Monday Morons--you just don't like me cause I'm handicapped

I realize that several of my readers live across the pond and really hate the "H" word, but I'm going to use it today anyway.

As you may know, I am in a club that is mostly made up of Star Trek fans. We have a monthly meeting at a pizza place, we have a monthly dinner that could be anywhere in the area that someone wants to go to, we have a an almost monthly gathering at someone's house to watch DVDs, etc... If there's a new Star Trek movie we go to a theater in costume for the opening weekend. Sometimes we go in costume to other movies such as Harry Potter or Star Wars. We have a Halloween Party and New Year's Eve party. There are groups of us who go out of town every year to certain ren fests and conventions. And every December we try to do this charity thing where we put on costumes and take presents to a needy family.

Sometimes in a big group, there are smaller cliques. I am in a clique. This is probably the only clique I've ever been in. (I don't think the little thing in school counted, since that was my best friend and me and whoever we were being nice to cause the other kids didn't like them.)

So I am in a club, and I'm in a bit of a clique within the club. And I don't always know whats going on with people who are in the club but not in my clique. And there are new people, or maybe not so new people, but people who have been in the club less than a year. And we have visitors, and we have some people who visit for a long time or who are with another club but visit us from time to time. And sometimes we have former members visit. So sometimes our little area of the pizza place gets a bit crowded.

So there are a couple of people in wheelchairs or scooters or whatever. And I didn't think that they had joined, but I wasn't concerned about it one way or the other. I noticed them and thought they were new people or maybe just visiting. Usually, people can visit often, and we don't mind.

Anyway, I can't say that I've paid much attention to them. Maybe just cause they are not in my clique. Some people in the club don't like these two. I hadn't yet formed much of an opinion.

So we are at the pizza place having our meeting, and we are discussing this and that, mostly the charity thing. The two people in wheelchairs are there. The guy in the wheelchair keeps interrupting the guy who is supposed to be speaking.

We are not a real formal group. We do tend to interrupt the speaker if the speaker lacks information or gets something wrong or whatever. But really, if you have more to say on a subject than the person speaking, you should have volunteered to speak on the subject rather than keep interrupting whoever is talking. And if you have something to say, it is more polite to raise your hand or something and wait to be acknowledged rather than just yelling out whatever it is you think needs to be said.

Someone reads off the December birthdays. There is a list that someone makes up of a.) people who are actually members of the club, and b.) actors and writers and such who have worked on Star Trek or Stargate or Star Wars and other things that we are fans of. Examples of people with birthdays mentioned were me, the head of club, and the actor who played Worf. So a name and a date were read, and then everyone clapped, and then another name and a date were read, and then everyone clapped, etc... And the person reading the list gets through with the list and starts to sit down. But the guy in the wheelchair interrupts and says "What about _____?"

"______ isn't on the list. We don't have her birthday."

"______'s birthday is on the 16th."

"Okay. ______'s birthday is on the 16th."

So everyone claps again, and the guy reading the birthday list sits down.

Anyway, the guy in the wheelchair is upset that his friend (the other person in a wheelchair) didn't have her birthday properly acknowledged. So someone goes and explains to him that we get the member's birthdays from the membership form that people turn in with their membership fees. So maybe a person might have filled out their form incorrectly, or maybe a person might not want their birthdate known and left it blank, or maybe a person just joined recently and didn't fill out the form yet or didn't fill out the form in time to get on that month's birthday list. There are a few reasons like that to explain why a member's birthday didn't get on the list.

But really, no one remembers the lady in the wheelchair actually joining the club and paying the membership fees and filling out the membership form, etc....

"Well, we're not paying members, but we're still members."

"No, you're not. Until you fill out the form and pay the fees, you're not a member."

The wheelchair guy keeps insisting that the two of them are somehow non-paying members, and no one wants to keep wasting their time arguing with him. He's not a member. If he wants to join he can do that. If he wants to keep visiting, he can probably do that. But right now, he's not a member.

So then we move on to discussions about the charity thing. We have the address of the needy family and a time that we're supposed to be there. We also have the address of a nearby fast food place where we could meet fifteen minutes before that so we can make sure everyone can find the place and maybe not take so many cars and look more organized, etc.... And we're real clear on what time people need to be where. We're not going to wait for you. There are like twenty people going to this thing, and only about three of them are important enough to wait for. I am not one of those three people.

Wheelchair guy wants to go. But he needs a ride. At this point someone starts to volunteer to give him a ride, but then she remembers about the wheelchair and starts to withdraw the offer and looks for someone with a van to volunteer. Wheelchair guy then says that he can walk and doesn't need to take the chair if someone with a van can't be found.

Well, if wheelchair guy can walk, why is he annoying everyone with the wheelchair?

To be fair, the pizza place makes you walk through this long hallway before you are served. So maybe we always see him in the chair because he can't handle that long hallway. But I don't know that many people who use wheelchairs, and except for some really old people who have had some nasty falls, none of them use wheelchairs if they can still walk.

So the woman again offers him a ride, and she asks if he still lives in the same apartment as last year. So that was odd, cause I didn't realize he'd been visiting for more than a year. Not that I'd ask him to leave after a year of visiting, but that still doesn't make him a member, and you'd think that he would have joined by now if it's been more than a year.

Okay, so wheelchair guy is going to go with us to the charity thing because he wants to donate some food. He donated food last year, but that time he just arranged for the woman giving him a ride to just pick up the food. This year he wants to go. Okay, fine. Someone has agreed to take him.

So you would think that's the end of it, but it isn't. The head of the club and his wife have a mini-van, and they're going to drive the minivan to the charity thing. Wheelchair guy wants them to give him a ride in the van so that he can take his wheelchair. They say no, and he complains about it a bit. Well, a.) they don't live anywhere near him and it would really take a long time to make a detour to go and get him, b.) they are driving the minivan specifically to take donations to the charity thing and NOT to cart around someone's wheelchair, and c.) they never offered to drive him anywhere. And that's not even getting into the whole thing about him not being a member.

Then he wants to donate some money to the charity. But he doesn't have any money, so he wants someone to loan him some. I don't think that anyone did, but I may hear more about that later.

So, it is December, and it's time to renew memberships and fill out the forms and pay fees. I forgot to bring any money for that, and a lot of other people forgot to bring money for that, so we will just have to fill out the forms and pay the fees next month. No big deal. And we have these calendars, and when you pay your membership fees for the year you get a free calendar. If you want an extra calendar, or you're not a member and want one anyway, you can buy one.

Wheelchair guy wants a calendar, but again, he doesn't have any money. So he wants to get a calendar now and pay something for it later. Well, that's not the way it works. You can pay the membership fees and get a free calendar, or you can buy a calendar, but either way requires money. And it doesn't even have to be cash money, there's Paypal and checks and such. But wheelchair guy doesn't seem to have any of that either.

"Why can't you just give me my calender now and I'll get you the money later."

"It doesn't work that way. You can just get a calendar later when you have the money for it."

"But I want my calendar now."

"Sorry, I can't do that."

"But no one would even know, so what's the problem?"

"I would know. Sorry, the answer is still no."

This went on for a bit.

The next day we are at the fast food place getting ready to do the charity thing. The wheelchair guy and the woman giving him a ride are a bit late. Apparently the wheelchair guy talked the woman into taking him somewhere to do a bit of shopping. I hope that had something to do with the charity thing, and not that he just talked the woman into being late so he could do some other shopping. But still, you can't do that. You can't have people waiting on you while you go shopping even if you are shopping for the charity thing. But, the lady who organizes the event was running late too, and they got there before she did. So we didn't actually leave without them like we said we were going to.

So there are twenty of us at the fast food place, and most of us are in costume. Most of us are dressed as people from Harry Potter, and we also had a Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. Wheelchair guy and the woman who gave him a ride did not have costumes, and two others did not have costumes. If you did not have a costume, it was suggested that you wear a Santa hat to be one of Santa's helpers. And, if you needed to borrow a hat or a wand, you could borrow one.

So wheelchair guy borrows both a Santa hat and a wand, and off we go. The Harry Potter people went in first. A few of us had "speaking parts" and the rest just carried in food and gifts. Then Santa and Mrs. Claus went in. Pictures were taken with Santa while Santa's helpers brought in the rest of the gifts. Then we sang a few songs.

Wheelchair guy kept bugging everyone about the stuff he'd brought. He couldn't find something and he just wasn't going to be quiet about it. The woman who gave him a ride assured him that it was being taken care of, but he wouldn't shut up until he was taken to the kitchen to see for himself.

We sang "Rudolf the Rednosed Reindeer". There's sort of a longer version of the song, where you add stuff--Rudolf's nose glows "like a lightbulb" and stuff like that. Apparently wheelchair guy had never heard it sung that way before, and he kept trying to tell people "That's different" and "Well, that was certainly longer" and such, while we were singing.

Just shut up already.

But, we didn't say that, cause we didn't want to cause an argument in someone's home right when we're supposed to be entertaining them.

The kids opened a couple of presents, but they're supposed to wait til Christmas for the rest of them. Okay, we've got to get Santa back to the North Pole now. Merry Christmas.

We leave and go back to the fast food place and everyone gets in their own car. From there, most of us went to another restaurant. A restaurant with menus and waitstaff and such. And the waitstaff push together a bunch of tables so that we can all sit together. And then we sit down, and I'm at one end of the table next to Santa Claus. Across from me are two empty chairs, and I expect the woman who organizes the charity thing is going to sit in one of them. She's a bit late, and those are the only empty seats.

