Thursday, December 21, 2006
Christmas past, Christmas presents
If you're expecting warm and fuzzy reminiscences about happy family times, you must be new here; this isn't a Hallmark special, it's another dark fragment of my past:
When you were a kid, did your parents know what you wanted for Christmas? If you were raised by human beings instead of by pod people like *I* was, you answered "yes"; maybe your parents couldn't always afford to get you what you wanted, or didn't think some of those things were appropriate for you ("You'll poke your eye out"), but they KNEW, and more importantly, CARED. MY parents had total recall of every imagined wrongdoing of mine for my entire life, and of every penny and minute of effort they ever "wasted" (their word, not mine) on me, so how is it possible that they never knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I went on and on about each desired item like any other kid? Actually, it's theoretically possible that my father might have known, but since gift-buying wasn't his department (he's a traditional man, although without the nobility that usually includes) it wouldn't have benefitted me; my mother, though, who was a stay at home mom with so little to occupy her mind and time that she spent most of each day watching soap operas, reading mystery novels and shopping, either was somehow organically unable to retain information in this one area or had decided, consciously or unconsciously, to use the gift-giving holidays that are all-important to a child as an exceptional opportunity to abuse her power to mess with me... it's a sad commentary on her that the best we can hope for is that she was too blind and stupid to realize what she was doing.
My mother approached Christmas like she did everything else that wasn't for her exclusive benefit; with the intention of investing as little of her time, effort and $ as possible, and with all aspects of it subject to her ever-changing and usually unpleasant whims. She'd embraced the standard parental cheat of wrapping up clothing items (that should just have been bought and put in the kid's closet like all other clothes) and passing them off as gifts for children too young to care about such things, and apparently saw the commonness of this shoddy scam as evidence that the whole point of Christmas gifts was to put a reasonable amount of stuff under the tree but give the kid as little as possible of what they wanted; if they ever make this an Olympic event, she's a shoo-in for the gold medal.
When I was very young, ignoring what I wanted was trivial for her to handle; she'd contemptuously insist that she hadn't known I'd wanted this or that, and deny all knowledge of the 5000 times she'd been told. When I got old enough to remember this claim from one holiday season to the next, and started making more of an issue about what I wanted to attempt to counteract her inexplicable memory lapses in this area, her response was to bark that I didn't need to keep telling her; when I pointed out that, based on her story from the previous year, I obviously DID need to repeat myself, she retorted with what SHOULD have been the end of her nonsense... that I should just write out a wish list and give it to her, and that would be the end of it. Foolishly, I accepted this as a valid solution; I didn't know her then like I do now.
Although we were far from poor, I grasped even as a little kid that anything bought for me would come from Kmart or the military Exchange, and only from the lower end of what was available there; it hurts now to look back and see how unquestioningly I accepted that the natural order of things was that that was all I should have to choose from... to this very day, I often have to push myself to get nice things rather than deciding that I could get something like it cheaper at WalMart. When I made my list, I didn't put anything fancy on it even as a wild hope; everything was at "my level," and had been verified to be in the approved stores (which I was routinely dragged through on weekends to keep her from having to pay a babysitter while she shopped). I handed the list over, and...
Well, there IS a little bit of good news; on most Christmases after that I got a "special gift," which didn't mean that it was a better grade of present, just that it bore significant resemblance to something I'd asked for... I think once she actually relented and got me the EXACT thing, an electronic game where you tried to guess the # the machine had chosen, but generally she managed to make the item different enough in style, color, or whatever that my initial burst of joy when I thought I had something I wanted would fizzle out in disappointment when I saw what it really was. Still, it was progress.
Along with the ugly polyester clothes, and odds and ends that I didn't remotely want or like but had been on super-sale and thus been ideal in her mind as filler, would be things that were from my list only in her warped mind: If I wanted a toy that was a set of items, she'd find a store that had just the central item and that'd be all I'd get; the idea that the point of having the items available individually was to let you to pick and choose a BETTER set for your child's tastes, NOT to sidestep paying for a set, never occurred to her, or if it did she was too cheap to care. If some company was ripping off a popular toy by making a conceptually similar but far less appealing item for less $, my mother thought she'd really accomplished something by getting me that rather than the good one... she was especially proud of my fake Barbies. If I wanted a specific baby doll, I'd get the cheapest one she could find instead, because "a doll is a doll." If I wanted a specific stuffed dog, she'd find a different one that was half the size and price; after all, it was still a dog, wasn't it? If she'd put a fraction of the effort into getting me what I wanted that she did into the mental contortion acts and hours of extra shopping necessary to get me the substitutes, I'd have been the envy of every kid I knew.
