scrawls
still cheaper than therapy*


friday.

lalala. and the plumber came, early early, even though i was up an hour and a half earlier (just in case he decided to come then). and it cost way way lots, and we have roots growing in our house line to the city sewer. so they make this stuff that kills the root without hurting the plant, and inhibits it from growing around the sewer line. so we'll have to dump that down.

and we had another barbecue. the guests go home tomorrow and everyone wanted to say bye. we'll probably not see them for ages again :( but they send baby pictures often :) with the digital camera.

everybody liked their presents. i think. so far. One of the shirts we sent to indiana was too small. ah, well.

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thursday.

christmas is such an ordeal.

so it was christmas - which is intereting, but, well, the guests are christian, i guess, more or less, or more than i am, anyway, so we had a christmas. and the drains had gone down a little bit - so i decided maybe i can take a shower - and i just barely got to the hot water. and it doesn't take that long to get the hot water. so. very brief shower, with turning off the water between getting wet and lathering and showering off, and no shampoo, and then the Loved One had a similarly brief shower - but then the water backed up again. so the guests left after breakfast-or-so to take showers at the neighbors'. sigh. i feel bad.

and then it was christmas, and everybody went to the bathroom at their house before coming over, and then we couldn't run the dishwasher because eew, and what if the toilet-water backed up into the dishwasher, and eew, et c., and after dinner we decided to transport all the desserts to the neighbors and have dessert and whatnot there.

so the lamb was yummy, and the asparagus and the other grilled veg are always yummy, and the fish soup of S's was quite good (and i found a recipe for it), and those little top-secret-recipe cheddar biscuits from red lobster were even better the second day, but not bad then either, and .. i know there were seven .. rice pilaf is always rice pilaf .. sigh. there was something else. maybe i was counting dessert. So anyway.

christmas tastes good. which is really the whole point. and we had a tree - full of plastic apples and gold-painted walnuts and beady pears and plums and crinkly ribbons. i meant to do the cranberry-popcorn strings but .. well .. that can happen someday. we did have a couple of real ornaments - there was a hallmark Thimble Puppy, which is not christmassy at all, and a couple of hallmark Herald Angels with horns and drums and flutes and things. one of them had a pan-pipe, which is certainly not christmassy. Mostly apples.

i think, left to ourselves, we might've had christmas on christmas .. or we mightv'e just had vacation and good food and presents throughout the vacation. we both had to work on the solstice, and even if my blood is jewish i don't know a thing about practical celebration, but .. i think i consciously rejected jesus a very long time ago.

i think i was nine or ten - still going to quaker first-day school. and i was looking for some other thing in the bible, and i found a story about how jesus killed a poor sickly fig tree. (aha! i found it, ya bastards: matthew 21:18-22; mark 11:12-14,20-25.) he cursed it. and not out of mercy for a poor sickly fig tree. because he was hungry and it didn't happen to have any figs, poor thing. it died. because he wanted to demonstrate that prayers could be answered. when he could have just as easily blessed it and had perfectly good figs and had his demo. or he could have in fact mistaken an entirely different kind of tree that wasn't supposed to have figs in the first place. or it could've not been fig season. or somebody could've picked all the figs that morning. so. that didn't seem very nice, to me. and i asked the first-day school teacher about it and she changed the subject.

but quite aside from killing defenseless trees. i've done a lot of things, but i've never deliberately killed a plant. i don't think i ever even helped my mom weed gardens (i couldn't be taught which ones were weeds and which were flowers / corn / zucchini / et c.). cockroaches, yes, obviously. even spiders and moths and lizards and things on occasion (if they're dumb enough to wander into my house, i'm doing the species a favor by eliminating them).

if i have any sins, which i'm not sure i believe in in the first place, but maybe i'll discuss that later, anyway, i like my sins. i quite enjoy them. each of them was my decision. i don't want some random napoleon-complex egotistical bastard taking credit for them. they're mine. if anybody's going to die for them, it'll be me, and certainly not someone i've never met whose help i never asked for.

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wednesday.

christmas is such an ordeal.

so i go to the grocery because we're going to a friend's for christmas eve (he's a new bachelor after more than a decade) and he kept calling to make sure he was cooking the turkey and the acorn squash right (which was okay, but ...well) and then when i got a call at the grocery: the toilet is stopped up - get some drano. Okay. and i got home and it wasn't the toilet, and it wasn't the bathtub, and it wasn't the other toilet or the other bathtub, and it wasn't the dishwasher or the washing machine or the hose - it was the f*cking sewer.

