kapgar

Whoo, black diamond...

Okay, several of you asked, either in comments or e-mails, what it was that I got for Katie for Christmas, so I figured I'd do a bit of a gift round-up.

For her from me:

• A collector's copy of Marley & Me by John Grogan
• A ladybug necklace from Red Envelope
• A floppy-eared dog stuffed animal
• And the piece-de-resistance, a diamond loop necklace

I would've taken a picture of the actual necklace itself either on Katie or off, but she's asleep and I don't want to wake her up right now. So you'll have to settle with a representative image of it from Jared.com.

For me from her:

• A Chicago Bears Tradition "B" hat
• A Chicago Bears NFC North champion long-sleeve T-shirt
• A Chicago Bears Devin "Windy City Flyer" Hester jersey
• A copy of the Chicago Bears edition of Monopoly (don't see a theme yet, do you?)
• A Hallmark chihuahua Christmas tree ornament (not that I'm a big fan of chi-hoo-a-hoo-a's, but it's part of the series of Puppy Love ornaments that I had been buying for her over the years; she just beat me to the punch on this one; so it has sentimental value to us as a couple)
• And, of course, the Palm TX that I detailed a bit yesterday

I love everything she gave me and, thankfully, she liked all that I gave her, which made for a great season of gift giving.

Phew!

So how the hell do I top it next year?

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Latest Fun With Dead Trees reviews - It's been a while, but we're back with a few new reviews. I stop by with a review of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys while Claire chimes in with both Richard Avedon's Evidence 1944-1994 and Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors. I will, hopefully, return soon with a review of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, which I read yesterday.

We wish you a Merry Christmas...

I am absolutely dying to give Katie her Christmas gift. I mean it. I’m dying. I’ve had the thing in my grubby mitts for a couple weeks now and it’s killing me.

However, the fear of her not liking it is balancing out the equation a bit.

Do I want to give it to her, or do I not want to take the risk?

Do I?

Don’t I?

Dammitalltohell!

The thing I’ve got going for me is that everyone I’ve either shown or described the gift to has absolutely loved it. That’s a plus. But Katie is certainly not “everyone” and that’s why I’m still worried.

Can I just give her the damn thing (well, “things” would be a bit more accurate although it’s only one of the gifts that I’m truly worried about) already?

Grrr…

Well, anyway, just in case I don’t get a chance to post again (we’re going to be traveling all over the place and I can only hope I will find a chance to sneak on the Web a bit, but I make no guarantees), I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and whatever other holidays are happening around this time that I may be overlooking right now.

Tune in soon for my end-of-year wrapup.

Stop the world, I wanna get off...

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

*cough cough*

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Sorry about that. Had to get it out.

It's been a while since I ranted about bumper stickers, like a really long while. And many of you know that nothing frustrates me more than hypocrisy, so you'll forgive me for delving into this again.

I was behind a vehicle last night on my commute home when I was assaulted with stickers bearing messages such as "Live simply that others may simply live," "Kill your TV," "The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth," and "Think Green." There were others, but he would neither stop long enough nor turn in the same direction as I was, so this was all I could get written down in my trusty Moleskine.

Clearly this guy is an environmentalist and would like to see life simplified. Noble pursuits, in all honesty. There is nothing wrong with wanting to simplify things, perhaps go back to a time akin to Little House on the Prairie. We'll all wear bonnets and ride around in horse-drawn wagons and actually sit down together at the dinner table before blowing out the flames in our hurricane lamps and going to bed.

But are you going to be willing to part with your gas-guzzling SUV to do so, you imbecile?????

That's right, our fair lover of all things natural was driving a 10-mile-per-gallon SUV!

You friggin' moron.

I-I-I-I...

ugh.

For the record, I am not opposed to SUVs so don't think I'm crusading against you. I am merely opposed to stupid people who say one thing, yet do another entirely.

And all this a day after I post about a guy telling me I'm not snide. Well the fairy tale had to end some time, right?

I always feel like somebody's watchin' me...

I know a few of you are convinced my townhouse is haunted because of some of the strange noises I've reported over our couple years living here. Well, I'm not so easily swayed to this seemingly menacing perception.

However, this morning I heard some more inexplicable noises that left me wondering.

When my alarm went off, I smacked the snooze bar. I haven't slept well the last couple nights and I thought that ten extra minutes couldn't hurt me.

