Category: Other complaints

Everything you ever wanted to know about running a garage sale

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Today was the annual City-Wide Garage Sale in Reinbeck.  We had one.  Needless to say, it was a long week.  We got the garage swept out last Sunday, carried things into the garage Wednesday night, set things up Thursday night, and priced everything last night.  We were up till after 11:00 p.m. every night this week and then I had to crawl out of my nice warm bed at 6:00 a.m. this morning to get the signs put up so people would know we were having a sale.  The city always puts out a map of people having sales and then they have the maps at Casey’s and Trunck’s.  It costs $5 to have your name put on the map, but it’s worth it because then people know where all the sales are.  We paid our $5 and when Greg went to Casey’s this morning to get some pop and a couple of the maps, he discovered that they had left our house off.  So we paid $5 for nothing.  I guess it’s a good thing my signs held up…

So this is how my morning went:

  • 7:32 – I would much rather be going around town checking out garage sales than sitting out here in the blistering cold running my own garage sale.
  • 7:34 – And by blistering cold, I am, of course, referring to the parts of me not right in front of the heater.
  • 8:02 – Come on, people, BUY MY STUFF!!!  See?  Three exclamation marks.  Just buy it.  You know you want to.
  • 8:05 – My policy should be, “If you look at it, you buy it.”  Then maybe I’d get done in time to do some shopping myself.
  • 8:06 – I should have brought my computer out with me.  Then I would be entertained and my lap would be warm.  Yay warm!
  • 8:28 – Hooray!  A sale of some consequence at long last!  Woo!
  • 8:35 – It’s always nice to get repeat customers!
  • 8:56 – Have officially given up all hope of keeping track of items sold.  Managed to get two items on the list before giving up.
  • 8:57 – Am now channeling Bridget Jones.  Must lose weight.  Must also try to forget about yummy Daniel Cleaver.
  • 9:18 – I should have a no smoking sign up.  Someone came in with a lit cigarette.  Yuck!
  • 10:01 – There be donuts in the house.  Why is it that everything yummy is so bad for you?
  • 10:45 – Okay, so it’s not winter-coat-and-coveralls cold anymore, but it’s still darn chilly.  And the lovely heater is making me sleepy.
  • 12:25 – Our heaters died. 😦  Apparently we blew a fuse.  But then it was Greg to the rescue and now the heat has been restored!  YAY!! 🙂
  • 12:26 – My jaw hurts.
  • 12:29 – With my trusty  heater by my side, I’ll never be cold again!  I sorta feel like I’m camping, but without the s’mores.
  • 12:33 – You know, s’mores sound good.  I need s’mores.  Where are all the s’mores when you really need them?
  • 1:01 – Have you ever been high as a kite and then gone garage saling?  Well, my neighbor sure seems to enjoy it!
  • 1:27 – Please, dear high-as-a-kite neighbor lady, don’t come back till you’ve sobered up.  You digging through my knives makes me nervous!
  • 1:39 – Tick, tock, tick, tock…Come on, two o’clock, hurry up and get here so I can close up and do something fun!

It’s amazing what brings out the kooks in town.  There’s an apartment complex next door to our house and one of the tenants came over to see what we had for sale.  “Whoa, it’s like a little store!” she exclaimed upon entering, holding a glass of questionable contents (orange juice for sure, but Lord only knows what else).  “Oh, I love your lamp!  I want this lamp.  I’ll be back for it.  You guys have exactly what I need, I swear.  You really do.  You have everything I need.  I’ll be back.  Oh, I love this lamp!  I want your lamp.”  After several painful minutes of her seriously disorganized (I can’t think of the word I want, sorry) rambling, she finally left, only to return about a half hour later with her rather annoying (and awfully overweight) dog in tow.  She wasn’t quite as high when she came back, thankfully, but still, when she went pawing through the box of miscellaneous knives, Teresa and I got a little nervous (Greg’s mom came up for the weekend and sat with me through most of the sale).  This time, psycho neighbor lady picked up one of a two-pot set (she only wanted the one – they were a buck for the pair), a handful of knives, and a can opener, set them down near the check-out, and went to let her dog relieve itself (hopefully in someone else’s yard).  “But I’ll be right back.  And I really want that lamp, but if you sell it to someone else, you go right ahead, it’s okay.  But if you don’t, I’ll take it.”  Gee, lady, thanks; I’m so glad I have your permission to sell my lamp.  *sigh*  Some people.  While she was amusing in her own “special” way, I wasn’t too disappointed that she completely forgot about coming back to our garage sale.