Wheelchair guy sits in one of them. I really do not want to get stuck with this guy, and I'm sure my friend doesn't either, but there isn't anywhere else to sit. So I guess I can put up with this guy if she can.

I do not know what is wrong with wheelchair guy. I do not know why he uses a wheelchair if he can walk. Anyway, whatever his problem is, he needed someone to read the menu to him. The lady who gave him a ride is sitting on the other side of me, and she starts reading some of the stuff on the menu.

"OH, my eye! The light reflected off the menu right into my eye! I'm very photosensitive. Oh, my eye."

If you are so photosensitive, you should have brought sunglasses. I'm not going to put down my menu. Since he isn't even reading the menu, he can just close his eyes. And I'm not going to bother explaining to him. He can figure it out for himself.

So the lady reads him some more of the menu, and he wants to order the "surf and turf." Only, there isn't such a thing on the menu. Well, he knows that. But there's a fish and shrimp combo, so maybe they can add some steak to that. "I like a bit of beef. I'm allowed to have a bit of beef sometimes." He goes on like that for a while.

Who cares? The man is often in a wheelchair and has I don't know what health problems and he's overweight. And here he is about to order three entrees.

Not sure how he's ordering even one entree, since yesterday he didn't have any money.

My friend comes in and does not sit in the empty chair. She's gone to the other end of the table. I get up and go talk to her.

"Oh, no. You are not going to get everyone to move down. You are not leaving me with that guy. If I have to be stuck with him, so do you."

"I told the waitstaff we didn't have enough room, so they're going to add another table at this end. Stay here."

So we moved three chairs and they brought us another table that maybe we really didn't need, but we just couldn't stand that guy anymore.

Well, even under the best of circumstances, most of us would rather not just go up to someone and say "I don't like you, and I wish you would go away." I only dealt with him for two days, and I can't take it anymore. I can't imagine what other people who've spent more time with him think. Some of us think that we should just ask him to leave, or at least warn him that we are about to ask him to leave if there are anymore problems. But if that's going to happen, it should probably come from the head of the club, or maybe from all of the club officers. Something official, not just some of us telling him to get lost. But so far, the officers don't want to do that, because they think he'll say something about us not being understanding about his being handicapped.

Freaky Friday

Okay, I'm going to start doing the Freaky Friday posts again, but this one doesn't really count. I didn't have time today, and I wasn't organized enough to write anything interesting anyway. Of course, we all know that I'm not very organized, but I at least hope to be back up to my normal level of disorganization next week.

Anyway, there was the usual stuff about diet sodas, Rudy's BBQ, Bath & Body Works, etc....

And there were searches for nylons one size fits all, which of course we know that they do not. And there were searches for corset sluts. Okay.

But the really funny thing that I made note of this week was the numerous searches for penis molds, or penis moulds, and one of them came from Limerick. I hope I spelled that right. Anyway, it's a town in Ireland, and I guess you know why I thought it was funny.



No count this week, because of the disorganization.



The top twelve keywords are: costume, penis, the, dick, giant, going, hell, rudys, texas, bbq, state, diet

Christmas Lights, Robots, and I Feel Bad About My Neck

I recently went on a business trip with my husband. During the drive we listened to this audio book. It is written by the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally. It is one of those non-fiction books where the author pretty much complains about all the things in her life, but somehow it all ends up being funny.

To start with, the woman doesn't like her neck. In fact, all of her close female friends hate their necks. They look good for their age, except for their necks, so they all wear turtleneck sweaters.

She talks about other things that you have to deal with as you get older, like your eyesight isn't what it used to be and how you don't know or even care who the new musicians are and how you don't really like the new electronic stuff cause you can't even get half the stuff on your cell phone to work. She then goes on to talk about cookbooks and getting various jobs and renting apartments. She was married several times, and she was more attached to her apartment than any of her husbands.

I very much enjoyed this book, as did my husband.

After spending most of three days alone in a motel room, I noticed some lines on my neck. I'm sure I'd seen them before, but I just hadn't really given them any thought. Well, that's not entirely true. When I'm making a costume, I think about my neck and where the wrinkles and bulges are. But the rest of the time I don't dwell on that sort of thing much, and my neck usually isn't high on the list anyway.

But I'm alone in this motel room, and I'm looking at myself in the big mirror that most motel rooms have over the sink with the bright overhead lights. And there are these lines on my neck. And I don't like them.

I am nowhere near as old as the woman who wrote this book. But I think that I should like to go out and buy a bunch of turtleneck sweaters. But that really isn't the problem, is it? I like turtleneck sweaters. I especially like black turtleneck sweaters. I can go out and buy a bunch of black turtleneck sweaters and be very happy with them. But I can only wear them until maybe March. Someday I will have to move someplace where I can wear the turtlenecks year-round.

Anyway, I went on this little trip with my husband, even though except for the drive I didn't actually spend lots of time with my husband. So why did I spend most of three days knitting and wasting time watching cable when I have all of this stuff to do at home? Mostly, I just had to go because my husband was taking this little trip to the town where I used to live, and it happened to be on the last days of the season when the Christmas stuff was still up at the college. When I was little, we used to go an look at these decorations every year. But we moved away just before I became a teenager, and I think that this is only the third time that I've been in the area at the right time since then.

It's mostly silly stuff. I'm guessing that most of this stuff was originally bought in the sixties, or maybe even the fifties. Perhaps it is not that impressive today. You cannot see the lights from outer-space or anything like that. It seems like there's some Disney stuff and there is a nativity scene and some stuff from A Christmas Carol and several displays with Santa.

And there's a robot. This is a fifties-type robot that looks like the one from The Jetson's, only more square. He's supposed to blow bubbles, but that wasn't working the day we were there.

So I went on this little trip, because I doubt that I'll ever get to do it again. It is difficult to schedule stuff like this in December. And I don't know how much longer the college will continue the tradition anyway. I think the college has had the decorations since about 1971. But the decorations are older than that, and they won't last forever.

The day after we saw the lights we went to a clearance sale and bought chocolate and a few decorations and some other odd things. And I bought a pencil sharpener that looks a lot like that robot at the college. I never can find a pencil sharpener when I need one. I buy lots of cheap mechanical pencils, because not only can I not find the pencil sharpener for regular pencils, but then I can't find the refill lead for the mechanical pencils either. So I just keep buying new ones. If I have a pencil sharpener that looks like a robot, then maybe I won't lose it. Maybe.

The New Year's Eve Party

Well, I went to the New Year's Eve party, and I'm glad I went, though it somehow wasn't quite what it might have been. Certain people were not there, though we still had a full house. It's just that it's unusual for certain people not to be there, and certain other people did not even make an appearance. So that was odd.

It usually starts off rather slow, with a few of us watching a DVD. I am usually the third person to arrive, with a lot of the other people not showing up for another two hours. Then a bunch of us go in the other room and talk and play with the cat and see if he'll maul anyone.

Last night most of the people showed up about ten or twenty minutes after I arrived. Someone brought a very short film for us to watch, and I don't think anyone watched DVDs after that. The cat was pleasant company for about an hour, and then he decided he'd had enough of us and went upstairs.

There was the usual silly stuff going on. And since there were a few newbies we had a bit of fun with that. One guy got the fright of his life while in the bathroom. Personally, I don't think trying to scare a person half to death while they are in the bathroom is funny, but apparently I am in the minority. I did get to tell one of the newbies what the cat's name was. I'm sure she didn't believe me at first. Now that's funny.

But aside from the usual silly stuff, some of us got into a very serious discussion. There are now four of us in the little "my dad is dead" group. Or more specifically, there are now four of us in the "my dad died around Christmas time" group. We've added two of the newbies.

We were so into our serious discussion that we didn't notice that is was about fifteen til. Usually we'd have been outside already.

A few years back my friend started this tradition of writing down personal crap that she wanted to get rid of and then burning the paper with the personal crap on it. That first year I was really happy and didn't really have anything to right down. But I wanted to be part of the group so I wrote down something like I need to worry less and give my husband more space and stuff like that.

That was a big mistake.

So I really don't participate in this part of the evening. The stuff that I want to get rid of is serious stuff and burning little pieces of paper aren't going to do anything to make me feel better. Sometimes I think it would be fun to burn someone in effigy. But that wouldn't go along with the spirit of the tradition. And also I'd have to waste time making something to burn, since they don't make fat-assed Homewrecking-slut Barbie or anything else suitable that I could just buy. And I suspect that burning a doll would probably create toxic fumes and make everyone sick.

Following this there are a bit of illegal fireworks, though this year there where not as many as in previous years due to a certain person being out of town. There were some small intentionally lit fires and some fun with fire extinguishers. And there there was talk of the time that the bathroom did not get blown up. You would have thought that would have ended the tradition of the illegal fireworks (just as you would think that the threat of a two thousand dollar fine would have prevented the tradition from getting started in the first place), but no.

I don't think that there was any dancing this year. The "kids" (who must now be in the mid-twenty to nearly thirty range) had taken over the TV area playing some game where you pretend to be a rock star. I have no musical talents whatsoever and did not even go to see what was going on. A bunch of us left rather early, though in past years the party has gone on way past two and people even end up spending the night.

