fambly Category
xmas
Thursday, December 27th, 2007Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
J3 wrote me a fabulous email story about Thanksgiving with the family. Although it’s a pretty sucky tale, I find bits of it funny and the whole thing brilliantly related:
i was planning to make mom/grandma/j6 photo albums
w/wedding pictures, so they’d quit bugging me about
them. naturally, i thought about it too late, didn’t
finish the project, and ended up bringing down the
laptop with digital photos to look at instead. bad
mistake.mom looked at the photos once on thursday, didn’t say
anything all day friday, then sat morning made the
whole family get up at 5 to get ready to go, then
wanted to look at the photos one more time. so she
sits there going through 100 or so photos, writing
down the name of each one in a notebook (which will
probably be saved forEVER) and this takes like 2
hours, with the rest of the fam sitting around waiting
to go…then she is like, ‘now what should i do?
should i send you the list and then you take it to the
photo shop and find out the price and send me the
price and i send you the money and you send me the
pictures …OR…blah blah blah fifty different
scenarios’ and i’m like, no just tell me which ones
you want, i’ll send them to you. ‘but what about the
money?! should i a/b/c scenarios…?’
me: no, what i said before.
mom: but won’t you need the money or…blah blah?’
me: no. what. i. said. before.
mom: (blow up)CAN’T you TRY to HELP me OUT i’m TRYING
to COMMUNICATE about WHO is paying for WHAT so we
don’t have these misunderSTANDings etc etc. SOB
thanks for a great HOLiday SOB see you in another
YEAR!!! (run out of the house slam)
of course only then did i think of the brilliant plan
where i just give her a damn cd which she can do
whatever the hell she wants with, but i tried to bring
it up when she came back in to get a bag:
me: mom, i have a better idea–
mom: well i DON’T think i want to HEAR IT (stalk out,
slam)
so, that was the end of the family visit, with dad and
the kids sheepishly following her to the car and
grandma saying, ‘well, it’s a shame it had to end that
way.’
This has all the elements of a classic family event: Mom getting people up at insanely early hours, everyone sitting around helplessly during Mom’s agenda, Mom presenting an endless line-up of scenarios and options to an unwilling audience, Dad submitting to everything, Mom having a fit, and Grandma unable to register or admit that her daughter is mad as pants. Awesome.
Spiders in my soul
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Gave up yet another anxiety-reducing day at the gym for a mad xmas shopping dash. Was put in resentful frame of mind toward fellow man and season in general.
Mood slightly lifted to overhear in elevator:
“and he was, like, completely unable to grope them!”
and then found this delicious spam email title:
“PenisMountainousBlanche”
Where does the mental image settle? on pervy desserts, a la J3’s bachelorette cake? A Streetcar Named Desire? The bottom half of Mt. Rushmore? I find I am quite distracted from my Grinchiness.
Blog Blug
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I think after NaBloPoMo stops flogging me, I will try NaGreTeDriMo in which I shun coffee and sweet hot drinks and focus on green tea drinking. Or perhaps NaSalEatMo* in which nothing but salad is ever eaten. Can they be national, though, if it’s just me? Perhaps not. Local? LoGreTeDriMo. Or personal? PerGreTeDriMo.
Bla, ble, bli, blo, bluuuuuuh! This reminds me of doing “blend ladders” when I was learning to read (at the age of four, sssssizzle!). My mother would hold up a “blend” flashcard that said “thr” or “fl” and I would sing it with each vowel up the scale: thra, thre, thri, thro, thru.
In addition to being raised to crippling dorkity, I can kick all y’all’s asses in the phonics department. Come on, whatchu got? Sl? Str? Bring it!
*although, anything ending with “Eat Mo” would seem to belie the weight loss at which salad intake aims.
Why, what happens on the 25th?
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
Here’s an example of our alternate priorities for the month of December. We got a tree, but don’t have time to deal with it for the next two weeks during the crucial, water-every-5-minutes period. Hmmm, what’s big and holds a lot of water? Recycling bin!
I guess we’re not far from this state of things.
You think I’m a potty humor-obsessed grouch, but see? a list of positive things
Monday, November 26th, 2007Today I am the cartoon character with one thick black line for an eyebrow and two eyeballs sagging beneath it and a dark scribble of funk over my head. Tried looking for some clipart of a grumpy Calvin, but no luck.
After a long, med-free day of driving, traffic, coming home to Rt. 46 U-turns, frenzied media research and a late bedtime, I woke up as grumpy as humanly possible and in serious need of some prunes and bran.