Greg had to work today, so he didn’t get to enjoy watching the people come and go.  He did, however, rig something up so that we could still run the heaters after we blew a fuse in the garage.  He grabbed his heavy-duty extension cord and plugged it in at the house, then rolled it out to the garage to plug in one of the two heaters we’d been using.  That was nice.  But apparently we must have blown another one in the house because when I sat down to count the take in the dining room, the light wouldn’t turn on.  There’s no way we blew out nine lightbulbs at once, so we must have blown another fuse running that heater.  *sigh*  Oh, well.  At least we were warm.

There weren’t many people out today for the garage sales, not that you would know it from talking to Greg.  Every time I talked to him, he told me about the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Randall Street.  Trouble is, we’re not on Randall Street!  My theory is that people started up on Valley Drive and out in Eastgate and over on Hillcrest and Ridge Streets and then by the time they got done with all the rich people’s houses, they were too tired, too broke, or too tired and too broke to come over to the west side of town and visit our lowly establishment.  For Pete’s sake, we had good stuff, dammit!  It’s not like we’re in the poorhouse.

Okay, end rant.  I just was not real patient with people this morning.  I mean, I was, it’s just that I was dissatisfied with how long they were taking to get out to our house.  Our biggest crowd consisted of four people who happened to wander in at the same time.  And then there was one lady who came in with her kids and her son was just a terror!  He was tearing things apart all over the place and she really wasn’t a lot better, but then she was just like, “Well, come on, we’re going,” and didn’t reprimand him once or tell him to behave and keep his hands to himself or anything.  And then he wanted a toy and she wouldn’t buy it for him because it was part of a bag and he only wanted the one, so he threw a temper tantrum, clearly expecting it to work.  If I’d behaved like that, my mother would have given me the spanking of a lifetime when we got home.  She didn’t buy him the toy, at least, and I was glad when they were gone.

There were a couple people that came in like that, who were worse-behaved than the kids.  That always gets me.  This one gal came in with her sister and they were looking at Greg’s Jeff Gordon jacket.  The one woman ended up buying it, but her sister was trying to talk her out of it.  She used the very tips of her fingers to pick it up and look at it quick, and then she asked if we had any hand sanitizer she could use.  She dropped the jacket in a heap on the table and then brushed her hands together, as if the jacket was filthy and she couldn’t stand the thought of being contaminated by it.  She said if it had been a Dale Earnhardt, Jr. jacket, she would have been all over it like white on rice and I thought, “Gee, lady, aren’t you a little old to be acting like a middle schooler?”

Hmm, it seems that the battery in my laptop is about to go dead, so I should probably wrap this up.  I have a headache anyway and need to go take some more something for it.  Some food, perhaps; all I’ve had today were a handful of Mike & Ike’s and a few slices of summer sausage, washed down with a lovely bottle of Dr. Pepper, because clearly, I’m a health food junkie.

Oh, and happy Mother’s Day!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

So…

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So basically, I’ve been atrocious about posting this month.  Sorry.  As I just finished telling my bridesmaids, the procrastination bug has bitten quite hard lately.  There are a million things I should be doing and yet…none of them are getting done.  I can’t even blame Facebook this time!  I’ve been playing Bloodlines on MySpace and have become rather addicted.  It’s pure boredom, I think, that’s stimulating my fascination with the game.  So much for having outgrown my interest in vampires…

I really can’t say that there’s much going on around here because really, there isn’t.  My hands have finally recovered from raking leaves last week; I got off work early Friday and spent the rest of the afternoon raking the yard.  Yecchh.  We have a pretty big yard and lots of leaf-bearing trees, so raking is a huge chore.  Plus, Greg and the kids raked all the leaves up last fall and pushed them out to the curb for the City to pick up and then they never came, so when the snow began to fly and the plows began to plow, they pushed all those leaves right back into the yard.  Jerks.  Their leaf-collecting machine broke, so rather than reschedule the leaf pick-up, they just didn’t do it.  Raking wet leaves really, really sucks.  You might say it sucks brass monkey balls.

