Spread

Black-eyed peas for breakfast.

Are you all ready for your New Year's Eve celebrations? Little girl and I went to the dollar store for supplies: noisemakers ("squawker blowouts," it said on the packaging) and candles. We got feather masks there too, and my pink one is so pretty, but stinks like crazy so I can't wear it for more than a second. Dang. Later, we'll write down our wishes and light them on fire. Or is it our regrets? Either way, we'll be ready for 2009, and starting it together.

One of these years, I'll know that the first boy to cross my threshold in the new year won't be the neighbor kid. But not yet.

Remember, get your bills paid today and stock up your cupboards. Have fun tonight, everybody.

Spider hands.

At first, I thought the drawing below – by little Z – was a family tree: Grandma and Grandpa, me and my sister, our girls, and Z. My sister and I are right next to each other, same level, and little G seems to extend from her. But given Z herself is the giant on the right, I guess it's just a picture of our family and our relative importance. She got G's fabulous hair right, and it appears Grandpa has no hands. N is directly next to Z, which is where she always seems to want to be. And we're all wearing some pretty snazzy culottes. That's Christmas!

Me and my sister are right together because she can't ever tell my us apart anyway, though clearly one of us looks more like a monkey, the other more like a mouse.

How do you order a chocolate milk?

Little Sweet got interested in German, so I bought her a learn-German CD, set to music. We listened to it on the way home from Esky tonight, repeating after the man and the woman as they chanted over this funny techno soundtrack. Though all we know how to do so far is order white wine, by the glass and the bottle. Or we can ask for beer, or pilsner. My ten-year-old in the passenger seat. Maybe I should have checked to see if they had an under-21 version.

Such a clatter.

It is a rainy, melty day here, which is great, since I'm hitting the road on the one wet day between two winter storm warnings. Thanks, universe! And, I only have to drive 3 ½ hours today, instead of 8, which is a huge blessing, because the Robin Cook CD – Critical! – in my car isn't as entertaining as I'd hoped. (I'm paranoid enough about everything without MRSA fiction in my own car.) But we'll get to Esky earlier than I thought, so late-Christmas can last all the longer.

Xmas 08.

There were only a few clouds in the blue sky. At 3:00, the turkey looked just about done. We had ice cream in the freezer for later.

Naw, really it looked more like this:

 

Past, present, future.

Let's see, I found the most amazing lavender denim tool belt at Vinnie's yesterday. Now I'm heating up Vernors on the stove. That's a thing, right? I seem to remember my mom doing it for me when I was little. And I'm going to try not to watch Double Shot at Love later, but I might not be able to help it.

Hair, health, body, money, life.

I haven't bought a women's magazine for a long time, but Britney looking all healthy and pretty in white in this month's Glamour sucked me in. Then I remembered why they are so boring. There was honest-to-god an article called Seven Ways to Wear a T-Shirt. (Just looked it up for accuracy's sake: "7 Ways to Work that Tee!") There's with jeans, with pants, with a long skirt, with a short skirt, under a jacket. I guess there were two more (with sweatpants? under a flannel?), but I promise they weren't any more revolutionary.

I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell.

No pleasure cruise.

The Pretty Little Kittys have clawed our way to the finals in both our fantasy football leagues (though Lil Sweet named my other team the Winded Dragons). Today is a big day. I'm making chili and watching the Steelers stats on my laptop while the Lions game is on the TV. My opponent in my main league has put all his eggs in the Saints' basket, so send some love to the hard-to-love Lions defense. In fact, send good vibes to all feline teams: my backfield has dropped dead one by one and I had to actually start the Bengals' Cedric Benson today. While you're at it, let's hope Larry Fitzgerald has seen snow before. Tell me he played college football in the north.

Ooh, I just looked it up and he's from Minnesota and went to college at Pittsburgh. He may still have some sense memory of playing in snowstorms. This keeps my hopes alive.

Best of luck to all your teams. Tell me how your seasons are turning out.

Always take the weather with you.

Where are my snowplow angels this year? We got buried last night. I need to go to school and print some things, and part of me thinks it'd be easier to order and printer and some reams of paper to be overnight delivered to my house than it would be to shovel my driveway. I already tried to get out once. Shoveled as far as my car and gave up. And it's still snowing, and they say it'll keep coming down until tonight. I hate feeling trapped like this. And that dang plow has gone by like six times in the last minute. I do not exaggerate. It's like he's just there to pack me in good.

I suppose I'd have to shovel for the FedEx guy with my printer anyway, so I won't go that route. I'll just wait till spring I guess.

Good will towards men.

I was just cleaning up the house before bed and got carried away – started packing up puzzles and games and that weird raccoon coat for a trip to Vinnies. And it reminded me of a long time ago, when this person told me this story. He said he was standing in line at the grocery store, reading the Action Shopper, when he saw an ad by a woman getting rid of two hundred 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles. He said he thought of me, and called her right away, from a pay phone in the store. The old woman on the other end had already found a home for the puzzles. But the person telling the story, he was thinking longer-term than the rest of us and asked if maybe he could get the number of the person who bought them, figuring she'd need to get rid of them eventually as well, and we might as well be ready. This, I guess, kind of freaked out the old lady on the phone, who wasn't about to start giving away other people's phone numbers to strange men on payphones. So no puzzles for me.

Now, this should have been a pretty sweet story, or at least the closest this guy ever came to making an effort on my behalf, but even at the time he first told it to me, I wasn't really following it. I got tripped up on the numbers, and couldn't imagine just how big a 200,000-piece puzzle would be, and where I would put it together. I'd need to build a dedicated addition.

My igloo.

