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 |  Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket? |
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Fair Warning: I've upped the rating on this blog. It is now set at GC. |
| Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the mellowest one of all? It's rather amazing what you learn about yourself through other people. My boss finally got the letter from Civil Service approving my new job description. Woohoo! That means that after the first of the year I will no longer be supervising anyone. The folks I supervise are accepting this with widely varying degrees of comfort. Turns out I am never stressed. Now, personally I did not know this. Hell, over the past two years I have seriously considered pharmaceutical interventions to manage my stress and anxiety levels (as opposed to just drinking like I do now  ). So, my staff has this perception that I never seem to get stressed out about things. When problems come up, I never seem rattled or surprised and move calmly in the direction of a solution. For this reason, they are all a bit reluctant to be transfered to a new supervisor. Sheesh! How high-strung are these people that I seem calm in comparison? I tested this notion with a couple of my work friends, and asked them if they think I get stressed out about things. Their response seemed to confirm the general perception. Although my friends know that I DO get stressed because I tell them about it, they say that I don't SEEM stressed.  I even asked my husband and he used the word "mellow." What the . . . ? Perhaps I've recently switched places with the calm me in an alternate universe.  Oh well, I had some bad news today. Turns out my office did NOT win the holiday decorating contest. I couldn't find the red and white Christmas lights to go along with the 3 ft plastic candy canes. I think that if I had found the lights, I would have at least scored me an honorable mention. Maybe next year . . . if I haven't quit my job by then. |
| While shopping over the weekend I noticed an odd penny. It felt lighter and looked a bit smaller than the other pennies. "Damn Canadian penny!" I thought. I am a magnet for the Canadian coinage. Today I was digging out change for a soda and found my weird little penny again. I'd forgotten about it in my shopping, baking frenzy, but I pulled it out of my change purse and flipped it over in my hand. It wasn't Canadian. I had been given an 1883 Indian head penny. It is in good shape. All the markings are still legible. I checked out its value and found out it is worth $2. So, no big shakes in the world of coin collecting, but it struck me as pretty cool. Maybe someone went Christmas shopping with that same penny 124 years ago when it was still shiny and new. I wonder what a penny would have bought in 1883. Surely it would have been enough to buy some small toy.  |
| I realize not everyone enjoys the holiday season, but I'm thoroughly caught up in the cheery buzz of preparations. I baked cookies this weekend. I made chocolate chips, peanut butter blossoms, and sugar cookies. I also made an oatmeal cookie with toffee bits, pecans, and caramel chips. I still have several more varieties I want to make so I can put together some gift plates for neighbors and teachers. I enjoy holiday baking, and both of the kids enjoy being part of it. I think it is funny that my daughter can't remember what she got for Christmas last year, but she knows what cookies we baked. Ah gift giving. I've had to be very frugal with it this year and that is hard for me. Don't get me wrong, I don't love shopping, but I enjoy the process of discovering and gathering gift ideas. It is a reconnecting in its own way. Trying to find out about the tastes, preferences, and current interests of family members. What are they reading? What color is the bathroom now? Silly things that make them seem less like strangers. Yes, the stores are busy, and some people are very rude as they battle for parking spaces and cut in line and grumble and bitch and haggle. But there are pleasant people out there too. People who embrace, and even embody the spirit of the season. The lady in line who hands me a $10 off coupon she just received because she is done with her shopping. The man who told me to go ahead of him in line because I only had a few items. The salesperson who took a lot of time to help me find the right size in a sweater. The smiles, and laughter shared while waiting in line mean a lot more to me than grumbled complaints of the folks scanning the lanes to see if there is one moving faster. Yep, I like the holiday. As soon as I finish this blog I'm going to decorate my office. I just wish I could have found another string of lights. |
