Monday, December 3, 2012

Post Turkey

Annual Thanksgiving awards:  Alden wins for most pictures of a cooked bird.  Sue wins for the most turkey roasting drama.  I lose for having inedible Brussels sprouts.  End of Thanksgiving.

Gorgeous DIY branch tree!
On to Christmas.  For the first time in history, I  decorated the house before December.  As you will recall, last year we traveled to North Carolina for Christmas, and a jolly good thing we did at that.   But we did no decorating, save a winsome, lonely wreath on the front door.  This year is another story.  The tree is up and decorated within an inch of its life, the mantle is draped, festooned and lit with gobs of stuff and the buffet in the dining room is replete with sparkling, freshly polished silver.  Not to be happy for her mother on this unprecedented feat, daughter Alison, in her snarkiest New Mexican, inquired if I'd also set the table for Christmas Eve.  Alison's birthday is on the 2nd of December, how do you think that worked out for her? That's what I thought too!  I sent her pictures of the house and asked how she was doing.  

 Daughter Lindsey and I went to see the last Twilight movie.  We had to, we'd seen the last two or three or however many there were.  And we are not apologetic.  We also got our nails done.  So one treat offset the other so to speak.  I was amused by the sign proffered at a bar stating that a 20% increase to your bill would be assessed by showing your "Breaking Dawn Part II" ticket stub.  What ever hater.

Daughter Megan and her beloved took themselves off to Portland  Thanksgiving week for an adults only  trip by themselves.  The good grandparents had the  grand-offspring.  Steve and I managed to catch the plague the week of Thanksgiving and so were spared babysitting duties um not available to help out.  Oh right, thanks to Malcolm for the plague, way to share sugar.

At this point I had ready a rant and a rave about the whining post election.  I got over it and I feel sorry for those of you who can't.  I rest.

In an effort not to be a horrible person, I visited my ancient Auntie the other day.  She kept reminding me that she was 90 years old.  I said not for long, as her birthday is in January.  She was confused about that.  She got cross with me several times and then told me I could come by any time but there was no guarantee she would be home as her schedule varied from day to day.  I agreed to do whatever she wanted, she was carrying a stout cane.  I love her.


So there used to be this computer game called Bureaucracy.  It was in DOS format.  I believe that DOS stood for dumb operating system.  I played this game on an Apple PCJr.  Suffice it to say that this was in a galaxy far far away.  Before windows.  Anyway, Bureaucracy, the deal was you had to type in commands to perform simple every day tasks like finding the phone, getting the mail, talking to repair people etc.  Each time something went haywire, like you didn't move the correct object to find something to find something else your blood pressure would rise.  Eventually you would have a stroke and die.  The game gave up the ghost for me after I discovered you had to stroke the llama's tongue to open the mailbox, but I digress.  Anyway, I tried to reach the repair/service department at a Sears store today.  OMG and FML, epic fail and all that, I never did talk to a service person at the store, but I did talk to some call center in Bangladesh or where ever and nearly popped a vessel talking to the phone maze.  The upshot of this is my beautiful Cobalt Blue Kitchenaid stand mixer, that I bought for myself when I had a pity party for myself back in 1986, seized up last night in the middle of making gingerbread.  And all I really want to do do is find someone to fix the thing.  A quick call to all the appliance repairs idiots in Vacaville got me no where as, to a man,  they only do major appliances and my major melt downs had no affect whatsoever on any of them.  I feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it.  Perhaps a nice cocktail will calm me down.  Who cares if it's 10 in the morning.  I'll bet it's 5 in Bangladesh.  This would be a bad time to offer platitudes... or advice.  Real bad.
RIP

On that happy note, I shall sign off for now.
Adieu,
Cheers,
Squidgy

'