Then I heard the "footsteps."

These ones were not inside on the stairwell like ones I've heard in the past. They were on the roof... on the outside. And they sounded like they were crunching through snow.

Then I heard the "scraping."

It actually sounded like a snow shovel on concrete clearing the detritus away after yet another snowfall. And this is what I was convinced it was.

You see, it's been a week and a half since that first big snowstorm of ours and the snow is still here. However, the temperature has risen above freezing and the rain has started just in time to give us a nice, muddy brown Christmas (yay). So I was under the impression from those two noises that the temperature had instead dropped and we got a ton of snow overnight.

I freaked out and jumped out of bed to look out the window to determine if I did, in fact, need to shovel.

Nothing. It was still raining.

And I missed out on prime snooze minutes. Damn noises. I think I could almost feel my house laughing hysterically at my misery.

I took my shower and grabbed a laundry basket of clean clothes and pulled them into the closet so I could sort through and find clothes to wear without waking Katie.

Then I heard the "creaking."

Of course, from my vantage point, looking up at all my newly installed shelving, the only thing I could think was that my closet was going to collapse in on me burying me in piles of clothes a la Michael Keaton in his mom's closet in Johnny Dangerously.

Nothing happened, thankfully. But how long until something does? I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On a completely unrelated aside, the rules for Reveal Your Blog Crush Day have been posted. Plan accordingly.

Little ditty 'bout Dave and Diane...

Dealing with traffic on I-88 east: absolute hell.

Putting up with the Hillside Strangler on 290 east: even more hell.

Coping with no traffic flow whatsoever on 90 west: the worst kind of hell.

Being able to meet up with Dave and Diane at Chicago's Pizza and Pasta and then having drinks at two bars afterward: friggin' priceless!

I've raved about meeting Dave before (opportunity #1 and #2) and having a chance to meet up with him again was great. But Diane is a new blogger buddy of mine and far too cool for words. If you have a chance to meet either, do so. By all means.

Oh, and the redeye could be a combination of the flash and the drinking. Who's to say for sure?

I also need to give a big thanks to another blogger buddy of mine, Hilly, who sent me a belated birthday gift. My gift to her was late as well so she need not feel guilty. Plus she fed my craving for all things David Sedaris by gifting me with Holidays on Ice and Live at Carnegie Hall. Sweet!

Been around the world...

I have no single good thing to talk about today, so I figured I'd shoot for some snippets. Been a while anyway.

Holiday decorating
While we did get some more holiday decorating done last night as we watched TV, you could tell there was little to no joy in its execution. I fear we may have overdone it with holiday spirit last year and now we're completely drained. For the most part, we just set up stuff around the house like Katie's beloved Willow Tree nativity scene the pieces of which she's been collecting for a few years now. I started to separate some tree ornaments and break apart the cluster of hooks, but we never hung any of them. We still plan to, we just don't know when.

Wii hunt
Apparently, both Katie and my parents were trying to find me a Nintendo Wii for my birthday. And, as would be expected, neither party had much luck. However, yesterday, I was given Katie's blessing to run out to one of the early sales, this one at Toys 'r' Us, to see if I could score a system.

Yeah... no. I got there about 8 a.m. because the TrU salesperson told her on Friday that they would have them on Sunday and I need only show up an hour before opening. However, people were lining up as early as 6 a.m. and a sympathetic salesperson handed out claim slips to the systems they had in stock at about 7:15 a.m. so they could avoid the cold and wait in their cars. So I missed out.

But I will try again. I may start pulling some of my strings to see what I can do so I don't have to wait in a line again.

Shredded
There are household items that people "kill" on a regular basis. And most people seem to be cursed by consistently killing several of the same thing. For some, it's a cellphone (my FSiL). For others, it could be anything from blenders to power tools to lawnmowers (my dad) to snowblowers (again, my dad) to God only knows what else.

For Katie and me, it seems to be shredders... yeah, the big ol' thing that you use to obliterate important documents. We use it to kill not only old billing statements, but all those damned annoying "you've been approved" credit card applications. And the sheer volume of what we've given our shredders has burned out two of them. The motor burned out on the first, which is wholly understandable. The weird thing is the second one, on which we seemed to have practically liquefied the teeth. Yeah, you read that right, half the metal teeth on this thing are worn down to nubs. But the other half are completely fine. So now, until we get a new one, we have to make sure the sensitive information on the sheet goes down the shredding side of the shredder so it gets chewed up. Annoying.