The rainy train ride was tainted by my two seatmates, Pack-a-Day and The Macy’s Perfume Department. When Macy’s left her umbrella on the floor, I decided against pointing it out. Two much nicer humans saw it, though, and pointed it out to me, thinking it was mine. I felt briefly chastised, but frankly, the woman could use a good rinse. With any luck her co-workers will not spend their mornings with dry, itchy eyes from her perfume overdose.
On the bright side:
1. The train arrived at Walnut St. before I did and stopped between the lowered gates. I ducked under the gates, walked around in front of the train and boarded!!!! No cops giving tickets! No announcement from the engineer to bar the young lady with the brown coat from boarding! The conductor saw me coming and held the door for me!
2. My laptop battery lasted the entire ride to work.
3. My green tea smells like fish, but it has soothed me somewhat.
4. When we got home last night, there were two packages for me, and they contained neither aluminum, foam, plastic, or packaging. These had finally arrived (and in the interest of this Pollyanna list, I will save my ire on the cost and length of delivery for the Shoe Metro customer service) and so had this beautiful thing, which I’ll wear to a family wedding this weekend:
The Rural Tenenbaums
Friday, November 23rd, 2007It’s a holiday, so I have plenty of time, but feel that I should get time off from doing the have-tos. Like blogging.
We went with the family to a Christmas tree farm and spent waaay too much time poking, circling, sniffing and bending. What, are they like melons at the supermarket, another elaborate product-selection process, where you thump and toss and kick ‘em down the aisle? You see that topspin? That’s a good one!
I pretty much felt that if it was green, stood up straight and had a few arms to hold ornaments, it was sufficient. No one comes over to our house during the holidays, anyway; we’re all too busy visiting each other to, uh, visit each other, and certainly no one will be standing around admiring the fullness of the branches and needle gloss and whatever the hell else there is to really get into about trees.
But, noooo. We have to reject one based on its bare spot one one side and another on its too sparse top (highly desireable, I would think, for angels and stars and such). Come one, guys, we’re covered in treeees! Just pick one already. Also? I can no longer feel my toes. I’m going to chop the damn thing up for firewood so I can keep warm out here.
p.s. We did and it was a fir. Not very sappy and smells quite nice.
Triptophan Day
Friday, November 23rd, 20071.I’ve been missing a few days of this here NaBloPoMo and am not entirely to blame for it. Computer problems at home and an infernally malconnected network at work (have I been Dooced?) make for very sporadic posting.
So, I’ve been pulling up some drafts and tweaking things and throwing them up here to get the monkey off my back.
2. Today we left our place about 10 and made it down to the in-laws in 3:40, an all-time record. I won’t tell you who was driving or how many miles per hour were averaged, but it wasn’t someone with a prostate.
We contributed Jim Lahey’s fabulous bread, with a rosemary and olive oil tweak of my own, and some pumpkin pies.
All the usual trimmings were there, with my favorites: sister-in-law’s baked stuffed potatoes and MIL’s asparagus. I ate sparingly and feel unusually comfortable and not bloated and HOLY CRAP THIS JUST BECAME AN I ATE SOUP FOR LUNCH BLOG.
11.14.78
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Also, today is P’s birthday. He shall be wined, dined, and gifted this evening.
30 and counting
Monday, November 12th, 2007I missed yesterday’s post due to being on the road and among the offline. We were in SVA for my parents’ 30th anniversary dinner, where many memories were shared, including this one from my mom’s friend:
“I do know that when they STARTED seeing each other that Martha and I lived at 8 N.W. St. in an apartment in the upstairs of Mrs. Nellie Fix’s house [actually, it WASN'T Mrs. Fix's house--we just thought it was. Turns out, ol' Nellie rented it and sold her landlord a bill of goods that she was so poor so he let her have it for a VERY low price. And then she rented out the upstairs to the point she hardly had to pay any extra to him. And of course, Mrs. Fix was a Christian...] Mrs. Fix was older and she and her little old lady friends would sit on the front porch of the house and make little “Oh, there’s the happy couple” remarks or something like that that really set your mom’s teeth on edge.”
My grandmother told an unrelated story about her brother-in-law, who approached her father in order to ask for a sister’s hand in marriage. He worked up the nerve to ask, “Sir, I’d like to marry your daughter.” Her father replied, “Well, I have 5 daughters. Which one do you want?”