Perhaps her most psychotic category of purchases is one that just occurred to me as I've been writing this; the games. A game is a perfectly reasonable gift for most kids, but from the time I was about 9 onwards there were few, or no, kids my age living near us wherever we were stationed, so what was the point of giving me games that required 4 or more players when there were never that many kids in the house, or even games that TWO could play when I didn't have ANY kids in the house most days (I assume I don't need to explain why MY house was the last one anyone wanted to go play in)? I'm not talking about some clueless, distant relative who sent a game with good intentions because they didn't know the score, I'm talking about my MOTHER buying them... was she expecting angels to come and play them with me, or perhaps aliens? Even scarier was that she didn't seem to understand what it MEANT if something was a game; I remember sitting around bored once (because there was nothing on TV and I'd read every book I owned 100 times), and she marched in and demanded to know why I wasn't playing with one of the games... and when I pointed out that they all required additional players, she DENIED it. I literally had to pull them off the shelves one by one and read the # of players each called for off of their boxes; I know she eventually saw that she'd been proven wrong because she did her usual sudden and swift departure without addressing what had been said, with a final snippy comment ("just play with something, I don't care what") and angry look. Scariest of all was that we went through several additional rounds of this where I had to make the same assertion and actually reach for a game to prove it before she'd bolt from the room; is there anyone besides me whose mind is boggled by the fact that someone who pinched every penny repeatedly spent $ on things she should have KNOWN I'd never be able to use?
People from saner backgrounds, who perhaps would prefer to believe that my mother was just a blithering idiot rather than someone making deliberately unacceptable choices, might be wondering why none of my unwanted gifts were ever just taken back and either replaced with better ones or the $ given to me to spend as I chose; while any gifts that she or my father got that they didn't like WERE returned and replaced with other things, the rule for ME was that if anything was outright rejected she took it back and kept the $, and I ended up with NOTHING... and to a kid with so little she cared about, it was better to have unwanted things than nothing.
Once I got to my teens, the problem became that she didn't want to pay for something as "expensive" as a record, and so would get me cheap little novelty geegaws along with a few paperback books and the annual dose of Kmart clearance-sale clothes; I finally bluntly pointed out that for the same amount of $ she'd spent on useless junk she could've gotten me several records, and saved shopping time in the bargain... she was petulant and dismissive, but since it DID save her a significant amount of time she did start grudgingly buying some albums... which had the added benefit of being foolproof gifts, since there were no substitutes or cheaper versions that she could get me. Come to think of it, she DID put forth an argument for just getting the singles from the bands I liked rather than paying more for whole albums, but when I pointed out that there'd be MULTIPLE singles from each album, and that buying them all would cost MORE than the album did, that was the end of that.
The funny part of all of this is that now, when I have mountains of stuff and don't depend on her for what I get or even WANT anything from her, she spends far more effort and $ on getting me nice gifts than she used to... although when she got me a mini display cabinet a few years ago that was too shallow to accommodate any of my collectibles and I gave it back, she DID just keep the $... some things never change.
When you were a kid, did your parents know what you wanted for Christmas? If you were raised by human beings instead of by pod people like *I* was, you answered "yes"; maybe your parents couldn't always afford to get you what you wanted, or didn't think some of those things were appropriate for you ("You'll poke your eye out"), but they KNEW, and more importantly, CARED. MY parents had total recall of every imagined wrongdoing of mine for my entire life, and of every penny and minute of effort they ever "wasted" (their word, not mine) on me, so how is it possible that they never knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I went on and on about each desired item like any other kid? Actually, it's theoretically possible that my father might have known, but since gift-buying wasn't his department (he's a traditional man, although without the nobility that usually includes) it wouldn't have benefitted me; my mother, though, who was a stay at home mom with so little to occupy her mind and time that she spent most of each day watching soap operas, reading mystery novels and shopping, either was somehow organically unable to retain information in this one area or had decided, consciously or unconsciously, to use the gift-giving holidays that are all-important to a child as an exceptional opportunity to abuse her power to mess with me... it's a sad commentary on her that the best we can hope for is that she was too blind and stupid to realize what she was doing.
