was perfect. Always before I've overloaded the pan with root vegetables. This year I added only onions and carrots with the meat (and wine, and Lipton Onion Soup mix).
I roasted the potatoes separately.
Bingo!

The apple hand pies were very nice too, but you know what?
Even though I want to bake more, I want to stop eating white flour. I've been cutting down on simple carbs, and when I eat it, it makes me   s  o  o  o  o  sleepy. I don't like that.

This morning I ate the apple & walnut filling out of the leftover pie.
I composted its white-flour crust. (The City provides little green trash cans for food waste.)
My Stated Desire for 2023: Keep doing that.

I thought about going to Christmas morning Mass this morning, but decided it was too early (9 a.m.), too cold (even to walk two blocks), and likely to be too crowded. People closer to me have been catching some nasty viruses, and I don't want to.

I'm around a ton of people at work, though--why haven't I gotten sick?
It might be that the donations door, a huge car-repair–sized garage door, opens frequently throughout the day, so while it's HOT in the summer and COLD in the winter, we get a ton of fresh air diluting the viruses.

Riding the bus, I sit by the exit door whenever I can, and that opens at almost every stop, blasting me with cold air too.
I don't know though--mostly I reckon I've been lucky. So far... I keep expecting that surely I will catch at least the average flu.

(Hm. That reminds me, I am not prepared to be ill---I need to grocery shop for canned soups, etc. to have on hand, in case.)

II. "You're already flying upside down."

Anyway, the evening was lovely––it was so nice, a balm, really, to gather with old friends, in my own place . . . until the very end, just before everyone left, when a guest started to talk about increased crime in the city where we all live, and told us some x, y, z terrible and terrifying statistics a police officer told them.
(I went to bed after, with my eyes wide open. My new magic blanket calmed me down, with its North Star in the winter blue night.)

They want to relocate to [a lovely coastal town near a mountain in northwest WA that some may know]. They work online, so location doesn't matter.

More power to moving somewhere you can flourish. godknows crime is up in cities across the US, and leaving may be a smart choice. I moved to a quieter neighborhood when I moved to HouseMate's, and now again, here.

And yet, I feel I would rather go down with the ship, the city, than leave...
Perhaps I'm being stupid––and also self-deluded and that's not even true, it's just me thinking in puritanically romanticized terms? (Hm, but is that likely? Yes, yes it is.)
I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said his place during the Nazi reign was in his country, Germany. I'm making no claims to be like him! OMG, no. And there's little good in staying, just for the sake of it--you have to DO something, even just ("just"?) bearing witness, as they say.

Like in Mad Max: Fury Road: "Witness me!"
I just rewatched that film, and, hm, come to think of it, it's a mix of people who choose to stay and fight (Furiosa), and those who choose to wander (Max).
And both are good.

Still, when I've house/cat sat in rich neighborhoods where people talked during Covid (and after George Floyd's murder) about things like how sad they were they couldn't take their annual trip to Belize [actual example], I just feel that, I just... I wouldn't fit in well.

But, also, the Pacific Northwest? I saw Pacific Rim, and that's where the kaiju are coming from!

So, fine. Don't want to move, Fresca?
Don't move.

You makes your choices and you pays your price.
Or, as it says in Deep Survival, a book I just reread, advising people to take risks--to take informed risks, because, after all,
"You're already flying upside down."*

That's like what I wrote for my blog header that I can never bear to change because I still like it so much--that I am, we are...
writing at 100,000 kilometers/hour, just sitting here

III. I Heart Overthinking

Did I ever mention that I studied Philosophy & Theology?
The state U doesn't offer Theology per se, of course––my BA is in Classics (Religious Studies)––but a favorite of mine was a series of classes on Medieval Philosophy, and that's what that is.

I love that stuff!
It shaped how I think--especially its mathy metaphors and twisty semantics💓💓💓:

"God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."**

Anselm's definition of God being "that, than which no greater can be conceived."

People have told me over the years that I overthink, or that I'm too intense.
But that's what I like, and I'm sticking to it.
That, and dolls and bears.

Wishing to all a Merry Christmas and/or Parallel, Antecedent, Cousin,  Offspring Holidays.

May We Be Good Ancestors, Flying Upside-down!

ABOVE: Planets in the solar system, Copernicus, De revolutionibus, bk. I
__________________________

* Re, You're already flying upside down. [boldface mine]

"Survivors know, whether they're conscious of it or not, that to live at all is to fly upside down (640 people died in 1999 while choking on food; 320 drowned in the bathtub). You're already flying upside down. You might as well turn on the smoke and have some fun. Then when a different sort of challenge presents itself, you can face it with the same equanimity."

-- Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, 2003.

** "God is an infinite sphere" is from Liber XXIV philosophorum, (Book of the 24 Philosphers), a Latin booklet by an anonymous author, earliest copy from the 1200s:

‘The text of the Book of the 24 philosophers is extremely topical […] The modern time till nowadays is not, as we generally say in a superficial way, a period of atheism and abandonment of faith, but a time in which God has become […] a logico-mathematical structure, which is the real symbolic Gestell of our age […] we haven’t yet understood how science is still and unbelievably deeply theological’

Marc Richir (Beligian philosopher, 1943–2015), And God became Space (via)