There is always the chance of this becoming solely a weather blog. I'll try to fight that urge, but today: man, it's five degrees outside and everything is frozen over. Local schools are closed.

I didn't leave the house yesterday, when the wet, heavy snow was coming down. (I didn't feel like shoveling, and there was plenty of football on.) But I really think I need to brave the elements today. I'm okay being a social hermit, but I don't think it's good for me to be literally holed up chez here for too long in a row. How can the cats miss me if I never leave?

Not exactly.

I wish I could blog more about my work. I read so many weird things from students and clients and teenagers. None of it's really mine to share though. That leaves you with stories about my non-work life, which lately seems to mean: things I have broken and my lack of a handyman. I feel sorry for all of you. (By the way -- just to hit the point home -- the WD40 didn't fix my door lock, but the warming weather must have. It started working again yesterday.) But in one capacity or another, I just read a sentence, confused on so many levels, that claimed that Anne Frank was born both blind and "death." Now that's a person whose blog I would want to read. What is her world like?

Addressee unknown.

I still get emails for that person who is not me. This summer, she received – from Ed – a list of wildflowers that grow along the Au Sable River. Last week, someone wrote and asked her how her lunch with Dean Bradley went. And this morning, a notice that her church is in need of cowboy boots for the 3^rd through 6^th graders in the upcoming Christmas pageant. Aw.

I hope this woman realizes how lucky she is – canoe trips and kids in big boots and lunch dates. I only hope her friends don't think she's horrible for not writing them back.

Making tracks.

I like how the snow leaves evidence of what's happened here while I wasn't looking. Like two nights ago, a deer in the side yard, and last week what could only have been a rabbit party around the rhododendron. I don't bother walking out to the mailbox till I see tracks from the truck. Though the past two nights, I've also left my own footprints to the back door, since both days I came home and my key wouldn't open the front door. I assume the lock was frozen, and I've tried some WD-40 though I don't know yet if that will do the trick. Of course, because I am lazy, I don't shovel all the way to the back, so the footprints are more like footholes. Maybe the chipmunks can hibernate in them. I'll know if they do.

Cradle of lies.

Subscribing to cable is so complicated. Like I already told you, my new cable bill was $30 higher, so it was time for my twice-yearly visit. I always go into the offices in person, because when I've tried to renegotiate on the phone, I've tended to get someone not local and crabby and absolutely no help. But the girls who work the counter are ready for me every time. They have a list with the current deals and they just see what'll work. Today wasn't my most successful bid.

Option one was to add phone service. But I don't even have any phone jacks in the house. (I hope they're completely out of style before I decide to move and sell the place.) The other was to add channels and pay $10 more a month (or keep my same channels and pay $30 more a month). So now I get IFC, Sundance, ESPN Classic (??), a bunch of other crap, and THE LIFETIME MOVIE NETWORK. This last makes me nervous. What if they have a Tori Spelling festival and I forget how to ever leave my house? I mean, just check on what's on tonight alone: Confessions of a Go-go Girl, Co-ed Call Girl, and Unfinished Affair. And oh dear, on the Biography network right this second: Sitcom Scandals: The Truth Behind Gilligan's Island.

Snail mail.

Li'l Sweet designed our Christmas cards this year. If you get one, and it doesn't make sense, just know that I'm right there with you. And that when I asked her what picture we should use, she wrote back and said, "Weird Round Face." So there's that problem as well.

But also know we do wish you all the happiest of holidays.

Talents of the young.

I had to take my laptop to the Help Desk today. I spilled something sticky on it, and then in attempting to clean up behind the keys, I broke a bunch of them. Yeah, brilliant. And all the cat hair I can usually blow off it was stuck good. It was gross, and I was embarrassed to bring it in.

But the girl was nice. What did you spill on it, exactly? She said to tell the truth so I didn't void the insurance or something. So, a vodka tonic, I said. With lemon. I don't know why I said it hesitantly. I'm faculty. I'm legal. Plus I was just curious: Is it really about the insurance, or are there perhaps better solvents for attacking different spills? She said, "Oh, we've seen worse."

Ooh, tell me, I said. And she came back with: vomit, dog piss.

Yup, that's worse. Though I had to wonder. Did the dog really take a leak on the laptop or was that only the story? Are they doing forensics in the back room? Would they know if I lied?

But really, they're pretty great there about whatever mess you make of your laptop, and in two hours, I had a fresh new keyboard. All clean. I should spill on it more often. But the weird thing is that they wouldn't release it to me because some of the girls working there heard it making a high-pitched squealing noise. I waited while they investigated. The trouble was that only the young people could hear it. Anyone over 30 heard nothing. They booted it up for me, and I couldn't hear anything either. The old people behind the desk and me all looked at each other like teachers must when they realize their students are using ringtones in frequencies we can no longer hear.

If it breaks down, the old guy in charge told me, just bring it back. But all the girls were like, Okay, but it sounds weird. Like pigs sniffing out truffles, these kids. Like water diviners. I was kind of impressed by them, but it's too bad their talents will only come to light if something bad happens to my computer. I don't know what to wish for.

Staying put.

I love living in a place where they can pile a Winter Watch Alert on top of a Winter Storm Warning. We've got both, right now. And it does look pretty wild out there. Though this morning wasn't bad, so I went to the gym. We'd only gotten a few inches, though snow was blowing every which way. But I'm glad to be home now and stocked with soup and student stories and yarn. What else could I need?

Sweet Georgia Brown.

Apocalypse.

Little Sweet always shows me how to better use my technology – texting no-no's and DVD tricks and keyboard shortcuts. This time, she discovered that we could set a date on my camera – to any year up to 2079.

What a weird, arbitrary number. You think Sony knows that's when the world will end or what? Are they in charge?