The upside of not staying out too late is that I am reasonable awake now and feeling reasonably well. I had expected to feel really sick and spend most of the day wishing that I could just get back to sleep.

Monday Morons--I'm not very organized

A few notes before I get to the post. First, I had originally written this thinking that I would post this on Christmas Eve, but remembered I had something else that I'd rather post. So I am posting this now, without rewriting it, so there are parts that do not quite make sense because I wrote this more than a week ago.

Also, if you need a bit more chocolate or other snacks for tonight, the Christmas stuff at Target is now 75% off. Or, at least, the stores that I've been to in Texas are now having their 75% off clearance sale. I suppose that other areas may have different sales dates. But be aware that the Hickory Farms and Pepperidge Farm products do not scan at the sale price, even though there may be a sale sign on the shelf right in front of the items. To get the sale price, you may have to ask the cashier to ring up the items manually, ask to speak to a manager, and perhaps threaten lawsuits, and you might still not get the items at the sale price. Decide before you shop if it is worth the effort.


Okay, on with the post-------



Earlier I had started a Monday Moron post, but it turned out to be a very long post and I did not get it done in time to post on Monday. So I thought that I'd finish it later and post it the next Monday. Only then I remembered that the next Monday would be Christmas Eve, and I did not want to post such a thing on Christmas Eve.

Then I thought that I didn't want to post a Monday Morons on Christmas Eve at all. Something else came to mind, which would be just as funny but more in a holiday mood.

Due to a certain husband spending all of his time off either blogging or with me at the movie theater, I didn't get to use the computer when I thought of whatever it was I meant to post today. I've forgotten what it was. It just seemed so perfect, but I didn't think that I'd need to be reminded of whatever it was. I didn't write myself a little note saying what I was supposed to blog about.

So whatever today's post was supposed to be, I've forgotten.

So now I am back to Monday Morons, though I've decided that blogging about that other person on Christmas Eve would not be a good thing in the holiday spirit, so I'll blog about myself instead.

If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed that I'm not very organized. I am spending most of my holiday break (that is, most of the break that I am not spending at the movie theater with my husband) trying to clean house and get organized. But, as I write this, there is still a couple of boxes of Halloween stuff out in the hallway. The one box is T-shirts, and I suppose that it is still there because I'm still finding things to wash and add to the box. But the other box is just sitting there because I haven't gotten around to it yet. I really hope to deal with it today, so that I don't have to deal with organizing Halloween stuff and Christmas stuff at the same time. I will be at Target around 7am on the 26th, so there will definitely be Christmas stuff to deal with soon, even though I didn't unpack much of anything this year.

But that is the usual state of things. What really bothered me here recently is that I don't have the Harry Potter stuff organized. There is no excuse for that really. I know that I usually need it every December, and there are other times during the year that it might be requested. So you would think that I would have it all put neatly away someplace where I could get to it at a moment's notice. Or at least, you'd think that I'd start gathering the stuff so that I could have it all together by mid-December when I know that I'll need it.

I have three wands. Two were cheap things that I bought for myself. I don't mind if I lose those, but that I lose them in my own home instead of when I am out is greatly annoying. I have another wand that is not cheap, and was made by a friend and given to me as a Christmas gift. I know where that one is, but it usually doesn't leave the house because I do not want to lose that one.

I have various hats that do not stay on my head. Most of these are cheap and again I would not mind if I lost one of these while we are out. I have one that I did a lot of work on, but it still wouldn't stay on my head. I tried sewing a hair clasp to the hat, which does keep it from flying off my head, sort of. It still gets blown backward and doesn't stay properly on my head but sort of flops around my neck upside down. So I usually don't bother with the hat, and I wear a hooded cape so if I want something on my head the hood usually works better.

For the most part, the black cape and the Gryffindor scarf are the things that I just can't do without. I have a black dress that I would prefer to wear, but I can't find that half of the time. I have a black vest that I wear, but since it is black against an already black dress it doesn't really show that much anyway. If I can't find the black dress I do have a number of black turtlenecks to choose from as well a few black skirts. And I could even switch to black pants if I had to. Then there are various black shoes to choose from if I cannot find the preferred black boots.

So the day that I need the costume I know that I won't be wearing the dress, because I looked for that already and I couldn't find it anywhere. Finding an alternate skirt took longer than I expected, and went through three turtlenecks before I found a suitable one. The black vest turned up, but not the preferred black boots. Still there was a shorter pair of black boots, so that was okay.

The black cape was not where I normally keep it, but then I remembered taking it out in case I decided to be Little Black Riding Hood instead of Little Red Riding Hood.

Okay. Hat? Not this time. Wand? Skip it. Black hooded cape, check. Black skirt, check. Black turtleneck, check. Black vest, check. Black boots, check. Black purse, check. Gryffindor scarf?

Where the hell is my scarf?

Once in a while, I make an effort to get the scarves and the yarn at least in one room. So when I didn't find the scarf where I thought I'd left it, I thought maybe it was in the other room with some other scarves. I found the original practice scarf which I wear just when it is cold, but I do not think it is good enough for part of a costume. I found a scarf that I had started for a friend but then never finished because I decided to instead make scarves for his whole family and this one didn't quite match the other three. I found another unfinished scarf that I had started for a club auction, but the auction winner preferred the Ravenclaw scarf. I found Dr. Who type scarves and other scarves, but no Gryffindor scarf that I wear with my costume.

Should I cancel? Should I just go dressed all in black with no scarf?

Maybe I should wear a different scarf?

I found a green and grey Slytherin scarf, which I had thought was finished until I noticed that I had somehow made two extra tassels on one side and they would have to be redone. But I suppose that they don't have to be redone right this minute. I can probably wear the thing and only I would notice the problem with the tassels.

Actually, switching to Slytherin worked out okay. I practiced being a whole different character from the one I'd made up earlier. I complained about Muggles and not liking children and all of that.

And it gave me an excuse to get out of the singing. I don't sing. I just sort of go along and pretend to sing. With this grumpy character, I didn't even have to pretend.

So it did work out in the end. But really, I should be more organized. What's the point of having this stuff if I can't find it when we need it?

And Happy After-Christmas Clearance Sale Day To You Too

Well, Christmas itself has finally come and gone. I've exchanged gifts with everyone that was on my list except for two club members who were out of town. I have an assortment of hot chocolate mixes from the official club gift exchange, and an unexpected gift basket from an out-of-state friend, and I have a sweater from my mom and a necklace from my sister and a few other things and some gift cards. I really did encourage people to get me gift cards, unless they wanted to get me miter clamps and such, which most people probably thought was a joke. So sadly, I did not receive any clamps, but I did get over a hundred dollars worth of gift cards.

Last year, we lost a gift card to our favorite restaurant. So I immediately stuffed all of "my" gift cards into my wallet. My husband is still holding on to some of "our" gift cards to some restaurants.

I was up early Wednesday morning, ready to go to shopping. Maybe I got up too early. My first stop was going to be Target, which opened at 7am. So I spent some time looking on the Internet. I didn't want to spend a lot of time waiting in the parking lot, so I thought 6:45 would be a good time to leave. I checked the clock on the computer every once in a while. Finally, it was time to get going.


Only the clock in the car said it was ten minutes later than what I'd thought it was. Don't you hate that? You're just doing something to kill time, and then you end up late to whatever it was that you really wanted to do.

So I got to the store about eight minutes later than I planned. So I expected to see some people with carts full of just the stuff I wanted. Don't you hate that?

Well, I really didn't want that much. Except that I was going to get a ton of storage stuff if that had been on sale. But it wasn't. And why should it be? The week after Christmas is right when people are supposed to buy the stuff, so it wouldn't be on clearance yet. But the orange and black boxes were on sale the day after Halloween, so I thought maybe they'd mark down the red and green boxes the day after Christmas.

No such luck.

Well, we had gone to the store Friday and looked around and said that there really wasn't anything that we were just dying to have at 50% off, but there were a couple of things I should get if they were still there. And of course I'll be looking again when the stuff is 75% off later, but that won't be at least til Saturday or Sunday, and possibly not til next Wednesday.

I got a spice rack. How boring is that? Well, this one looks almost looks like a set of test-tubes, except that the bottoms are flat and they have screw-tops. So when I get done with the spices, it will go with the Halloween lab-set decorations.


I picked up some candy that my husband wanted. I didn't buy any decorations. With school and going out of town and such, I don't think that I've really done any major Christmas decorating since we've moved. So I'm thinking I shouldn't buy much anyway, cause I don't know what I need. I know, I don't really need any of it. But I'm thinking that I probably don't have enough stuff that really goes together, and I should probably take a complete inventory of what I already have before I buy lights and such.


So what I mainly came for (other than the storage boxes that I didn't buy cause they weren't on sale) was food. I didn't see any Hickory Farms stuff, so I was about to leave when I found where it was, mostly hiding behind the 50% off sign. I took about three things to the self-scanner, and they didn't seem to be on sale. After discussing the matter with another shopper, we decided to take the stuff to the checkout anyway and make them give it to us at half-price. They can't argue that it isn't on sale when they've put the 50% off sign right in front of the stuff.