My mother approached Christmas like she did everything else that wasn't for her exclusive benefit; with the intention of investing as little of her time, effort and $ as possible, and with all aspects of it subject to her ever-changing and usually unpleasant whims. She'd embraced the standard parental cheat of wrapping up clothing items (that should just have been bought and put in the kid's closet like all other clothes) and passing them off as gifts for children too young to care about such things, and apparently saw the commonness of this shoddy scam as evidence that the whole point of Christmas gifts was to put a reasonable amount of stuff under the tree but give the kid as little as possible of what they wanted; if they ever make this an Olympic event, she's a shoo-in for the gold medal.
When I was very young, ignoring what I wanted was trivial for her to handle; she'd contemptuously insist that she hadn't known I'd wanted this or that, and deny all knowledge of the 5000 times she'd been told. When I got old enough to remember this claim from one holiday season to the next, and started making more of an issue about what I wanted to attempt to counteract her inexplicable memory lapses in this area, her response was to bark that I didn't need to keep telling her; when I pointed out that, based on her story from the previous year, I obviously DID need to repeat myself, she retorted with what SHOULD have been the end of her nonsense... that I should just write out a wish list and give it to her, and that would be the end of it. Foolishly, I accepted this as a valid solution; I didn't know her then like I do now.
Although we were far from poor, I grasped even as a little kid that anything bought for me would come from Kmart or the military Exchange, and only from the lower end of what was available there; it hurts now to look back and see how unquestioningly I accepted that the natural order of things was that that was all I should have to choose from... to this very day, I often have to push myself to get nice things rather than deciding that I could get something like it cheaper at WalMart. When I made my list, I didn't put anything fancy on it even as a wild hope; everything was at "my level," and had been verified to be in the approved stores (which I was routinely dragged through on weekends to keep her from having to pay a babysitter while she shopped). I handed the list over, and...
Well, there IS a little bit of good news; on most Christmases after that I got a "special gift," which didn't mean that it was a better grade of present, just that it bore significant resemblance to something I'd asked for... I think once she actually relented and got me the EXACT thing, an electronic game where you tried to guess the # the machine had chosen, but generally she managed to make the item different enough in style, color, or whatever that my initial burst of joy when I thought I had something I wanted would fizzle out in disappointment when I saw what it really was. Still, it was progress.
Along with the ugly polyester clothes, and odds and ends that I didn't remotely want or like but had been on super-sale and thus been ideal in her mind as filler, would be things that were from my list only in her warped mind: If I wanted a toy that was a set of items, she'd find a store that had just the central item and that'd be all I'd get; the idea that the point of having the items available individually was to let you to pick and choose a BETTER set for your child's tastes, NOT to sidestep paying for a set, never occurred to her, or if it did she was too cheap to care. If some company was ripping off a popular toy by making a conceptually similar but far less appealing item for less $, my mother thought she'd really accomplished something by getting me that rather than the good one... she was especially proud of my fake Barbies. If I wanted a specific baby doll, I'd get the cheapest one she could find instead, because "a doll is a doll." If I wanted a specific stuffed dog, she'd find a different one that was half the size and price; after all, it was still a dog, wasn't it? If she'd put a fraction of the effort into getting me what I wanted that she did into the mental contortion acts and hours of extra shopping necessary to get me the substitutes, I'd have been the envy of every kid I knew.
Perhaps her most psychotic category of purchases is one that just occurred to me as I've been writing this; the games. A game is a perfectly reasonable gift for most kids, but from the time I was about 9 onwards there were few, or no, kids my age living near us wherever we were stationed, so what was the point of giving me games that required 4 or more players when there were never that many kids in the house, or even games that TWO could play when I didn't have ANY kids in the house most days (I assume I don't need to explain why MY house was the last one anyone wanted to go play in)? I'm not talking about some clueless, distant relative who sent a game with good intentions because they didn't know the score, I'm talking about my MOTHER buying them... was she expecting angels to come and play them with me, or perhaps aliens? Even scarier was that she didn't seem to understand what it MEANT if something was a game; I remember sitting around bored once (because there was nothing on TV and I'd read every book I owned 100 times), and she marched in and demanded to know why I wasn't playing with one of the games... and when I pointed out that they all required additional players, she DENIED it. I literally had to pull them off the shelves one by one and read the # of players each called for off of their boxes; I know she eventually saw that she'd been proven wrong because she did her usual sudden and swift departure without addressing what had been said, with a final snippy comment ("just play with something, I don't care what") and angry look. Scariest of all was that we went through several additional rounds of this where I had to make the same assertion and actually reach for a game to prove it before she'd bolt from the room; is there anyone besides me whose mind is boggled by the fact that someone who pinched every penny repeatedly spent $ on things she should have KNOWN I'd never be able to use?