*sigh*  Have had it with working.  Am more than ready to go home for the day.  Really looking forward to the RCIA potluck tonight and the yummy, yummy deviled eggs that will be going with us.  Have decided to channel Bridget Jones with my writing style for this paragraph.  Am super excited that tax season is officially over.  Must now lose weight.

In other news, Twitter is being irritating.  While it is rather awesome, it’s also rather a pain.  The jury is out on this, too.  I suppose now it’s cooperating, I don’t dislike it quite as much as I did a few minutes ago, but that may change.  I suppose I alternately love/hate it, much like the Twitter widget in my sidebar that doesn’t update in real time.

I think that’s it for the day.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

If only…

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If only I had that much energy today, or any day, really.  How nice that would be!

In case I didn’t make it obvious enough, I’m super tired today.  It was definitely one of your longer weekends.  Saturday was spent running errands and running around and then scrambling to put the house in order before the soon-to-be-in-laws arrived.  Then we all stayed up till sometime after midnight so we could go to the Easter vigil at church.  I was confirmed and had my first communion as a brand-new Catholic.  I think I like the grape juice and bread cubes the Presbyterians serve better than the cardboard wafers and wine.  At any rate, there was a reception after the service (which started at 8:15 p.m. and ended shortly before 11:00 p.m.) and then after indulging in cake and coffee and juice, we all went home and indulged in strawberry pie with cool whip, courtesy of Ginny.  Yummy!  Yesterday brought a way-too-early wake-up call at 7:00 a.m. to see what goodies the Easter bunny delivered and then a trip to Gladbrook before an even bigger trip to Elkader to visit Greg’s family.  By the time we got home and watched a movie and went to bed, it was somewhere around 10:30 p.m.  I’m functioning solely on caffeine today, and not very well at that.  Yeesh!  Hopefully it will kick in soon.

*sigh*  Too tired…Must catch Z’s…

I suppose I had better get back to work, since I have a desk full of it and the tax deadline is only two days away.  Hasta la vista…baby!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

No news

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Sorry.  There’s just not much to tell lately.  I really haven’t felt like writing all that much, which is rather odd for me.

So to update, we’ve finally settled on the bridesmaid dresses.  Yay!  One thing down, 970 million more to go.  Um, I’m being confirmed at church Saturday night.  And my tummy hurts.  Apparently all the antacid I took after lunch hasn’t kicked in yet.  It really needs to, though, cuz I’ve had awful heartburn since yesterday and it needs to go away.

I actually made some progress on my type-up-all-my-old-stories project.  I got one all typed up and I started on another one.  Oh my God.  Seriously.  I knew they were bad, but holy crap, I didn’t realize the exact extent of the horror.  Yikes!  I should be shot for writing such utter drivel.  Aside from the fact that every time someone asks my character to tell them about herself, she gives them her life story in one paragraph, well, there are really no words to describe just how bad it was.  I kept making remarks like, “It’s a good thing I never got knocked up at fifteen like some people do because I’d have stuck my kid with a truly heinous name,” or, “You have got to be kidding me.  What the hell was I thinking?!”  And I thought these were good once upon a time?  I was out of my freaking mind!  Greg asked me why I was typing them all up if they were so bad.  I told him it was so that I had a record of what I used to write.  “Oh, so you’re not going to have them published?” he asked.  “Oh, HELL no!”  I replied.  “I’d die of embarrassment!”

And I would.  They are true horrors.  *shudders*  And yet, I keep on going…

We got 8 inches of swearing Sunday.  This is April, dammit.  That’s not supposed to happen.  When they said April showers bring May flowers, they meant rain!  Not white crap!  NO MORE WHITE CRAP!!

Okay, I think I’m done now.

But on the subject of crap, my long-awaited piece of BSB-inspired fluff is nearing completion.  Yay!  Because everyone loves a good bit of fluff, right?  Right?  You know I’m right.

*sigh*  I hope this afternoon goes by as quickly as this morning did because I just want to go home and curl up in bed.  I seem to be feeling rather averse to productivity today.  So with that, I think I’ll go back to doing quizzes on Facebook and hope that this time, stupid WordPress will post my entry when I tell it to instead of saving 90% of it as a draft and losing the rest of what I typed.  I hate when things of that sort happen.  Stupid computer glitches.  If I could remember everything that I typed, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, I guess, but my memory sucks, so there ya go.  Apparently my computer sucks, too, but I already had suspicions of that.