so as of noon on christmas eve, we couldn't flush the toilet or take a shower or run very much water at all down the kitchen sink. including washing vegetables and dishes and things. and we called every plumber in town and they were all closed - so we looked in a different phone book and checked off all but one that we hadn't called and they were open and it was going to be $115 for the first half hour and $125 an hour after that, or something, and they said Okay, we'll be there this afternoon. And then the water drained very very slowly, and we decided we could wait until friday when it would be $70 for the first half hour and $50 an hour after that, or something. But i had to make stuffing, and since we were going to be gone that night and wanted to start the crock-pot lamb early the next morning, the people we were going to have xmas with came over and helped cut veggies, and we washed them VERYVERYFAST. and i couldn't find the right Poultry Seasoning to make His Gramma's Stuffing with, so i said Fuckit and used pork sausage and tony sachere. and it was yummy, and everybody liked it, but it wasn't Gramma's. And we went over to our friend's and used his toilet and had turkey and acorn squash (both of which he had done perfectly well thankyouverymuch) and dressing and apple pie and cherry pie and punkin pie and chess pie and cookies and beer and whiskey, and we had a lot of whiskey, come to think of it.

and we had a bonfire, and there were three little girls playing pianos and doing cartwheels and poking the fire, and there was this one annoying woman, but ..well.. we can avoid her in the future, maybe. but.

and the baby that is staying with me is absolutely adorable. he even makes cute faces when he's crying.

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tuesday.

christmas is such an ordeal.

so we started making food for thursday - just desserts, at this point, and then we forgot to eat some of them anyway, but that comes later. and we'd scheduled a barbeque for this evening, so people came, only not the fella who pissed on the floor last night, but his roommate came, and there was food, and people, and beer, and we had a large quantity of slivovitz, all told. so this was just a normal massive party.

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monday.

christmas is such an ordeal.

so, with the guests, who came back and wanted to see everyone, everyone came over on monday without saying they were going to in advance - so i ended up feeling really cool and not marthastewarty, really, but something like that, because i fed between eight and ten people without planning ahead, breaking a sweat, or really noticing at all. and then i went to stock up on beer and when i came back one of our friends who apparently had been already drunk when he showed up had had too much becherovka (like, oh, jager, but cinnamon and yummy) and passed out, and everybody was drinking his beer and smoking his cigarettes, because that's what happens when somebody passes out, and then he woke up and then passed out again, and i mentioned to the Loved One that i haven't ever drawn a line between His Friends and My Friends, but if i was ever going to do so, it would be at a time like this one, because he pissed all over our bathroom floor before he left. Ungodly quantities of piss - i had no idea the human body could even hold that much.

at least it was all only on the floor.

and i guess we opened the slivovitz (czech plum brandy) that night, too.

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driving home yesterday after work.

car in front of me stops.

i stop.

car behind me doesn't.

and the geico-man can't come see it until monday, so it can't be fixed until after that.

so now my head kinda hurts (not much, i mean i'm mostly okay, not that i told my boss i was okay, i'm milking this one, baby, but kinda) and my back kinda hurts (similarly) and i can only get into the trunk through the back seat and my taillights (though not broken) are all exposed. my car feels naked. violated, too, probably. nobody likes being bumped in the ass by a giant truck. the bumper missed mine entirely.

i did name the car, sort of, when i got it, though it's not something i refer to it as. zoey. zoey is a lovely galactic blue, and as a new-ish, foreign car, she's going to be damn pricey for that poor schmuck that hit me.

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still need to get a nice bottle of whiskey for christmas. that's it. i'm done. and i don't think the liquor stores will be more crowded than at any other time of year, really.

babyproofing the house in preparation for the Guests over the holiday. borrowed a baby gate (not sure if it's learned to crawl yet - it's at that age where it might do so in the next week or two, or might just up and start running around. in either case. we can keep the baby from the dogs if it turns out to be necessary - but i don't think it will). i've never babyproofed before. the toddler that comes over sometimes bongs his head on the coffee table - but then, he can walk. of course the dogs fall over stuff all the time - and i think a large part of babyproofing will be Putting the Dog Toys Away. also Not Letting the Dogs Chew on the Baby Toys might be important ... or anyway potentially taken rather badly should i fail to do so ... but i think they're going to get a crack at that GlowWorm sooner or later, because they're determined. and utterly fascinated by it. and not so easily distracted as i'd like sometimes.

and they're going to need to be distracted from the baby, because they Love Kids, and love Licking them, and Being Alternately Tugged On and Shoved Away. it's great fun for them.

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it's friday, lovely, lovely. and there's still beer in the fridge.

having one of those days at work where i'm making a lovely huge presentation, and it'll be pretty, and thorough, and a lot of important people will see it, and i won't get any credit.

also the computer people came through work yesterday and deleted the following:Things they left:

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i'm nearly done with christmas shopping. i have:
two purses (one small and cute, one large and sacky, but that's how she likes 'em)
two pairs of earrings
one split-neck sweater
three Indiana Jones movies
one polo shirt
one magnetic-darts game
three college sweatshirts
one madlibs calendar
three blown-glass christmas tree ornaments
a GlowWorm
a blue leopard-spotted stuffed frog with velcro limbs
ten Winnie the Pooh wall stickers, assorted
two weeks to go.

i still have to get:
a beer-making kit
ten lords-a-leaping

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