People from saner backgrounds, who perhaps would prefer to believe that my mother was just a blithering idiot rather than someone making deliberately unacceptable choices, might be wondering why none of my unwanted gifts were ever just taken back and either replaced with better ones or the $ given to me to spend as I chose; while any gifts that she or my father got that they didn't like WERE returned and replaced with other things, the rule for ME was that if anything was outright rejected she took it back and kept the $, and I ended up with NOTHING... and to a kid with so little she cared about, it was better to have unwanted things than nothing.
Once I got to my teens, the problem became that she didn't want to pay for something as "expensive" as a record, and so would get me cheap little novelty geegaws along with a few paperback books and the annual dose of Kmart clearance-sale clothes; I finally bluntly pointed out that for the same amount of $ she'd spent on useless junk she could've gotten me several records, and saved shopping time in the bargain... she was petulant and dismissive, but since it DID save her a significant amount of time she did start grudgingly buying some albums... which had the added benefit of being foolproof gifts, since there were no substitutes or cheaper versions that she could get me. Come to think of it, she DID put forth an argument for just getting the singles from the bands I liked rather than paying more for whole albums, but when I pointed out that there'd be MULTIPLE singles from each album, and that buying them all would cost MORE than the album did, that was the end of that.
The funny part of all of this is that now, when I have mountains of stuff and don't depend on her for what I get or even WANT anything from her, she spends far more effort and $ on getting me nice gifts than she used to... although when she got me a mini display cabinet a few years ago that was too shallow to accommodate any of my collectibles and I gave it back, she DID just keep the $... some things never change.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Bah humbug (mostly)
It doesn't even seem like the holiday season in the Omni abode; we don't have a single Christmas decoration out yet... heck, we still haven't put the ones from Halloween and Thanksgiving away. As always, I'm held hostage by the disinclination of my lazy and procrastinative husband to tackle the floor to ceiling stacks of huge boxes that all our holiday paraphernalia is in so that stuff can be packed up and replaced with, er, other stuff; I'm not remotely strong enough to shuffle the stacks myself, and I'm not QUITE willing to hire a handyman to help me, so I'm stuck in a holiday display timewarp until I can scream loud enough and long enough for my husband to give in and take time out from screwing around on forums and do his 5 seconds of work so that *I* can spend several hours tearing down old displays and then putting out my most elaborate one of the year... which, if I'm lucky, will occur BEFORE Christmas day.
The real bummer is that my spectacular Christmas tree is absent this year; I finally wised up and changed my policy from screeching and battling every day for 5 weeks over getting the many boxes involved brought out and the tree constructed and wired up, leaving me stressed and cranky for the entire holiday season, to a decree that from now on if the tree isn't up by the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend like everyone else's there would just be no tree for that Christmas... and guess what. Although usually ebullient when he gets out of doing anything, my husband looks sad and guilty over this one, so I'm guessing he'll bestir himself next year... which doesn't help much THIS year.
The Christmas cards are done, but just barely; he managed to get through last weekend without digging them out for me with his usual chant of "later later later" and leaping into bed without saying goodnight to avoid being asked to do any last-minute tasks, which meant that I didn't get the frigging cards done, which meant that I had to give up a bunch of sleep and scramble to do them during the week... and if you're wondering why HE doesn't do any of the cards for people that are also HIS family, you must not be married. Whose idea was it to require us to send these stupid pieces of paper to everyone we know at Christmas, anyways? Does anyone ENJOY getting the cards, or their attendant letters describing every trivial thing each member of those families did in the past year? It's not like the cards are great works of art or literature, and it's not like they contain true and heartfelt declarations (for the most part), so what is the POINT? I've seen easily a half dozen bloggers with requests on their sites for people, STRANGERS, to email them their addresses so they can exchange cards, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry; how much time do these folks have on their hands, that they're looking for more people to swap cards with than they've already got? Is there some pleasure to the endless looking up of addresses, message writing, stamp sticking and envelope licking that I'm unaware of? Is it that they're eager to RECEIVE more cards, so much so that they'll beg for them from the blogosphere? Are they in competition with their friends as to who gets the most cards? Are their lives that empty? Do they dance with excitement when new cards arrive in the mail? *I* groan out loud, because they might be from people I didn't already send cards to, which means that all the supplies will have to come back out so that I can put together cards for them; I sure wish I knew what drug it is that turns this chore into a joyride.