The cashier had to call three different people before she'd give me the discount. While that was going on we let another customer go ahead of me, since he only had some mouthwash and a DVD player. The DVD player wouldn't scan, so she just asked him what it cost and he said that it was on sale for thirty-five dollars. So she rang up thirty-five dollars and took the man's money, and he left with his DVD player and his mouthwash. I still have to wait for the manager if I want seven bucks off of some cheese, but if you want discounted electronics they'll just take your word for it?


I finally get my discount and pay about twenty-five dollars and leave. I'm so proud of myself that I didn't go crazy and buy more. I pretty much just bought what we'd discussed and some cider and some crackers. Not much at all.


Well, the grocery store down the street used to be the place to get goodies after Christmas, so I went and had a look. Either there wasn't much of a sale or it was too early for them and they hadn't gotten around to marking it yet. Whatever. I should have gone to some other places, but they were near the mall and I decided to go home first and find out what other people had planned for the day.


My brother wanted to have us over for lunch. I thought lunch might be at eleven, and it was like 9:30. So I decided to put off the mall area shopping for a bit. Besides, I should see what yarn I needed before I went shopping.


My brother didn't plan lunch until 12, and then it ended up not being until after 12:30. So I could have had time to do a bit of shopping. Whatever.

After lunch we were going to see that Alien movie. We decided we were a bit late and would wait til the next show. So I'm off to the mall area to get some yarn.

Only I get to the checkout at the fabric store, and I can't find my wallet. I think that it must have fallen out of my pocket while I took out a measuring tape to check the size of a storage box. It was right at the front of the store, maybe someone turned it in?

No. Maybe you left it in the car?


I didn't think so, but I went to look anyway. Didn't see it. Called my husband and he didn't see it either. Called my brother too, but no luck.

So I've lost my wallet with my gift cards and my checkcard. So I have to turn around and go home. I go home without any yarn or anything.

I look for my wallet near the computer and in the bathroom and on the bed and in the kitchen, but I can't find it. I call Target and the grocery store to see if they've found a wallet. No luck. I retrace my steps to my brother's place, but still no luck. I go home and call the fabric place, but still nothing.

Time to give up and cancel the checkcard. And to be on the safe side I also cancel my library cards. I currently have three library cards. Not that I think someone is going to rush to the library and steal books and videos, but just in case.

So that's all done. I start to feel a bit better. The three of us still go see that Alien movie.

And then when I was about ready to go to sleep, I found the wallet just under the bed. So I'll have to do without my checkcard for a few days, and I'll have to go and get all new library cards, but that's okay. At least I didn't lose my Christmas presents and I don't have to go to the DMV for a new driver's license.

The summer that I met the real Santa Claus

Everyone seems to think that his name is Nick. They're wrong. His name's Rick. I don't remember his last name, but his first name was definitely Rick.

Rick didn't have elves. I heard that he had a bunch of kids, like maybe ten. I never met the kids. I don't know if they were really his kids or step-kids or foster kids. Maybe a combination. Or maybe they were all grown up by then. Anyway, I never met the kids, but I heard that he had a lot of them.

I worked one summer at an arcade that had lots of skeeball machines. Rick would come in and play skeeball several times a week. He didn't have a beard or white hair, just brown. He was tall and fat. He always wore suspenders to hold up his pants.

He was a very friendly guy who did nothing but play skeeball. A lot of skeeball. Like twenty dollars a night.

Some people play skeeball for fun. This guy played to win toys. He only occasionally looked up to see how much he'd won. He won a lot. He played some perfect games of 450, a lot of near perfect games of 410, and occasionally only a 370 or so. You win tickets depending on how high your score is, and sometimes you win extra stuffed animals for perfect games. Every time he came in he got one of those extra stuffed animals and spent enough tickets to buy between three and six more stuffed animals. And every time he came in he gave away a stuffed animal, or maybe two, or maybe three. He took home at least three stuffed animals and a bunch of tickets.

The stuffed animals he took home were stored until Christmas. In December he brought back the rest of his tickets and bought pretty much all of the cool stuff in the prize counter. Then he took the stuffed animals and other stuff and gave them to some orphans for Christmas.

Once in a while we'd have a slow day at the arcade, and there weren't really any kids around when he got ready to leave for the day. A couple of times he didn't see any kids he thought needed the stuffed animal, so he gave it to me instead. I had two stuffed animals given to me by the real Santa Claus. I don't have them anymore. I'm afraid I must have lost them when we moved from Fort Worth.

The mall with that arcade isn't there anymore. I wonder where Santa Claus moved to?

Monday Morons--No thanks, I'm not alcoholic

Okay, this is the third or fourth post that I've written for today. I keep changing my mind which one to post. Since it's the day before Christmas, maybe I should get into the whole "peace on earth and goodwill towards men" thing and just skip Monday Morons this week.

On the other hand, I just remembered something that has to do with Christmas, so here goes....

As some of you may know, I do not drink alcohol. Or, at least, I do not consume much alcohol, and most of that has been cooked. I've had beer cheese soup and beer bread and the occasional fish with wine sauce and stuff like that. Maybe when I was younger I had some prescription cough syrup that contained alcohol, but I don't remember.

I was once introduced at a party as "that girl who won't drink NyQuil."

Anyway, I don't think that drinkable alcohol should be available over the counter like that. If you need a drug, go see a doctor. I don't think that it's fair that people can legally go out and drink and such and there's nothing you can do to stop people from doing that and follow up with any number of stupid things. People are sold useless alcohol when it's pretty obvious that they're going to end up hurting or even killing someone. On the other hand, if you want to buy antibiotics for a painful UTI, that's too bad. You want antibiotics, you have to go to a doctor first, and if you don't go see a doctor the people in the drug store will let you suffer and possibly die. But in that same store you can buy as much alcohol as you want as long as you have ID.

The whole drinking alcohol thing is stupid anyway, even if it didn't hurt and kill people. If you're not any fun to begin with, the alcohol isn't going to change that. You'll never be as funny as me, so just accept that fact and get on with your life. The alcohol will not make you as funny as me, it will just dull your senses until you imagine that you're as funny as me. Those of us who stayed sober just watched you do something really stupid. We're laughing at you, not with you.

Where was I?

So I don't drink alcohol and everyone who's paid an attention knows that I don't drink alcohol. I do like a few things that other more strict people think are recreational drugs--caffeine, chocolate, and sugar. I am quite sure that I consume more of those things than is good for me. But so far it hasn't made me do anything stupid (in front of other people) or caused me to hurt someone or hit someone with the car, etc....

I enjoy a number of non-alcoholic drinks and a variety of foods. My husband also enjoys food. And if you're supposed to get me and/or my husband a gift, things that have to do with food are usually a good idea. Gift cards to restaurants, coupons books and/or calendars, homemade goodies, and gift baskets from Hickory Farms and such are all things that we appreciate.

One year my employer gave me a gift basket and a bottle of champagne. It wasn't like they specifically went out and bought that for me, just that everyone at the place received an almost identical gift basket with champagne. I mentioned that if I was still there the next Christmas (which I was not) I would prefer the less expensive non-alcoholic bubbly or maybe some bubble bath that just looks like champagne. I think I ended up cooking some fish in it and maybe attempted to make some candy with some of it. I'm sure a lot of it went to waste, cause I wouldn't drink any of it and I certainly wouldn't let anyone else drink it either.

So very often for Christmas, someone gets us an assortment of cheeses and a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice or cider or pear or something that looks like wine or champagne. We like that sort of thing, and before I joined the club we usually spent New Year's Eve at home, undressed, eating the cheese assortment and drinking the non-alcoholic whatever.

One year when we unwrapped the bottle of non-alcoholic whatever it was, someone joked about the bottle, maybe saying that someone was too cheap to get us the real stuff. I don't remember exactly what the joke was, just that it was funny at the time cause everyone there knew that I didn't drink alcohol.

So the next year someone gave me real champagne. This was someone who not only knows better in the moral sense, but has known me a long time and knows that I don't drink. But for some reason the joke from the previous year stuck in his head, and then he got confused and thought that I had really changed my mind about drinking alcohol.

That was all a bit upsetting. I didn't want the stuff, and the person who gave me the gift was embarrassed. He had so gotten it stuck in his head that I wanted real champagne for Christmas that he just thought he'd gotten me the perfect gift and hadn't seriously considered getting me any gift that did not come with a bottle of champagne.

So don't give people alcohol for Christmas. Unless, maybe, they happen to be gourmet cooks and wouldn't actually drink much of the stuff. If you give someone alcohol and they don't want alcohol, that can be embarrassing. And if they really like alcohol, well, how would you feel if someone got hurt?

...and a beer in a tree

Okay, I saw something like this in the store this week.

So that's just about perfect if this is your favorite Christmas song.

I wouldn't say it was my favorite Christmas song, and of course I do not consume alcohol, but a beer in a tree is really funny. So now you can have ten beers in a tree.

Of course, I do not have beer in my tree. Actually, right now I didn't even put up the tree. But the weird things that are usually in my tree are spaceships.

This guy has a cool tree. Mine is not so cool, even when I put it up. I'm cheap, so I only have about six Hallmark ornaments, and half of those were gifts. I get to see a tree very much like this at a friend's house. But I don't know this guy, he just had cool tree pictures on his blog.

An unpleasant jump-start for your diet

1. Skip lunch, or wait a suitable period after lunch before going to the theater

2. In the afternoon, go see the new movie Sweeney Todd

3. Don't eat anything after you've seen the movie Sweeney Todd

4. Later, still don't eat anything. After seeing that movie, this should not be difficult

5. This may last a while. To prevent actual starvation, drink some broth and/or some vitamin water



If you are not on a diet, going out after the movie and having a stromboli is still a bad idea.