| LOL! It makes about as much sense as a partridge in a pear tree. I can't believe all the grief I'm taking over the Christmas pickle! Sheesh! It isn't even the most phallic looking thing I've posted pictures of. That honor still goes to my son's clay dinosaur, or as emmyloo dubbed it . . . Penisaurus rex. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** However, since we happen to be on the subject of holiday celebrations that involve . . . what the hell is the plural form of phallus? Phalli? Phalluses? Whatever. Anyway, I thought I would share with you a little about the Japanese fertility festival, Hounen Matsuri. I grew up with some great home movies of these festivals in which the Japanese got very drunk on sake and carried a giant wooden phallus through the streets. Unfortunately, those home movies seem to have disappeared over the years, but thankfully we have the internet, and I am therefore able to share this with you. http://farstrider.net/Japan/Festivals/HounenMatsuri/index.htm The first set of pictures focuses on the Tagata shrine . . . home to all things phallic. The next set involves the preparation. Preparation in this case is synonymous with getting very drunk. Next comes the procession. The wooden phalluses are carried in the procession by 36 year old women . . . 36 being an unlucky age. Crap. I'll be 36 on my next Birthday! I'm so screwed. Yeah alright, you can complete the photo tour on your own now. I'm too depressed about the 36 year old thing. Regardless, I do believe it puts my little Christmas pickle in the proper prosepective. |
| Well, I'd like to say that I went out and completed all my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, but that would be a lie. I've still got plenty of shopping to do, but I made a dent, and that is something. I was going to run out again tonight and hit Borders and Best Buy, but it seemed easier to log on to Amazon for the books, so I did that instead. Honestly, I found the day to be exhausting, and I'm looking forward to a quiet day at work tomorrow. Tomorrow will be fun. Tomorrow we are getting "Technical Assistance." You see, we are a sort of rebellious lot and now we are one of the worst counties in the state in terms of our "preparedness" for the next wave fiscal roll-out nonsense. The powers that be are mistaking our apathy for ignorance and they are coming out to offer their assistance to get us up to speed. We had a pre-conference phone conference last week to discuss an agenda for tomorrows technical assistance. Oh wait! First we had a PRE-pre-conference phone conference to discuss what we would talk about on the pre-conference phone conference. Did your heads explode yet? There is something about government the requires lots of meetings about setting the agenda for meetings. I was at a statewide conference a few years back, and during the big banquet dinner, the fire alarms in the convention center started to go off. Everyone sat around puzzled and unsure of how to respond. Should we stay? Should we evacuate the building? Should we take our drinks? I was talking to a now-retired friend from the regional office who suggested that maybe we should form a task force to have meetings with a focus group to determine an appropriate course of action to the fire drill. Yeah anyway, we did evacuate, and I took my drink. After all, I was in Hershey, PA and it was a chocolate martini. |
I came home from work and wanted to take a picture of my tree to post for bugzy is baaaccck!!  . I am a foolish woman. I thought I could just take out the camera and snap a picture. Oh no. Not in my house. The camera came out and both children's eyes got all bright and shiny. Photo op! Yep, even the dog wanted to be in the picture. About 15 pictures into it I realized the pictures were not improving. Honestly, I think It was all down hill after about the fourth picture. Anyway, this picture is about as good as it got. It wasn't the best picture of Katie, and it was a pretty lousy picture of Zach, but it doesn't show the dogs butt, the bottle of glass cleaner on the window sill, or any huge reflected flash spots in the window. Unfortunately it doesn't show the beautiful color morphing star on top of the tree in all it's tacky splendor. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** And yes, it is an artificial tree, and a pre-lit one at that. I've had to compromise a lot over the years on this Christmas thing. Turns out I can't have a real tree in the house without severely aggravating my allergies and asthma. Took the doctor several years to convince me that there were reasons that I got sick every year at Christmas time. When I gave up on fresh cut trees, live greens and 90% of the candle burning, I noticed a significant improvement in my health over the holidays. Who knew? Well, I guess my doctor did, but who'd have thought he was right? Seems to me I had a blog topic and some point in the day, but all this picture nonsense has wiped it from my brain. Tomorrow I'm off work. I'm taking a personal day to <gasp> start my Christmas shopping. Okay, I bought one gift, so technically I HAVE started. Mostly though, I've been helping my mother with her Christmas shopping.  Wonder if I get extra presents for being such a good daughter. |
| Suddenly I find myself with a port full of 249 items. Since 250 is the maximum that I'm allowed, I guess I'd better do something about this. So, I am going through the rather slow and tedious process of saving entries to my garden journal so that I can delete it. I've already started a new garden journal off site, and I'll see how that goes. Most of my views to my garden journal come from off site anyway, and by moving that one item, I'll be able to delete nearly 30 or so associated images. I thought it would be a quick fix to free a lot of space for now, but there really isn't anything quick about it.  Aside from that, it is just the usual Sunday fun . . . grocery shopping, laundry, and helping to turn a big Styrofoam ball into a model of a human cell. I fought the Styrofoam. It seems that there ought to be a more environmentally friendly material we could use to create a cell model. Since it is due tomorrow, papier-mâché is out. Damn shame too because I do so love my papier-mâché. |