At least I don't have to worry about gift-buying; I had all my gifts bought by June, as usual. Shocked? You shouldn't be; the preferences of one's intended gift recipients don't suddenly change on Black Friday (aka the day after Thanksgiving and the biggest shopping day of the year), so anything you're frantically looking for for them now could have been bought months ago... except for things that are deliberately released for the holiday season, which you can get far cheaper after the 1st of the year and give as birthday gifts if you really feel the need to purchase them. Where did we get the idea that we "can't" shop for Christmas gifts before the end of November? I learned from watching my mother that gifts should be purchased for everyone on the list year-round, and then parceled out for each gift-giving occasion as it arises; we NEVER have to race around at the last minute trying to find something, ANYTHING for someone in the hours before their birthday party (or whatever).
I owe my mother for another gift-related thing, too; she announced about 30 years ago that it was ridiculous to try and purchase gifts for geographically distant family members when we had no idea what any of them needed, wanted or liked, and then go through the trouble and expense of packing and shipping guesswork items which would undoubtedly get lukewarm receptions, and therefore our sub-family wasn't going to send any more gifts and didn't want to receive any, either... so the only family gifts I need to worry about are the ones for her (my husband and I don't bother getting each other gifts-we already have pretty much everything). There are only a few friends we see around Christmas, and they're easy to shop for (I got their gifts on eBay), so while the rest of the country is busily grabbing everything off the department store shelves, I'll be... on the computer, what'd you think?
My husband redeemed himself somewhat while I've been typing this; we're watching a DVD from the 2nd season of "Pinky and the Brain," and he noticed that, during the introduction, when Brain is doing math on his chalkboard under the heading "The Theory of Everything (Made Simple)," he comes up with the solution "THX=1138," which is a reference to the 1st movie made by series producer Steven Spielberg's long-time friend George Lucas, "THX 1138"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/
and also a little poke at him for incorporating similar references into some of his own movies (for example, one of the cars in "American Graffiti" has the license plate "THX 138").
Wait, there's an even better husband story: Late this afternoon, I noticed a lack of happy tweeting on the patio, and looked out to see an enormous RAT inside the birdfeeder, gorging on the seeds meant for my little avian friends while the latter cowered in the bushes; I shrieked for my husband to go evict the rat, and he charged heroically out there, risking the filthy rodent jumping on him so that the tweeties would be able to resume eating. He was laughing when he came back in, and explained incredulously that a cat, which had been hiding in the junk pile, had come shooting out when it spotted him and rocketed over the fence, and he'd had the brilliant idea of taking the feeder to that same spot and dumping the rat out above where the cat probably still was... after which he heard a ruckus that made him think that the cat, which like the others that hang around here had previously shown no ability to catch anything, had in fact managed to dispatch the rat. I sent him back out to go and check the other side of the fence, and he reported that the cat WAS in fact consuming rat tartare... and probably planning to tell its buddies about its superlative hunting abilities (it's not like it'd admit that it only caught the rat because it fell on him).
The other good thing today was the arrival of my package from Amazon, which contained the awesome new CD "A Twisted Christmas"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000ICLTKK/ref=olp_product_details/002-8570383-1034463?ie=UTF8
which features classic carols done 80's metal style by Twisted Sister... including a version of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" (seamlessly blended with chunks of "We're Not Gonna Take it") that elevates frontman Dee Snider to demi-godhood; that was always one of my favorite carols, I think because it talked about being "joyful and triumphant," which I could only dream of being as a child... and so often am now.
I guess Christmas isn't really THAT bad...
The real bummer is that my spectacular Christmas tree is absent this year; I finally wised up and changed my policy from screeching and battling every day for 5 weeks over getting the many boxes involved brought out and the tree constructed and wired up, leaving me stressed and cranky for the entire holiday season, to a decree that from now on if the tree isn't up by the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend like everyone else's there would just be no tree for that Christmas... and guess what. Although usually ebullient when he gets out of doing anything, my husband looks sad and guilty over this one, so I'm guessing he'll bestir himself next year... which doesn't help much THIS year.