Sorry I haven't been around much lately

Let's see. I was busy with school stuff until about Thursday afternoon. Then, after a bit of a rest, I was busy with club stuff until Monday. Friday we went to see I Am Legend, and Monday we went to see The Golden Compass. I haven't been able to blog about either, because my husband has two weeks off and spends all of his time on the computer. I have started several posts about other things, but I never get to finish them.

The club charity thing went okay. I'll have to post about that later too.

Despite making a serious effort to clean and straighten things up around here, a day and a half later, the Halloween stuff is still out in the hallway.

However, the mini outlet center of Bath & Body Works is a bit more organized. Or, at least, there are no more bags of the stuff in the bedroom. Three items went into the official club gift exchange, two items so far went into the unofficial gift exchange, and several more items have been wrapped or bagged to be given out later. That leaves one item that still needs to be wrapped, about ten items that need to be moved to a better looking bag, and a number of leftover items that have been moved to the back room. We might have a clearance sale on eBay after Christmas.

Do to a lot of misunderstandings and supply problems at school, the teacher decided to just drop everyone's lowest grade. Therefore, I ended up getting an A instead of the earlier agreed on B, despite the fact that I missed an entire project while I went out of town for two weeks. Also, my second glass project has probably been fired by now, though I don't expect to see it until sometime in January. I've decided to not even ask about it. I have other things that I should be doing.

The family dinner thing was supposed to be earlier this month, but I told my mom that the best day for me was the 8th. By the time everyone else checked to see if the 8th was good for them, my husband had to go out of town that week and would have been driving back home late on the 8th. So the 8th was dropped. Most of the other weekend dates meant that I would have to drop some club thing. The 9th might have worked, but I guess that didn't work for someone else. So the next date was the 16th, which meant I'd have to cancel something important, but not as important as the 15th or the 31st, so okay. After thinking about it some, mom decided that it did not absolutely have to be on a weekend, as long as my husband and my brother-in-law were not going out of town then, and they weren't, so the 17th was scheduled. My sister got sick on the 17th. Mom suggested maybe waiting til after Christmas, and I suggested the 27th. The dinner has been rescheduled again and is now partially replacing the Christmas Eve plans. That works for me, as long as my sister hasn't already ordered the other food for that evening.

So far as I know, the 23rd is still planned with the only one of my in-laws that my husband still speaks to, and there are no real plans for the 25th itself.

I should blog about all that other stuff later. But that mostly gets me caught up. This last week before Christmas, when I don't have any shopping to do and I should be just wrapping gifts and enjoying the lights and such, I am instead planning to clean house. But I have planned to clean house before, and it rarely gets done.

Monday Morons--Vandalism

If you are eating while reading blogs, you should not read this one right now.

At school we have a main building with the offices and the library and the cafeteria and a swimming pool and most of the classrooms. And then there are some annex buildings on the other side of the parking lot. And then between the main building and the other annex buildings is the art annex building, which is where the ceramic classes and sculpture classes meet. The art annex building has two main classrooms, a big room with ceramic kilns and glass kilns, an office, several closets, a tool room, a saw room, a welding room, several sinks, a water fountain, and a women's restroom and a men's restroom.

These are not big multiple stall restrooms like they have in the main building. These are the kind with one toilet and one sink that you lock behind you when you go in. They are handicap accessible and have hand rails and all of that. Funny that the restrooms are handicap accessible and there are wheelchair ramps, but the classrooms themselves would not be good for someone in a wheelchair. I wonder if we ever got a student in a wheelchair would they build him a new table?

Anyway, there is one women's restroom and one men's restroom. Most of the time, the building is empty. When there is a class there is usually less than twenty people in the building. If there is a ceramics class and a sculpture class going on at the same time, there is usually still less than forty people in the building. For there to be more than forty people in the building there would have to be two classes going on at the same time plus students from another class, visitors, and/or maintenance staff. So the original plan for the building was to only have the one restroom, but people didn't really like that idea. So now there is one women's restroom, and one men's restroom. And if there's maintenance that needs to be done or some emergency, the men could use the women's restroom, or the women could use the men's restroom.

Friday, everyone was using the women's restroom.

The men's restroom was just fine early on Friday morning. At some point after about 9am, someone put shit on the walls. Not graffiti. Literally, shit.

So no one wanted to go in there after that.

Technically, it wasn't our class time. Our teacher was in the building from 9 til 11 and in the afternoon from 1 to 5 for office hours. There were a couple of us around trying to get extra work done, but we're pretty sure that it wasn't one of us. We're pretty sure that it wasn't our teacher, or anybody else's teacher. We're pretty sure that it wasn't a woman. We're pretty sure that it wasn't anyone on the maintenance staff, since they're the ones who would have to clean it up.

I did not go look at it. Someone who did asked "How did they get it up that high?" I don't want know, and I don't want to see it in order to formulate a theory.

One of the maintenance guys teased the teacher that it must have been someone he gave a bad grade that morning. Only it wasn't his class that morning, so he hadn't given anyone a bad grade. It must have been someone in that other class with that other teacher.

Can't imagine doing anything like that, even over a bad grade. Besides, the other teacher is a woman, and vandalizing the men's room isn't going to inconvenience her. Really, the person this is going to annoy the most is the maintenance guy who gets the job of cleaning up the mess. Did someone really do that to annoy the maintenance guys? Even if you hate the maintenance guys, it just can't be worth the risk of getting caught doing something so embarrassing.

The other bit of vandalism I saw was at a neighbor's house yesterday. Someone tossed a concrete support onto her car and broke her windshield. I do not know her very well, and I have no theories on that one.

I did not forget that it is Friday

I should have done a Freaky Friday post this morning. I didn't forget that it was Friday; I was just busy with school stuff. I know that I said I was going to start doing Freaky Friday either once a month or every other Friday, and either way I should have done one today. I didn't, and I'm sorry. I'll try next week, or maybe I'll even try to write one tomorrow.

Technically, all I have to do for class is paint a pumpkin and a dragon. The pumpkin is in the kitchen now, and one of the dragons is in the car. I could just do that and say that I'm done with it on Monday. But two of these dragons are supposed to be Christmas presents, and they're not working out. Not one of them has come out of the mold without breaking pieces off. I've done like eight now. It's just not working with the plaster.

I'm going to give it a couple more tries. There's plaster drying in the molds right now, and I'll cross my fingers for Monday night. After the semester is over I'm going to bring the molds home and try colored cement and possibly that clear acrylic stuff. But the clear stuff is expensive, and you have to buy a special mold-release.

Also I want to put using the harder stuff til later, just in case I can't get it out of the molds.

I originally planned to do the dragons without the high relief. If I had stuck to the original plan, I'd have no problems now. But the teacher said that rubber molds could handle the undercuts, so I tried to recreate the same dragon from last semester.

So it's Friday night, and I am a.) not doing anything fun, and b.) not even working on any art projects. I am mostly just sitting here waiting for my mom to call. Of course, she probably forgot that I said I'd call her back on Friday, and unless something bad has happened she is probably out shopping.

Possibility 1--something unpleasant happened to my sister. Mom called Tuesday when I was out, and it was too late to call her back. She called again on Wednesday, and being that it was only like ten minutes too late to call, I phoned anyway just in case it was important. I thought that it was about the family dinner, which she said it was not. But then she said that she was too tired to get into it, and I said that I'd call her back tonight after I was finished with the school stuff. Still, I'm thinking that if something unpleasant happened to my sister, she would have told me about it regardless of being too tired to get into it.

Possibility 2--something unpleasant has happened to my grandmother. Or rather, something more unpleasant than the usual has happened to grandmother. Grandmother is not getting any younger, so it is never anything pleasant for her anymore. Again, if it was something really bad, she probably would have told me.

Possibility 3--something unpleasant and totally unexpected has happened to someone else. Now that really is something she probably would have told me about before now.

Possibility 4--the same old stuff with grandmother, and would I consider taking a job helping out grandma?

Well, no, I would not consider taking a job helping out grandma. Not if there's anyway out of it. About three years ago, mom talked me into this "job." I didn't want to do it then. I wanted a job, but I wanted a real job with more money and insurance and such. But my mom talked me into it, and right after I agreed to do it, the "job" offer did not actually result in a "job". They'd have to talk about it some more, and she couldn't tell me the schedule so I could make other plans to maybe take an art class, etc.... I needed the money at the time, but I still didn't really want to do it even then. I was afraid I wouldn't know what to do in an emergency, and I didn't want to have to lift her if she fell down, and if I got hurt on the "job" I wouldn't have insurance and workman's-comp, etc....

I had all of those reasons not to take the "job" then, and those are still valid reasons now. I don't want to do it. I don't want any commitments right now, other than school. I really don't want that much of a commitment, but if I didn't go to school right now, I'd go crazy. And school is something I can get out of whenever I want. I don't know how I'd get out of this "job" if it just wasn't working out for me.

So I'm afraid that is what my mom wants to talk about. I've already said that I wasn't interested, I don't think so, and all the other polite things that I say when I don't want to do something. I hate to have to say anything else. I really do not want to have another conversation about this, and I especially do not want to have this conversation now, during the last week of the semester, and right before Christmas and birthdays and all of that.

