Wednesday Hodgepodge: Here's to 400 more

Here are the questions for this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge, which is #400. ☝ to Joyce! Answer on your own blog then hop back to From This Side of the Pond (click the graphic) to share answers with all of Santa's elves.

1. I feel like episode 400 cannot go without comment. That's a whole lot of Hodgepodging folks. 2000 questions if my math is right. So, what's something you feel like you do 400 times a week? 

400 times a week? That would be close to sixty times a day, whatever it is, so I assume this is rhetorical.

Answer spam phone calls from the air duct cleaning company, that would be one thing.

2. Tell us where you were and something about what your life looked like in the year 2000.

We had two children (and found out that a third was on the way). Mr. Fixit was still working for the telephone company, so our family days off etc. were a little more constrained than they were later on. 

I was homeschooling the eight-year-old Apprentice, and it was the first year that we had done "serious Charlotte Mason." Late in 1999, the curriculum  launched that became AmblesideOnline, and we transitioned into that over the early months of 2000: I remember scrounging a vintage copy of Tanglewood Tales, and also Anna Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study. Another good memory of that school year was the bi-weekly "craft club" (a.k.a. play date and tea party) that we had with a few other families. Some of those connections have lasted over the decades.

Oh, that was also the spring that the Apprentice caught chicken pox from someone at church, and then regifted it to Ponytails. I still have a get-well card that my grandmother sent them--one of the last cards we got from her before she passed away.

I think that was the year the Apprentice got her first toolbox for Christmas, and Ponytails got a little sled.  Barbie dolls may also have been involved.

So, like all years, there was a mix of good and not-as-good.

3. Do you like cinnamon? What's something you make and enjoy that calls for cinnamon? Of the cinnamon 'foods' listed which is your favorite-red hot cinnamon candies, cinnamon toast, cinnamon rolls, cinnamon toast crunch cereal, apple cinnamon oatmeal, churros, an Indian curry?

I am very fond of cinnamon, especially in things like oatmeal cookies and apple crisp. We are still working through a jar of fair trade "real cinnamon" from a couple of years ago. Real cinnamon, if you haven't come across this before, is the Sri Lankan C. verum, not the more common cassia type. It apparently doesn't hold up in baking as well as cassia, but it has a more subtle flavour.

4. Does Christmas 2020 (or Hanukkah) look much like it has in years past, or is this year vastly different for you and your family? How so? How are you feeling about it all?

Vastly different, for a variety of reasons.

5. What's one thing you need or want to do before this year ends?

Finish a couple of books, plus the Gospel of John. Which is a good antidote for grumpy elves.

Linked from The Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.