The Christmas cards are done, but just barely; he managed to get through last weekend without digging them out for me with his usual chant of "later later later" and leaping into bed without saying goodnight to avoid being asked to do any last-minute tasks, which meant that I didn't get the frigging cards done, which meant that I had to give up a bunch of sleep and scramble to do them during the week... and if you're wondering why HE doesn't do any of the cards for people that are also HIS family, you must not be married. Whose idea was it to require us to send these stupid pieces of paper to everyone we know at Christmas, anyways? Does anyone ENJOY getting the cards, or their attendant letters describing every trivial thing each member of those families did in the past year? It's not like the cards are great works of art or literature, and it's not like they contain true and heartfelt declarations (for the most part), so what is the POINT? I've seen easily a half dozen bloggers with requests on their sites for people, STRANGERS, to email them their addresses so they can exchange cards, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry; how much time do these folks have on their hands, that they're looking for more people to swap cards with than they've already got? Is there some pleasure to the endless looking up of addresses, message writing, stamp sticking and envelope licking that I'm unaware of? Is it that they're eager to RECEIVE more cards, so much so that they'll beg for them from the blogosphere? Are they in competition with their friends as to who gets the most cards? Are their lives that empty? Do they dance with excitement when new cards arrive in the mail? *I* groan out loud, because they might be from people I didn't already send cards to, which means that all the supplies will have to come back out so that I can put together cards for them; I sure wish I knew what drug it is that turns this chore into a joyride.
At least I don't have to worry about gift-buying; I had all my gifts bought by June, as usual. Shocked? You shouldn't be; the preferences of one's intended gift recipients don't suddenly change on Black Friday (aka the day after Thanksgiving and the biggest shopping day of the year), so anything you're frantically looking for for them now could have been bought months ago... except for things that are deliberately released for the holiday season, which you can get far cheaper after the 1st of the year and give as birthday gifts if you really feel the need to purchase them. Where did we get the idea that we "can't" shop for Christmas gifts before the end of November? I learned from watching my mother that gifts should be purchased for everyone on the list year-round, and then parceled out for each gift-giving occasion as it arises; we NEVER have to race around at the last minute trying to find something, ANYTHING for someone in the hours before their birthday party (or whatever).
I owe my mother for another gift-related thing, too; she announced about 30 years ago that it was ridiculous to try and purchase gifts for geographically distant family members when we had no idea what any of them needed, wanted or liked, and then go through the trouble and expense of packing and shipping guesswork items which would undoubtedly get lukewarm receptions, and therefore our sub-family wasn't going to send any more gifts and didn't want to receive any, either... so the only family gifts I need to worry about are the ones for her (my husband and I don't bother getting each other gifts-we already have pretty much everything). There are only a few friends we see around Christmas, and they're easy to shop for (I got their gifts on eBay), so while the rest of the country is busily grabbing everything off the department store shelves, I'll be... on the computer, what'd you think?
My husband redeemed himself somewhat while I've been typing this; we're watching a DVD from the 2nd season of "Pinky and the Brain," and he noticed that, during the introduction, when Brain is doing math on his chalkboard under the heading "The Theory of Everything (Made Simple)," he comes up with the solution "THX=1138," which is a reference to the 1st movie made by series producer Steven Spielberg's long-time friend George Lucas, "THX 1138"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/
and also a little poke at him for incorporating similar references into some of his own movies (for example, one of the cars in "American Graffiti" has the license plate "THX 138").
Wait, there's an even better husband story: Late this afternoon, I noticed a lack of happy tweeting on the patio, and looked out to see an enormous RAT inside the birdfeeder, gorging on the seeds meant for my little avian friends while the latter cowered in the bushes; I shrieked for my husband to go evict the rat, and he charged heroically out there, risking the filthy rodent jumping on him so that the tweeties would be able to resume eating. He was laughing when he came back in, and explained incredulously that a cat, which had been hiding in the junk pile, had come shooting out when it spotted him and rocketed over the fence, and he'd had the brilliant idea of taking the feeder to that same spot and dumping the rat out above where the cat probably still was... after which he heard a ruckus that made him think that the cat, which like the others that hang around here had previously shown no ability to catch anything, had in fact managed to dispatch the rat. I sent him back out to go and check the other side of the fence, and he reported that the cat WAS in fact consuming rat tartare... and probably planning to tell its buddies about its superlative hunting abilities (it's not like it'd admit that it only caught the rat because it fell on him).
The other good thing today was the arrival of my package from Amazon, which contained the awesome new CD "A Twisted Christmas"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000ICLTKK/ref=olp_product_details/002-8570383-1034463?ie=UTF8
which features classic carols done 80's metal style by Twisted Sister... including a version of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" (seamlessly blended with chunks of "We're Not Gonna Take it") that elevates frontman Dee Snider to demi-godhood; that was always one of my favorite carols, I think because it talked about being "joyful and triumphant," which I could only dream of being as a child... and so often am now.
I guess Christmas isn't really THAT bad...