I should not be greedy and worry that she'll get upset and cancel the family dinner, but that is what I'm afraid of.

So I am mostly just sitting here, waiting for my mother to call, possibly to have a conversation that I don't want to have.

I think that I'll go watch Night of the Living Dead DVD or something like that. Won't that put me in a better mood?

Last official week of art class

Nothing seems to be done. Well, that's not exactly true. The paper things are done, they just need to be framed later for display. The relief of Anubis is done. And the wire dragon is done. But I didn't really care too much for them.

Technically, the first glass sculpture is done, but it's full of holes. I have made a mold for the second one, but I have to wait for everyone else to finish their glass projects to see if there will be enough glass left for me to try again.

There is more drama with the rubber molds. I mentioned something to the professor about using paint-on thick rubber instead of pouring rubber. I was just talking about later, next semester maybe. But he thought it was such a good idea that he ordered some additive and told me to use that on my second mold. And he's making everyone else that hasn't already poured rubber to use this method too. I wanted to try it, just not now, and not on this particular piece. I'm not sure it's going to work with this piece. It's very high relief in places, and it is taking many many coats of "paint." I didn't think it was ever going to get done.

Tomorrow I'll finish that mold and hopefully I can test it Thursday. The first mold isn't working so good. I did the first piece, and the first piece is really just supposed to be a test, and it also helps clean out the mold and such. I'm afraid that the first piece may end up being the best one. I wasn't planning on doing anything with it, but now I'm painting it white to cover up all the smudges of leftover clay. Little pieces of the mold come off every time I use it. And every time I cast plaster in it there are bubbles and/or little pieces of plaster that get stuck in the mold and break off. After my third attempt I decided to give it a rest.

We were also supposed to used this same mold with cement and maybe a resin. But I guess that isn't going to happen either.

My pumpkin is now in the kiln. With luck I can take it home on Thursday and get it painted over the weekend. And with a little more luck I'll get the three extra tiles out and glazed in time to get fired again.

Really, to earn the B I have already agreed to, there isn't much that I have to do. I have to paint that pumpkin, which shouldn't be a problem. I have to finish painting that dragon test piece, which is mostly done except that I would like to find a way to repair a couple of the little pieces that broke off. And I have to finish that artichoke plant, which I am working on at home and should finish today.

But I had thought that I'd get more done. The teacher is offering other students extra credit for making more pieces with their rubber molds and paper molds. Why can't I get extra credit for something? I'd gladly do some extra work. I have been doing extra work all along. Just now the dragon mold is being difficult.

I had meant to use the dragon molds to make a couple of Christmas presents. I may end up just taking a picture of a dragon and wrapping it with a note saying, "I'll make you one of these later."

For some reason I was thinking that next week was the last week of regular classes. Finals week doesn't really count. Your not still supposed to be working on stuff during finals week. But I guess that I will be.

Monday Morons--Christmas with the in-laws

Not that I'm writing this to say that my in-laws are morons. Well, we might get to that later, but that isn't what this is about. No, this is about my husband being totally clueless.

Well, you know how it is. Your parents got married and had you and maybe your brothers and/or sisters. And your mom had her family traditions, and your dad had his family traditions, and then they got married and had to give up about half of their own traditions to participate in the other family's traditions, and then they also made up some of their own traditions. So maybe you spend Christmas Eve at your maternal grandparents' house, and maybe you spend Christmas Day at home, and maybe you spend Thanksgiving and New Years at your paternal grandparents' house. Or maybe you do Thanksgiving with one family and Christmas with the other, and then the next year you switch them.

So twenty or thirty years later, we you've gotten most of that worked out, you get married, and that all goes out the window. You have to decline about half of the stuff you'd normally do with your family to make time to spend with your spouse's family. Either that, or you spend holidays apart from your spouse and never even see the in-laws. Or maybe you both decide to decline all family traditions on both sides.

But I think most people go with the first option. Do some stuff with one family, and then do some other stuff with the other family. It's not rocket science. If you get married, little things like this change.

I don't remember doing much of anything with his family that first year. He had some weird schedule at work. I had a part-time job at a movie theater, a temporary job at the mall, and had just finished what were supposed to be the last two classes on my associate degree. And there were problems with the car. I still lived with my parents, and my husband spent half the time at our house and about half the time at his mom's place, and sometimes he would check on the empty house where we would spend the next nine and a half years. I don't think that we did a lot for Christmas. I remember Christmas with my family, and I'm sure we must have gone to his mom's to exchange gifts, but I'm afraid that I don't even remember doing that. The schedule was crazy, and two or three days a week I didn't even see him. Mostly I remember him unwrapping presents from me, and my family all looked bewildered that I got him a pepper-mill and other things like that. And they got him stuff, but mostly it was stuff like candy, cause they didn't know what else he liked. He bought me a ring, which my mom didn't car for, cause it had a garnet and didn't look like a wedding ring.

Anyway, I know that we didn't do much with his family that year, cause of the schedule.

Sometimes it just didn't seem to sink in with him or his family that he was married now. His brother would invite him to lunch and then be surprised when two of us showed up. They would just expect him to do something that he used to do. It didn't seem to occur to them that he wasn't going to go grocery shopping with them or do laundry with them anymore, even after he moved out of the house. And that first year we didn't file our taxes together, cause he just gave everything to his brother like he aways did. And then he signed it and sent it off without telling me, and he didn't even copy information to give to me so that I could properly file my taxes. I think maybe he even filed as a single person to get the extra money.

In February we moved into his grandmother's old place. It was not a good place and there were bugs and peeling paint and such, but I didn't care cause I finally got to spend the whole week with my husband.

So it was either the next December or probably the one after that, and my husband reminds me about going to his brother's place the next week.

Only this is the first that I've heard about it.

Not only does he think that he's already told me about it, I'm just supposed to know anyway, because the whole family always gets together every year on the 23rd. Just like last year and the year before.

But we didn't go anywhere on the 23rd last year or the year before. So far as I know, we were not even invited anywhere on the 23rd. And I don't even remember him mentioning that they did this while we were dating.

He insisted that they always do that and they have done that every year for his whole life. They all have their own plans on Christmas and Christmas Eve, but all of them who live in the area get together on the 23rd. He needed to call his mom and find out what time they were expected and if we were all going to drive over together and such.

I am quite sure that I had not gone to this brother's house on the 23rd before. It is possible that he'd been going without me, and certainly I would not have expected to be invited during the two years we had been dating. But if he'd gone without me after we were married, that was strange.

So he called his mom, and she didn't know for sure, so she said she'd ask and then get back to us. A couple days later, he gets all the details and confirms that we are going to his brother's place on the 23rd.

I'm a bit rattled by all of this. We are apparently going to some big family gathering in a few days, and I knew nothing about it. I hadn't scheduled for it. And if it's a dinner aren't I supposed to bring something? I had probably met this brother, but I didn't really know him. These were not people that I spoke to on a regular basis, and I didn't feel like I should just call and ask what this was all about.

The first two years we were married, I had a part-time job. Then I quit the job, intending to get another one with a different schedule, but my husband talked me out of that idea and said I should just stop working. So at this time we had every little money, and either I didn't have any job, or I worked less than twenty hours a week. So at least I didn't have a scheduling conflict with this last minute family function.

I had just about calmed down about the whole thing, when I asked to confirm that this little visit to the brother's place did not involve exchanging gifts with the extended family.

Oh, we get each other presents.

What???!!!

I had spent the last two months buying Christmas presents. With my limited funds I had barely managed to get things for my family, his mom, two of his brothers, one of his sisters, and a nephew that still lived "at home", and I already knew we were expected to exchange gifts with them just as we did last year. Now, with no money and not enough time to go shopping anyway, I'm supposed to have presents for another brother and his wife and nephews that I had never met and possibly their wives or girlfriends.

My husband doesn't see what the big deal is. We'll think of something.

The house had a big pecan tree, so I think that we ended up giving them a bag of pecans. And he was supposed to make a bunch of pralines, but most of them didn't turn out so good.

I was terribly embarrassed about the whole thing. I am uncomfortable in a lot of social situations, and my husband does nothing to help. You're supposed to do stuff for each other, like you're supposed to nudge the other person, and he's supposed to look at you so you can whisper "Get me out of here." Only instead of thinking of some excuse so that we can quietly leave, he either doesn't seem to get the signal, or he stands up and announces "My wife wants to leave now." So I should have known this sort of thing would come up, and that he wouldn't have a clue.

When I got married, I gave up things to be with the man I loved. I'd grown up being used to things like nice clothes and living room furniture. After we got married, I didn't do much socially. I didn't buy clothes except for jeans and what I could wear to work. Most of my old dresses still fit, so if I needed to go to a church thing I had stuff to wear, but what was I supposed to wear to this thing with his family? I was pretty sure that it wasn't a dress-up kind of thing, but were jeans okay?

So for a few years, we went to his brother's place on the 23rd. That first time, his brother's wife confirmed that they had not had this little gathering "in a while" and had definitely not done this since we'd been married. Every year I worried what to get them, cause I didn't have money to get them much, and I didn't know them that well anyway. I usually ended up trying to make them candles or whatever I was into at the time. Every year they seemed to remember to get me something at the last minute, and as they all exchanged gifts I unwrapped one package that was usually candy or soap or something that was probably re-gifted. Every year they got my husband a dress shirt, and maybe a sweater. That would be the only nice clothes he would have for the year, and usually he would ruin it two months later by wearing it to change oil or something.