| Spent much of the day dragging out all the trappings of the holiday season. My tree is now officially decorated. Woohoo! I went over to Mom's this evening to help her with her online Christmas shopping. Funny thing, one of the sites she was ordering from didn't have free shipping, and she was sure that they were supposed to have it. She called customer service and they told her that they didn't have free shipping, BUT . . . they were allowed to give free shipping to anyone who called and asked about it. Go figure. She saved about $10 in shipping costs proving that it never hurts to ask. At least that is the moral I'm going with. The other possible moral is that I've been getting screwed year after year as I paid for shipping needlessly. I guess it's one of those "the glass is half full" kind of things. My husband is now warming to the idea of staying in the area if there is a job to be had. We talked about it tonight. It seems that I just have a mind like a weather vein. It switches directions easily and quickly. His head doesn't work that way, and it takes him a couple days to catch up when the plans shift. His initial impulse was to dig his heels in and resist being swayed from the path he'd already chosen. Anyway, we are on the same page now and that is a good thing. Hope everyone is having a great weekend! |
| I had a close call this evening. The phone rang and I answered it. The heavily accented woman asked if she was speaking to Meezus KrahMEER. I've come to expect this sort of thing since abandoning my maiden name for something as difficult to pronounce as Kramer. Still, when it is mangled that badly, I know that no good can come of the call. I'm not sure exactly where this evenings call originated, but I'm pretty sure it was at least 6 or 7 time zones away. The volume kept rising and falling dramatically and was punctuated by garbled gibberish. The conversation from my perspective went something like this. "Meezus KrahMEER? This is . . . garble, garble garble . . . I'm calling tonight about your soul." Oh shit! Well I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been expecting this call. "What about it?" "You see . . . garble, garble, garble, and your soul . . . garble, garble . . . will expire this month." "I'm sorry, we have a bad connection. Something is going to expire?" "Yes! This is about your soul . . . garble . . . you must act now or it will expire this month." I'm thinking that might be a bad thing. "Say that again?" "Your SOUL! This is about your SOUL!" "It is going to expire?" "Yes, the warranty through Sears expires this month." "Sears?" "Yes, you bought your soul at Sears!" Okay, at this point I'm pretty sure she's neither the Grim Reaper nor the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present or Future. I'm also fairly certain that my soul is not under warranty through Sears. "I'm really sorry, but I'm having difficulty hearing, and understanding. Tell me again what you are calling about." This time she articulated very carefully . . . "You're sta-OH-vah." "Oh! My stove! Yeah, I don't want to extend the warranty. Thank you anyway." Yep, that was a close one. |
| I opened up this little white rectangle with high expectations, but now I don't have any thing to say. Go figure. I'm short on words these days. Perhaps the mad rush to produce 50,000 of them last month drained my rather finite stores. Maybe it is just the jumble of thoughts in my head that refuse to settle into neat streams of words. Whatever the case, I'm without. When I sit and see the empty box I reach for my cookbook which - since my computer is in the kitchen - is never far away. I have more than one cookbook, but at this time of year, only one of them matters. It is a cookbook compiled by the Nampa Church of the Brethren for their 100 year celebration. The cookbook was my Grandmother's. The recipes all list the contributor, and many of them are great aunts or "church ladies" my father remembered fondly. The cookbook has red tabs on many pages where my father marked favorite cookies from his childhood. Every Christmas I would bake him some of his favorites. Many of them have become my families favorites, and by baking these cookies each year, I feel a sense of connecting to the generations of women who came before me. Women named Pearl, Marlus, Delores, Ruthie, Gladys, Ester, and Susannah. According to the Cookbook, the following are rules of Dinner Etiquette from 1886 - Wear gloves to the table, and remove them when seated. - A gentleman must see that the lady whom he escorted is helped to whatever she wishes, but should not offer to help others who have escorts. - Do not use the edge of the tablecloth for a napkin. - Drink tea or coffee from the cup and not from the saucer. - Do not speak in boisterous tones at the table. - Do not speak of disagreeable subjects or loathsome objects at the table. - Never pick the teeth at the table. - Do not, by word, or manner, take exception to any article of food set before you. If anything disagreeable is found in your food, put it aside quietly and without remark. Okay, I don't really have a point in all that. Hope you weren't waiting for me to make one. I'm done now. |
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