What do you seem to have bad luck with?

The Amazing Race
They're gone! They're gone! If you watch the Race, you know who I'm referring to. If you don't watch it, no need to worry. And, if you haven't had the opportunity to watch it yet, I haven't ruined anything. But... they're gone! They're gone!

Bought a one-way ticket to hell...

Katie and I spent the early part of yesterday helping a friend prepare her house to host a surprise 30th birthday party for another friend. My job was to keep their four-year-old son, P, busy. So I took him out to get him a haircut, go buy some snackies for the party, and pick up the cake.

At some point in the drive, I was asking him what he had been doing that morning...

Me: So did you watch cartoons this morning?

P: No. I watched The Polar Express.

Me: Did you like it?

P: Yeah, it had a guy on a train and, when he took his hat off, he had no hair on top and a lot on the sides like you.

Me: ...

Four years old or not, I'm throwing down the gauntlet, kiddo. Bring it on!

They call me the whore...

There's a girl I met recently. I don't really know her other than as a relative acquaintance. I see her from time to time and we say "hi." Not much more.

That should do well to establish our "relationship."

So when you really don't know someone any better than this, is there a "good" way to tell her that her excessive use of facial makeup results in her looking like a dime-store hooker?

I'm not saying she's quite up to Tammy Faye standards just yet, but she's getting dangerously close.

I tread dangerous ground.

Hey! Got a meme in the extended post...

We make plans for big times...

"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

Derived from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse"... “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”

Such an eloquent statement. And one that applies to our weekend quite well.

Katie and I had such grand plans for this extended holiday weekend and yet it seems as though we completed only a fraction of them.

1. Clean up our house entirely.
Done for Thanksgiving, but it went all to hell yesterday.

2. Clear both our TiVos' "Now Playing" list of the two weeks' worth of shows that had built up on it.
Almost. We have one show left from those two weeks (last week's Studio 60) and whatever was added to it last night. However, I, personally, have about eight hours of Veronica Mars, Heroes, and Day Break backed up. Sometime on Saturday, I kinda decided there was no way I was ever going to get to all of it and simply deleted the first two episodes of Day Break and killed the Season Pass. As much as I like Taye Diggs, it was too much to catch up on and, since I never saw a single episode, I wasn't going to be missing much. I'm already pretty well invested in the other two and would like to finish them up.

3. Decorate for Christmas.
We certainly pulled out all the containers of decorations. Hence why #1 somewhat undid itself... the containers and decorations are now strewn about our home cluttering up what was once a beautifully clean homestead. We did get the tree assembled and got it all plugged in, as well. However, none of our ornaments are up at all. That will likely kick in tonight when we get done working out at the gym. Wish us luck.

4. Shop for Christmas presents.
We actually did a big chunk of this. Okay, maybe not that much. But at least we have about a quarter of it actually purchased and a list of what we will be buying for the other three quarters nearly complete. Just figuring out what to buy is a majority of the battle each year. Some of our relatives are not easy to buy for, let me tell you.

5. Do something with the leftover Thanksgiving food.
Katie made cream of turkey wild rice soup, a la Panera's cream of chicken wild rice, and it's damn good. She also made a turkey boullion base (sp?) that can be used for any number of other things. So, at least the turkey carcass is now gone from our fridge and we have room to put stuff in there.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Make such big plans only to watch them die upon attempted execution? You would think we'd learn. But we don't.

Don't fence me in...

It's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15 since that fateful night. The night my brother and I attempted to, and failed miserably at, construct a gingerbread house.

It was an horrific experience. One that, to this day, makes FHA assessors cringe. The walls never stood upright, the roof cracked and collapsed, the candies ran amok.

Simply put, it was not pretty.

So imagine my horror when my mother and father gave Katie and I a Gingerbread House Kit when they came over for Thanksgiving. The memories came flooding back. I tried to make them return it, but they refused. And, despite my better judgment, Katie and I decided to break it open earlier today while decorating for Christmas.

And now, our photographic retrospective...

Do note the sledgehammer at the ready

Everything is opened and ready to go.