I think that the family gathering had stopped about the time that their own kids had gone off to college, but my husband didn't remember. It started again, mostly because my husband expected it, and they didn't have a tactful way of saying they didn't want to invite us anymore. One year they found a way out by announcing that they were going out of town before that date and did not expect to be back until the next year. The year after that we did not get an invitation, and after that we had such hectic schedules that I don't think we even bothered to ask about it.

Eventually, my husband learned to dress like a grown-up without the brother's help. But he never did get into the whole gift giving thing. He gets stuff for me all the time. But he doesn't wrap them and wait for a special occasion, he just gives me stuff if he thinks he's found something I'd like. Christmas and anything resembling work that is related to Christmas, such as buying presents, wrapping presents, or decorating is left entirely to me. He gives me the money, and that is the end of his participation in Christmas until it is time for him to unwrap his own presents or eat something. I can barely get him to express his opinion on whether or not one of his relatives would like a gift I was thinking of buying.

When everyone found out that his mother had cancer, I thought that there would be one last big deal around Christmas time. But no one invited us over on the 23rd that year. For her sake, I hope that they did something and just forgot to include us.

The year after his mom died, the brother and sister and nephew that still lived "at home" still thought we should exchange gifts. We didn't actually go to see them, but they left some things for us when they went to visit one of their brothers, knowing that we would see him later that week. Now that his mother is gone, my husband doesn't really want anything to do with any of them except for one of his brothers.

Last year, I did not get any of them anything. My husband and the one brother he still likes can exchange gifts if they want to, but it's a relief that I don't have to deal with the rest of them ever again.

Have your neighbors joined a bookclub, or are they just perverts?

Okay, so someone I know has a blog and he's trying to make money off of the blog with ads and such. Most of these ads just magically appear on his blog. He doesn't choose the ads. The service reads his blog and then decides which ads go where. I don't even think that there's anyone actually reading the blog to select the ads. I think there's just a program that looks for certain words and then matches the blog posts with the whatever ads are available.

So we were all having a bit of a laugh one day when all these ads for sex toys popped up. There was nothing in the recent posts about sex toys. I'm not sure sex toys had ever been mentioned anywhere in the blog. Certainly the word sex is written from time to time, but I wouldn't think that he'd written it enough lately to get anyone's attention.

Anyway, my husband notices that some of the sex toy ads are from Amazon.com. Silly, me. I thought Amazon.com just sold books.

But, a couple of clicks later, and there are several thousand listings for sex toys.

I don't know where some of this stuff is supposed to go or what it is supposed to do. And we're having a good laugh and wondering what cyberskin is. And why is most of this stuff made in such bright colors? You would think that half of this stuff would be skin tones. And you'd think the other half would be white or something boring so that if you didn't look too close you wouldn't know it was a sex toy and maybe just think it was an electric toothbrush or something. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Apparently bright purple is the favorite color.

I haven't seen anything with stripes or polka-dots, but I haven't looked at that many yet.

And why are there remote controls on some of this stuff? That really creates some odd mental pictures. First it made me think of some creepy guy in another room watching someone on a TV screen. My second thought was of a bunch of people in a circle zapping each other like on The Simpsons.

And what is with this glass stuff? I don't want glass anywhere near there. And I wonder if there's a lot of broken glass due to people dropping their sex toys in the shower? That's just really weird.

Oh, wait. Maybe I have seen stuff with stripes and dots. Never mind.

So I'm having a good time looking at the silly things, and my husband asks me something like which one would I want if I was into this stuff. I don't know. Sorry, I was just having a good laugh looking at the pictures. I didn't know I was supposed to be taking notes or anything.

So the next time I see something that looks interesting, I click on it, but I get a message that it is temporarily unavailable. Okay. And the next thing that looks interesting is also unavailable. And I read that a few more times and then I gave up and went to bed.

A few days later there was a box on the doorstep. It's about 11 by 9 by 3 inches. It's a good size box for sending a book or two. And it's from Amazon.com.

Only it doesn't have any books in it.

So I guess he was offering to buy me something cause he'd already bought himself something. I have a good laugh and wait for him to come home so I can tease him about it.

Turns out that he had ordered me something too, only it hadn't arrived yet.

I make a note of when to look for the second mailman who delivers the boxes. I can't have boxes like this just sitting on my doorstep for the whole world to see.

The next day at about the same time I receive another box that is about the right size for a book. Only it is not a book. It was not so vulgar looking as most of the stuff we seen. It was long and shiny, requires 2 AA batteries, and could easily be mistaken for an electric toothbrush or something like that.

Except that it is metallic purple.

Okay, we're off to the drugstore for lubricant, antibacterial soap, etc....

Sometimes, it's the thought that counts. Having never really given this sort of thing much serious thought before, we didn't really know what to order. Now that we get the general idea, maybe something longer for him, maybe something softer and not so long and narrow for me.

And while I was looking at all the silly ads, I did find a mold your own penis kit. It costs about ninety dollars. Right now, I think I'll pass on it.

Think maybe he'll buy me some Victoria Secret stuff now? Wonder if Amazon.com sells that sort of thing?

How about a nice boring catch up post instead

Okay, so the reader that I told I would write about sex toys is having a really bad day and probably doesn't want to read today's planned post. So we'll save that for later, when she's up for a laugh.

Maybe I should write about the Homewrecking-Slut. Maybe we should just all sit around and compare notes on how stupid men are. But maybe she's not up for that either.

So maybe it's time for a catch-up post on just what's going on around here in general.

Thanksgiving was just my husband and me with my mom and my brother. My sister was at her in-laws. My mom made stuffing and a couple of other things, and my brother got the turkey and some other stuff at Popeye's. Pretty simple. Then we saw Grandma for a bit. She seemed a lot better than the last time I saw her, except that her eyes looked all puffy.

Well, I did not reach my goal of packing away the Halloween stuff before Thanksgiving. The really sad part about this is that I didn't really unpack any Halloween stuff this year. There's a lot of stuff that stays out all year: a plastic skull, some ravens, some art projects, some hats, some stuff I might need in a hurry if Hogwart's attire is requested, and a few other things. But there are still boxes and boxes of stuff that only comes out when it's actually time for Halloween decorations, and due to the travel plans and school I did not unpack a single box.

So all of this stuff that is out in the hallway is stuff that I bought this year. I've hardly managed to sort and pack any of it. I bought five new plastic boxes, thinking that would be plenty and there would be space for other stuff. But so far all I've boxed up is this year's costume. The rest of it is just sitting there.

Since I didn't have time to put away the Halloween stuff, I haven't yet unpacked the Christmas stuff. I suspect most of that is going to stay in boxes, and two months from now there will probably by stacks of Christmas stuff out in the hallway where the Halloween stuff is now. Or perhaps there will be Christmas stuff stacked on top of the Halloween stuff, if I haven't managed to put that away by then either.

I guess the vampire guy and I are not going to be great friends after all. Though at the last club meeting, I did have a bit of fun with a couple of Klingons. I usually play trivia games with K, but she didn't seem interested. So I drafted a Klingon instead. We were in the lead for most of the game, but then we somehow ended up in third place. Whatever.

Art class is a bit stressful at the moment. I keep trying to do extra work, but I never seem to get ahead. I have skipped a whole project and will have to settle for a B. But there are still more delays. Supplies don't arrive on time and that sort of thing. I should have cast a couple of dragons in rubber by now, except that we had ran out of rubber before the holiday break. The teacher ordered more rubber, only to find out that they had already closed up for Thanksgiving. So stuff that really should have been done last Tuesday won't get done until this Wednesday, if even then. The clay relief has finally been fired, and it looks okay, but I'm not overly impressed with it. Same with the wire dragon. The soapstone thing I skipped, but I might work on it by myself over the summer. My subjects for the paper casting were little sea-life scenes, which I now think are very boring, but it's too late to change now and I am stuck with them. The teacher thinks that they are good and wants to put them on display in January, so I'm buying frames and such for a project that I don't really even like anymore. My glass casting was a total disaster, due to something about the kiln not being set right. A classmate's glass project turned out nearly perfect, but mine is full of bubbles and holes. Some of the bubbles are golf-ball size. The big bubbles are in the back, but there are enough smaller holes in the front to mostly ruin the piece. Luckily, I made a rubber master and can try it again, once the problem with the kiln is fixed. The teacher hasn't tried to fire it again, so everyone else's glass is just sitting on a shelf. I have a dragon under a few inches of rubber, waiting for a bit more rubber to touch up a few places, and I have another dragon waiting to be cast, and then both rubber pieces need a sort of plaster box poured around them before the rubber molds can be used. So that probably won't get finished until the end of next week, if even then. In the mean time I'm at home working on a clay pumpkin, which looks okay but somehow not quite what I hoped for, but I'd better go ahead and finish it before it gets too dry. So that had better be by tomorrow or it won't have time to dry properly and get fired in time paint it. And for my last project had to buy a bunch of colored plastic spoons. I originally wanted green, but since there was no green at the dollar store I decided to use purple instead. Of course, right after I got started with the purple spoons, Party City had a sale, and of course they have plenty of green spoons. To late; I'm using purple.

