Every year, my dad and our next-door neighbor shared Christmas decorations that stretched across the two lawns. You can see what the whole shebang looked like right here. This was, of course, when we lived in Dallas, which should be evident by my short sleeves.
I wish I could get a picture of all three cats, but Monte has sequestered himself upstairs until very recently. Now that the house is dark and quiet, he feels brave enough to jump on kitchen cabinets, throw up on the basement stairs, and snuggle up in my lap as I type this. Probably tomorrow morning he will go back to being a great big baby.
Merry Christmas!
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current book: The Ice Storm by Rick Moody. I’m not quite halfway through, and I’m not sure how much I like it. It’s definitely an interesting study of the 70s, that’s for sure.
current music: An endless stream of Christmas carols being piped through every speaker in the house. Sometimes this is okay. Sometimes it is not, such as when the Sandy Patty CD falls into rotation, or the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas (they have all the versions), or the really dreadful “soulful” a cappella Christmas CD. Soul-sucking, more like.
current socks: Some really amazing ones that Tim got me at the Sock Shop in London a few years ago: knee-highs with bright red toes and heels, black and gray stripes, and fuzzy green Christmas trees on the sides. I think tomorrow I will wear my old favorites: green socks with a reindeer entangled in lights and holding a glass of eggnog. The caption reads, “Blitzen Christmas.” Makes me laugh every year.
On the Blue Line last night, I had a seat facing out. The ad above the seat in front of me introduced the new “wide-open” MRI at Saint Anthony’s Hospital—perfect, the ad told me, for those who might not be able to handle a conventional MRI. The ad ended with a bold-font command to “tell your doctor you want your MRI at Saint Anthony’s Hospital.” Um, no thank you:
With this new technology, Saint Anthony Hospital can now better serve all patients, including the very young who’s MRI experience can be a scary one, those with claustrophobia and people weighing up to 550 pounds.
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current book: About 80 pages into The Time-Traveler’s Wife.
current music: A handful of CDs my friend Ryan gave me last night. Thanks, Ryan!
current socks: Knee-high black SmartWools with gray and white polka dots. Mmmm.
I totally stole the subject of this post from the excellent Read Roger. It’s an oft-made point, though, that blogging is a self-serving exercise, especially for those of us who blog for such a small audience. I justify the solipsism because it’s a nice way for me to keep in touch with friends, and it’s a way for me to get ideas onto “paper” that I think might someday, with a lot of work, be essay-worthy.
This post, however, is just here because I need to bitch. Feel free to stop reading now.
I keep reading that everybody is having a bad week. Is it the four-winter-storms-in-ten-days? The pervasive white haze? The pre-holiday stress? Even the little things are pissing me off. Like my computer mouse. My old one broke—it moved up and down, barely, but didn’t move side-to-side at all, making navigation damn near impossible—so I ordered a cordless mouse off eBay. It arrived promptly, and when I set it up… nothing. Didn’t work. I bought new batteries for it, and it solved the problem immediately! Works like a dream! Well, a bad dream. The clickers don’t work consistently—sometimes it takes a triple-click to do the work of a double-click, and a double-click for a single click, but not always. As a result, I’m constantly clicking links that I didn’t mean to, or I’m clicking four times in a row to follow one link. I’m doing a lot of freelance work right now that requires considerable web-surfing, so this makes me crazy for a couple hours every night. I don’t want to keep spending money on mouses (mice?), but this is freakin’ ridiculous.
Normally I wouldn’t post about something so personal, but I don’t think I can bitch about this enough. I’ve been dating a guy for the last month or so, and things were going well (I thought). Exactly one-and-a-half hours after a lovely brunch together on Sunday, he broke things off with me. IN A FUCKING EMAIL. Who does that? It was three sentences long, if you count the last sentence: “Sorry!” I’m not quite nasty enough to post the whole thing here, but am nasty enough to invite you to mock his tactlessness in the comments. I mean, he lives half a mile from me, and he broke up with me in an email. Or join me in the bitching, relieve some holiday stress, and leave your own shitty breakup stories! I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about this blog, but if he’s reading this: for future reference, please don’t break up with girls over email. It’s not nice.
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current book: I have so many New Yorkers piled up right now…
current music: Bloc Party and Saturday Looks Good To Me. I can’t remember the album names, and it would require doing battle with my mouse in order to find them online.
current socks: Dark blue with light blue polka dots.
I skipped my group run this morning so I could sleep in; I figured since it was only seven miles, it would be easy enough to do on my own (and yes, I do recognize the insanity of the words “only seven miles”). So I headed out about 10:30am. (The one nice thing about running in winter is that you have the option of running at a time other than o’dark thirty; not so much in the summer, when it’s hot and sticky before 8:30am.) It turned out to be kind of a crappy run. Sometimes you just can’t get into the groove of things, and despite listening to a podcast of NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, featuring my Public Radio crush, Peter Sagal, today was one of those days.
The one thing I like about running in the winter (and especially in the snow) is the dogs: the big ones are ecstatic to be outside, and the plow the snow with their noses, running in circles and chasing each other. Dozens of dogs were out today, and their owners mostly took them off the lake path so they could tear through the half-foot of snow, chasing after balls and toys and sticks.
As I headed home, I passed a guy and his dog who were making all the passersby smile. The dog, a big yellow lab, had a whole freakin’ tree limb in his mouth. The circumference was easily bigger than my upper arm, and the branch was probably close to four feet long. The dog couldn’t have been happier: following his owner, wagging his tail, a tree in his mouth. As I passed them, I asked the owner if he was going to throw the branch for his dog. “I just threw it for him 33 times,” he said.
Wow. Even Monte (who thankfully only plays fetch with lightweight milk rings) loses interest after a dozen or so rounds.
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current book: One of the America’s Best Essays collections. I’d go look up which one, but Monte is comfortably snuggled into my lap.
current music: The latest from The Go! Team. Thanks, Harriett! It’s awesome!
current socks: Still in my running socks, but am doing laundry so I can slip back into my warm SmartWool stripeys.
Morning:
Late afternoon:
Night (really only about 5:00pm):
