Christmas 2007

It was a great time. Grandmother got mean and testy. Laurie's hair has started falling out because of the chemo but she was in good spirits. Morgan is wearing her new glasses like a badge of honor. My dad forgot the ham and had to drive back to Katy to pick it up then back to our house. My mom stayed and visited into the night. Jesse looked great! Ty loved his painting we bought him. My dad loved his kitchen gadgets. All in all it was a great time!

You’ve Been Talkin’ In Your Sleep

Carrie has been talking in her sleep a lot lately. Mostly she acts as if she is at work, answering phones, taking orders. I try to engage her in conversation but my knowledge of the products she sells is limited so she usually ends up laughing in her sleep at my inability to ask for anything other than a ladder. Occasionally something is so funny in her sleep she will sit up laughing hysterically but by the time morning rolls around she can’t tell me what was so funny.

This morning while we were snoozing, for the fiftieth time, she rolled over and pet my arm. Then she called it a “ham”. A HAM?! That is what I call my thighs when I am feeling fat. Ham comes from PIGS and PIGS are big and fat. I would have cried if I weren’t trying to squeeze an extra sixty seconds of slumber out of the morning. She must pay for the comment however. I don’t care if she was asleep. Only I can call myself a pig, fat, piggy, ham resembling, hog.

What I Miss

There’s One Every Year

We don’t send out Christmas cards most years but boy do I love receiving them. Every year there is at least one that is a real doozy. Two years ago it was my grandmother’s announcing she had a flasher at her window and in response bought a “pretty” gun. This year’s winner is from my uncle in Colorado. First let me explain that he is the sweetest man you will ever meet. He is mild mannered until you get him talking about politics or any tenet of the Catholic Church. He is very religious signing his letters “God Bless” or “Peace be with you”. He is everything the rest of this family is not so it came as no surprise to me when I looked through the mail yesterday that he had written us a Christmas card on a postcard he had leftover from a trip he and his wife took this summer. The postcard is from Virginia. Not your traditional Christmas scene but with a traditional Christmas message written in green to the left of the address. I have yet to receive my grandmother’s annual newsletter but if there are any juicy details I’ll be sure to share.

Happy National Bouillabaisse Day!

Actually it is my birthday but if you look on Wikipedia, you will also find that it is indeed National Bouillabaisse Day. A celebration of a Mediterranean soup or stew. Who knew? I turned 37 today. Here are some interesting (trivial) bits of information on the number 37:

It is a prime number (I am in the prime of my life).
The normal human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius.
The number of slots in European Roulette (I love roulette).
Thirty-seven is the number of men that Dante Hicks’ girlfriend Veronica Loughran had fellated in the film Clerks (This little tidbit pops up on a lot of 37 sites. I’ve never seen the movie and now I may be too old if this is what it’s about).
Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.
Nixon was the 37th president (He was also president when I was born and the only president to resign from office)
Abe Lincoln was elected to the House of Representatives at age 37 (I work for a company named Lincoln...hmmm)
Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937.


Enough about thirty-seven, what about December 14th?

In 1903 the Wright brothers made their first attempt at flight at Kitty Hawk on December 14th (I have a photo of Carrie and I on the very site).
In 1959 the Motown Record Label was founded.
Oh, and it is National Bouillabaisse Day. Have a bowl and celebrate!

My Gift to You

Found this in some old photos last night. Since so few people see this blog I figure I can post it without too much humiliation. Not sure what I was doing but I did come up with a few captions that might work with this photo:

"Why, why must I have mushroom hair?!"

"The Holidays Give Me a Headache"

"My Belly Button is Freezing"

"Please, Please Santa Bring Me an Easy Bake Oven"

If you have any captions let me know.

South of the Border Torture Order

I keep getting e-mails from Classmates.com to inform me that someone new has signed my guestbook. I don’t subscribe so I have no idea who has tried to contact me nor do I really care since I didn’t have all that many friends in high school. I was the class dork. The girl who never had the right clothes, I never had a Laura Ashley dress or parachute pants. I didn’t stand at the lockers chatting between classes instead I would walk and read from one class to another. So, it goes without saying that I have no idea why anyone would want to contact me twenty years later. Perhaps it is all the buzz about our upcoming twentieth reunion.

Next year we will be gathering again to see what/who/how everyone turned out. I went to my ten year. Morbid curiosity I guess. As we pulled up to the hotel where the reunion was taking place Carrie asked me who my friends were in high school, who was I excited to see again? I could not come up with one single name. She pried some more then finally let out a big sigh and asked “Am I going to the reunion with the class dork?” I had to tell her the truth. We went in anyway where, to add insult to injury, more of my classmates knew her from her mother’s modeling classes or church. Half of them probably forgot I went to school with them and thought Carrie did instead.

