Decking the Halls and Stuffing the Bird

To deter repeated episodes of this:


My husband devised this:



It has worked pretty well so far. **knocks frantically on wood tabletop** Living with an engineer ain't half bad.


Here are some highlights of the Thanksgiving experience:

>>Had dinner with my family on Thursday night. Got to spend time with my mom and dad, which was nice. Unfortunately, my sister spent the holiday with her boyfriend's family, so I didn't see her. Saw my cousin, her husband, and their two little girls for the first time in awhile.

>>Opened at work on Black Friday and didn't get completely trounced.

>>Spent Friday night through early Sunday morning with the in-laws, who I really like (weird, huh?). This involved:
>>>fabulous pancakes made by my husband's mamaw
>>>a trip to an outlet mall in which I actually convinced said spouse to buy two pairs of desperately-needed new jeans (total cost: $21.20. SWEET.)
>>>probably one of the best Thanksgiving dinners ever made
>>>a loudmouthed and absolutely freakin' hilarious marathon game of Bullshit with my husband, his brother, their two aunts and two uncles, and one of their cousins. I haven't laughed that hard in a long, long, long time.


Trying to be proactive

I sent in a résumé and application today for an honest-to-God grownup job that I'm vastly, laughably underqualified for, and I'm trying not to think about it anymore. :P


File this under "but he looked so cute and fluffy":

Why it's a bad idea to be 'huggy-kissy' with llamas

Someone needs to explain what the hell happened to November.

One minute I was coming to grips with the fact that it was almost Halloween, and the next, it was 3 days before Turkey Day. Not cool, this time warp thing.

Since I'll be working retail again this Christmas season, I'll be putting up all the holiday decorations on Thanksgiving morning. I'm looking forward to it, and expect that by dinnertime, my husband will be ready to toss me and my Christmas CDs out onto the lawn. No, I kid, I kid. He's a very patient man.

My real worry is that our cat might not be able to control himself once the tree goes up. He has a compulsion to get into everything he is strictly forbidden to touch. He also has a weird habit of drowning things in his water dish once they cease to amuse him. Last year, I lost count of the number of times I came home from work to find a Christmas ornament floating in a small watery grave. He had one particular ornament that he was OCD about getting his fangs on, but I can't remember which one it was.

Our tree is only 4 and a half feet tall, and we set it up on top of a small table. The cat had few difficulties plucking whatever he wished from the branches while he was home alone. Luckily, he kept the actual destruction to a minimum.

His last vestige of self-control vanished about a week after Christmas, however. El Esposo and I were eating dinner when the cat decided he wanted to sit under the tree. I pulled him out; he jumped back up onto the table. I pulled him out; he jumped back up. I finally decided to just let him sit there. Sure enough, as soon as I stopped watching him, he attempted to climb the tree from the inside. When I grabbed him around what I guess is his waist to pull him out, he went into civil disobedience mode. I swear I am not making this up. He flopped onto his side and threw out his front legs, hooked his paws around the base of the tree, and refused to let go. Meanwhile, he was thrashing back and forth a bit, so that he ended up underneath the garland but on top of the string of lights. He started to slip off the edge of the table, which was complicated by the fact that the tree was now securely tied onto his midsection. I caught him before he could bring the whole business down, but El Esposo had to assist with the extrication. We ended up having to lock the cat in the bathroom for an hour while I tried to stop laughing and we took down the tree. If there's a replay this year, I hope we at least get some pictures of it.

This cat post is funnier than mine.

Dammit.

A friend of mine had a link to an avatar maker on her blog, so El Esposo and I gave it a shot. It's us, except skinnier and with larger eyes:

I feel like I should stand up and applaud:

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama at the National Women's Law Center

This was the quote of the day on my Google page today:

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman

How uplifting! Thanks, Google. Google seems to know that I've been especially brood-y lately about the lack of a "real" job in my life. I like both of my retail jobs well enough. I'd love to get paid a bit more, but for the most part I can enjoy what I do, and with very few exceptions I work with awesome people. However, I must say that working at these jobs was not what I envisioned for myself at 2 years past graduation when I started college. To be totally fair and brutally honest with myself, this is likely about 95% my fault. I have not aggressively--or even much at all--pursued jobs in my field. I'm going to be lame and offer a few excuses for this, to make myself feel better. #1: the area I live in is not exactly a hotbed of geological or editorial activity. My husband has a highly decent job which he likes, and I had suspicions that I'd want to go to grad school, so it seemed silly to look for a job that would require relocation. #2: I tend to work a lot of hours to make up for the fact that I make a pittance, so that doesn't leave a lot of free time for hard core job searching...though I guess I could do less socializing online. Like I said...95% my fault.

Anyhow, I guess I should be grateful to my retail slave status, because it has made me realize that I DO need to go back to school. I'm at the point now where I feel like I truly have to either get a real job or get the hell out of Dodge for a few years or I'm just going to crack one day and start picking people off with CD cases thrown like ninja stars or something. I do, however, have a slight bone to pick with society in general over this situation I find myself in (and which I see many of my friends in) currently. They (they being our culture, schools, "the man," whatever) lead us to believe that all we have to do is get good grades in high school, participate in some extra curriculars, choose and get accepted to a decent college, and then choose a major, and we're all set. Not so much. Once you're at college, you have to decide if you want to stick with your chosen major (if you even had one to begin with). Then you have to decide if you want to go straight into the job market or on to grad school. There is no class called "Getting A Job 101." I wish there had been.

Also, by the time you're 25, it seems like you should already be well on your way to the picket fence and the car and the 2.5 kids. Again, not so much. I'll be 25 in March. I've managed to snag one of the most important ingredients in the equation--the supportive, loving, decent man with a good work ethic, an education, and good prospects--and yet I'm still wallowing around in semi-adulthood wondering where the hell I missed the bus that was supposed to take me to Grownup Land. As much as I hate to admit that sometimes I hear a somewhat cheesy song on the radio and go, "Yeah, man! I know!" here's one that makes me do that:

This is for all you girls about twenty-five
In a little apartment, just trying to get by
Living on, on dreams and spaghetti-o's
Wondering where your life is gonna go

Every time I hear Martina McBride sing those lines, I know what she means. Not that there's anything wrong with spaghetti-o's...I'm just saying.


To close, because I am mean and horrible:
www.demonbaby.com

Let me soften this a bit by saying that I laughed less at the haircuts (well, most of them) than at the painstaking comparisons to Marvel characters. As someone who fancied herself more than a bit "alternative" in high school, I feel I must applaud these kids for being brave enough to go all out in their quest to give a big fat middle finger to conformity. That said, I do wonder if when they're 40, some of these people will wonder what the hell they were thinking to spend so much of their hard-earned cash on hair products. Also, I admire their dedication, since it probably takes some of them more time to fix their hair every morning for a week than it has taken me to fix my hair every morning in my entire LIFE, including my wedding day and the two formal dances I attended in high school. Snaps for that.