As usual, the house is a mess. Only now there is extra mess cause I'm working on the clay pumpkin on the kitchen table. And I have a zillion soda bottles that I was saving for an art class. But the teacher didn't like the idea, so I can't do the project for school. So now I have this dilemma. Should I throw away all these bottles? It seems wrong to do that after I've been saving them all semester. Should I keep them in case I have another use for them? Or should I maybe go ahead and make something with them and just not have it be a class project? Anyway, if I am keeping them I need to find a place to put them, cause half of them are either just on the floor of the kitchen or in the bedroom.

My husband is gone this week. It's really strange when he isn't here. He was gone the first week of school, but other than that he hasn't been gone much since we had that last big fight in August. Things are never really wonderful anymore, but recently things were almost pleasant most of the time. We go to lunch and such. So he's gone for a week or so, and I end up missing this man that I wish I had never ever met. It is odd.

The good thing about him being gone is that I won't lose any lab time or anything like that. I keep going to school to do extra work, and then half of the time I leave early to go have lunch with him. And I really can't afford to lose any lab time this week, so this might be a good thing. Maybe I'll get more work done with him out of the way.

I find myself wondering what else I can do while he's away that I wouldn't do if he were here. I'm eating a pumpkin pie. Not that I couldn't eat a pumpkin pie with him here, but he hates pumpkin pie, so half the time when I want to buy one I end up putting it back and getting something that he might like. This week, he isn't here, and anything I buy I'm going to eat all by myself anyway, so I might as well buy a few things that he doesn't like. And I'm trying to think if there's anyplace that I should go for lunch. The Mongolian grill maybe? I like it, but it doesn't seem to be his favorite place.

I should be able to relax a bit by Friday. The clay pumpkin should be drying and waiting to be fired by then, and the only other art project that I can work on at home is the thing with the colored plastic spoons. And that won't make a big mess. With my husband gone I can even work on that in bed while I watch TV. Maybe I will go to Fort Worth and buy some glass. I'll be going to Fort Worth on Saturday anyway to hang out with K and a few other friends.

Officially, there are only three more classes before finals week. Where did the time go?

The Mist

Well, I have promised a certain reader that I would post about sex toys, but that will have to wait. A person can talk about sex toys any time. Movie reviews are rather time sensitive.

So we have not seen a movie in a while. My husband does not usually go for horror flicks, but I like them once in a while and was pleasantly surprised when he suggested that we go to see this one. The Mist is based on a Stephen King story, and while we both like the occasional Stephen King story, neither of us are really big fans.

The story is set in a small town on a lake. After a major storm cuts off the electricity, just about everyone in town heads for the grocery store. While the main character and his son are in the grocery store, someone rushes in and screams that there's something in the mist that "got Joe." The grocery store is then surrounded by a fog that no one can see through, so no one really knows what is out there, or when it might be safe to leave.

I liked it. The story is much like The Day of the Triffids, except that it takes place over less time. There is something in the mist, but the story is more about what the people do to each other than about the monster.



***********************SPOILER ALERT*************************

































First we have a couple of neighbors who don't like each other. But they seem to bond a bit after the storm. They really don't like each other because of something we know little about that takes place before the story opens, but one of them loses his car because of the storm, and the other one feels bad for him and gives him a ride into town. They are civil to each other and talk during the ride. By the time they get to the grocery store, the are friendly enough that the father trusts his neighbor enough to watch his son for a bit. The son is impressed that they are not fighting anymore. The storm clouds have a silver lining.

But that lasts about ten minutes once the trouble starts. The neighbor is an out-of-towner, who seems to think that the locals have taken this opportunity to stage some elaborate joke and make him look foolish. In an attempt to force him to look at the evidence, he is "assaulted" and he then threatens to sue everyone.

Two others go to look at the evidence, which is a two foot long piece of a clawed tentacle that one of them cut off of the monster that ate a teenager who worked at the grocery store. Me, I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to force people to go an look at it. I would have just gone and got a turkey pan or something and picked up the thing and brought it out for everyone to look at. But I guess that wouldn't have done any good, cause one of the guys poked it with a stick, causing it to spasm and then turn to liquid and mostly disappear.

So then there's a lot of yelling about what should be done. And who is in charge? On a normal day, the manager of the store would be in charge of the store, but that doesn't quite make him qualified for this. The angry neighbor takes a group of mostly out-of-towners outside. They don't think that anything is in the mist, and they think that if they just walk outside a ways they can get help. Or maybe they can at least get cell phone reception and call for help that way.


A local guy goes out to the parking lot with them. He doesn't think that leaving is a good idea, but he thinks that they would all feel better if he got the rifle out of his buddy's truck. The local guy gets about a hundred and fifty yards before he gets eaten. Or, at least, he gets half eaten, and the people in the store drag his legs back to the door by a rope they had tied to the man's belt-loops.

So now we have something that "got Joe", a sack-boy who was dragged off and eaten by something with big tentacles, a bunch of missing people who are presumed dead, and a half-eaten local guy. There is no more arguing about whether or not something is out there, but still little agreement on what should be done about it.


Someone noticed that the front of the store is mostly glass, and they start stacking large bags of dog food and fertilizer and such in the hopes that it would help prevent something from breaking through the glass. Me, I would have started by duct taping whole panels of glass, not just little places here and there where the glass was cracked. But maybe because of the storm they had sold most of the duct tape and didn't have enough to do that.


Also, it didn't seem to occur to anyone to move people to the back room where there was less glass to worry about. True, there wasn't any light in the back room due to a problem with the generator, but I would have at least moved most of the people back there at night when they were trying to sleep in the dark anyway. But no one wanted to go back there, some giant bugs got in, followed by something eating the giant bugs. We then have one girl who dies after being stung by a giant bug, one guy who is partially eaten by whatever was hunting the bugs, and an almost dead guy who accidentally set himself on fire in the excitement. After that we have an old woman commit suicide. After that no one wants to go in the backroom because that's where they put the bodies.

There is one woman who insists that they are experiencing the stuff described in Revelations, and that God has sent these monsters to punish them for their evil ways. Me, I don't think that these are the same creatures as those described in the Bible, but I would have let her test her theory by letting her go outside and walk among the monsters. She would have been eaten, and that would have proven either that she wasn't a Christian or that she didn't know what she was talking about. And there is a moment in the film where a bug is crawling on her but does not sting her, so there's a chance that maybe she does know what she's talking about. But she won't shut up about it. She scares people. One old lady starts throwing cans of food at her and threatens to stone her if she doesn't shut up.

A group of them decide to try to go next door to the pharmacy and get some supplies. The burned guy is going to die if he doesn't get medicine soon, and several other people are hurt. The make a list of things that they want and head out.

They get to the pharmacy okay, and they find most of what they were looking for. But they also find giant spiders. A dying military guy tells them that it is all their fault. Before he can say what that means, he dies and baby spiders start crawling out of him. The group heads back to the grocery store with the medicine, but they lose a couple of people to the spiders. And the medicine comes too late the save the burned man. And two of the three guys from the military base hang themselves.

Now most of the people are listening to the crazy religious lady. The remaining military guy tells of rumors at the base about a window that looks into a different world or another dimension. The religious lady talks more about pride going before a fall and God's judgement. Someone stabs the military guy and throws him outside to get eaten by monsters.

A bunch of people who were normal a few days ago just killed a guy for taking a job serving his country. And they're happy about it. Cause the crazy lady says that God won't let the monsters take anyone else that night.

About eight people have had enough of the crazy religious lady. The collect some supplies and plan to try to leave in the morning. Only the crazy lady catches them trying to leave, accuses them of stealing, and demands that the little boy be the next person sent out to the monsters.

I am not as into the Bible as I used to be, but still, I don't think that there's anything in the Bible to justify that. One of the people who still has a bit of sense shoots the crazy lady and threatens to kill anyone else who tries to stop them from leaving. The eight of them head for the car, but only five of them make it.

Driving very slowly with about a dozen headlights, they drive to the man's house to look for his wife. But the spiders have already gotten to her. They very slowly drive out of town. There's still more mist, and more monsters. Finally, the run out of gas.

At this point, I thought that maybe they had driving past the dangerous mist and were just in regular fog but didn't know it. I thought that they were all going to kill themselves and then the camera would pull back and show that they were in a safe place and if they'd just waited a little bit longer everything would have been okay. Not quite it. Cause they were still hearing the sounds of the monsters. Maybe even the sounds were getting louder.

My husband thought that maybe they had driven so far into the mist that they had ended up driving into that other world. That wasn't it either.

There are five of them, and they have a gun with four bullets. The four adults are all agreed that they would rather die in the car than deal with anymore monsters, and earlier the dad had promised his kid that he wouldn't let the monsters get him. So it is decided that he will shoot the boy and them, and then he will find some way of killing himself.

So after he's shot everyone he's crying and screaming. And he can't think of a way to kill himself, so he gets out of the car and waits for something to come and get him. And nothing comes. So he's starts yelling to get something's attention. The noises are coming closer. Something is coming down the road.

Only a tank rolls out of the mist. More military vehicles come. Survivors are being evacuated. We see that someone from the beginning of the movie lived.

The mist starts to evaporate, revealing more military people who are shooting the bugs and burning anything that doesn't belong here. There's still a lot of work to do and a lot of mess to clean up, but everything is going to be okay.

If they had just waited like five more minutes, they would have been rescued.