I received notification of the twenty year reunion a month or so ago. I mulled it over, obsessively, because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to put myself through another night of humiliation. Today when I received my most recent “guestbook” tease I went back on Classmates to see if there was a reunion update. Our class (or at least the one person brave enough to take the reins of organization) has decided to have the reunion at a Mexican food restaurant downtown. It could not be worse for me. First, I hate smelling like a fried chip when we eat at Mexican food restaurants. Second, I am forced to eat Mexican food approximately three times a week by my cheese/guac/beef addicted girlfriend. It is as if the Fates decided that since everyone really liked Carrie more at these reunions they would arrange for her to have a grand ole time and leave me to sulk in a corner like a wet tortilla chip.

More Christmas Memories

While we’re on the subject of family and drinking (or family driving us to drink), I have been reminiscing on Christmas nights spent at my grandmother’s house. These days Carrie and I have everyone over to our house to avoid the divorce crawl all over the city to visit each of our divorced parents. We have been having family to our house for the last three years and have become quite expert at getting the food on the table then getting everyone the hell out of the house (although I am usually too drunk to notice what time this actually occurs).

My grandmother used to have Christmas dinner at her house. She cooked the entire meal by herself while the rest of the family found quiet corners to read the books they just received as gifts. Conversation was kept to a minimum at best. After dinner we would all play the latest games we received or our fall back standard, Boggle. I don’t have to tell anyone who knows my family that playing a word game with the whole “PHD/Masters in English” bunch is akin to attending an aerospace engineer’s conference and trying to fit in. Unless you are good. Really good.

We would play at the dining room table as my grandmother did every single dish by herself. She would whistle while she worked except for the frequent interruptions to take a sip or two of wine. By the time the dishes were done grandmother would be loaded and ready to rejoin the group. Problem was she really didn’t know how to play so she would peer over our shoulders and yell out words that weren’t on the dice. When we would yell at her to stop ruining our concentration she would smack her lips and laugh like crazy. It could have been revenge for having to do everything on her own or perhaps just good old fashioned fun watching someone blow their top out of frustration. I don’t know what her reason but it happened every year.

She doesn’t drink as much wine these days. She doesn’t drink any less either but her outbursts have tapered off a bit. As I write this I am reminded of her joining us for Mother’s Day brunch. The waiter filled her wine glass about half way which is pretty standard in a restaurant. My grandmother looked at the glass and said; “I want a full glass of wine. That’s only half a glass”. The waiter chuckled and was about to walk away when I quietly let him know that “She is not kidding. Fill her up”. A decision I deeply regretted when she grabbed me by the waist and told me I was getting fat.

Ghost of Christmas Past

The holidays are fast approaching. We have only just begun our shopping. I think there are four or five gifts waiting to be wrapped. The remainder is yet to be purchased. Carrie and I stayed home from the ranch this weekend and hung Christmas lights. The weather was 80 degrees when we started which did nothing to put us in the spirit of the season. An hour or so into the process it began raining which really put a damper on any spirit we started with. Just as we were finishing up one of the trees we had just wrapped strand after strand of lights around went dark. We tried every plug, contraption, “three tap” but every time we plugged it in the breaker would trip. In a desperate effort to be done with the whole thing we ended up wrapping new lights over the ones that wouldn’t work. Not a perfect solution but at least at night you can’t see the dead stands.

My mother came by to visit while we were decorating. We were telling stories about all of the “drinkers” in our family. Who passed out in a chair, who holed up in a hotel, etc. Just the thing everyone discusses when decorating to celebrate the birth of Christ. Anyway, she was telling Carrie about a relative passing out in a chair. Mouth open, head back eyes to the sky. Mom was saying no one realized she was passed out at first and everyone kept looking at the ceiling to see what she was looking at that was so interesting. Carrie asked if we took pictures and/or put stuff on her which brings me to the subject of this post.

You see, we are kind of a strange family. We don’t really have any mercy for people who fall asleep during family functions. Before my grandfather died, my mother would bring him to her house for the holidays. She and my stepfather would get him set up in the recliner in the living room and hand him a glass or two of white zin (no taste in wine either). Granddaddy would make it approximately two seconds into gift wrapping before falling dead asleep with his mouth wide open. When we would laugh he would smile in his sleep. This led to hours of fake laughing really loud to see if he would smile every time. He did. Must have been the wine. This one Christmas he fell asleep with his hand in a gift bag full of socks (I know, I know, but he didn’t NEED anything).

The laughing game became a little boring so we decided to take family photos. Carrie was a bit appalled being new in the family and not used to our sick sense of humor. At first she refused to take the photos until we all told her to come on and get with the program. Mom, my stepfather and myself all posed around granddaddy’s sleeping form. We gave him bunny ears. We sat on the arm rests and acted goofy. He never woke up. Every once in awhile I think about that Christmas and it makes me smile to have such a sick, but fun, family.