Friday needs to hurry up and get here.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

So proud!

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I always knew Iowa rocked.  Yay Corn State!

So it seems that I never got around to posting anything yesterday.  Whoops.  Must have been the Class 3 Skull-Splitter messing with my head.  Or the actual work that I had yesterday.  They just kept piling it on!  I love days like that, where I have things to do.  It makes the time pass so much faster.  I really appreciate it when the work day flies by because frankly, I would much rather be at home.  It’s a lovely day outside and my boys will be home by 3:00.  The only thing missing is me!  How I wish I could cut out early.

In other news, a good friend of mine has been having rather a hard time lately.  She’s lost several relatives, all within a few months of each other, as well as a very good friend.  I called her the other night to chat and she had just found out that her uncle had passed away earlier that day from a massive heart attack.  I really hope things will start going better for her.  Maybe today’s news will cheer her up!  I hope so.

Spring is totally in the air today.  The sun is shining, there’s not a cloud in the sky, the wind has finally calmed down, and there’s a lovely crispness in the air.  It’s beautiful!  And they’re discussing possible swearing over the weekend.  Apparently the meteorologists haven’t gotten the memo that says since it’s now April, it’s not allowed to swear anymore.  Swearing is only allowed in winter and since it is clearly not winter anymore, swearing is strictly and expressly forbidden.  The Great Kay has spoken.

*sigh*  I keep staring out the window and thinking of Time Enough for Drums.  I suppose I always think of it in the spring because it was springtime when I first read that book.  Also I think of it because there’s a lovely passage about Jem losing herself to the spell of John reading French and staring out the window into the inviting April day and getting scolded for daydreaming.  I love that book.

And now I suppose I’ll get back to searching the internet for work-related items of non-interest…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Modern torture devices

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I have discovered that torture devices are alive and well in the 21st century.  I had a particularly close call with one this morning.  It taunted me with its promises of better health and weight loss and for thirty agonizing moments, I succumbed to glorious images of a new and improved me.  Then, hot, sweaty, tired, and in pain, I wondered incredulously what the hell I had been thinking.  Obviously it had some sort of mind control powers that it failed to mention or it would probably not have succeeded in keeping me in its clutches for as long as it did.  In future, I will know better than to heed its siren song and fully intend to steer clear of it and any and all like devices.  What is the device of which I speak, you may be asking yourselves, so that I, too, can avoid them?  The answer, friends, is simple: the elliptical machine.

Yes, I have begun in earnest the workout regimen that I’ve been promising to start for at least the last two years.  I somehow managed to break free from the lovely warmth and comfort of my cozy bed at 5:45 a.m. this morning and engage in an arduous workout.  By arduous, of course, I mean that I set the thing to level 2 and spent thirty minutes whining about being bored, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, and sick while struggling to breathe through my nose for the first time in days.  That’s right, folks, I’m a pansy and a whiner.

But of course you already knew that.

My goal is to get into better shape and lose all the weight that I’ve gained over the last year.  Ideally, this will happen prior to September 26, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for.  Maybe I can just lose most of it by then.

I still hate mornings, though, and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn is sooooooooooo not my idea of a good time.  In fact, working out in general is not exactly my idea of a good time, in case you couldn’t tell.  I love riding my bike and going swimming and taking walks, but those are all rather difficult to do in the middle of winter.  Oh, sure, I could join a gym and do all of those things inside, but then there would be no mosquitoes to swat away, no sunburns to deal with, no bratty kids to shoo out of my way in the pool, no excess of heat and humidity…Why haven’t I joined a gym again yet?  Oh, right, because then I would miss out on enjoying nature.  Because I’m such the avid naturalist and all-around outdoorsy type.  Right.

Maybe in my dreams.

Rachael cracked me up this morning.  She came downstairs as I was about halfway through my half-hour of torture and sat down at the table to watch me, positively enthralled by what she saw.  Whether it was the idea of me working out or the fact that she had no idea what it was I was doing that kept her attention riveted on my ever-reddening face, I’m not sure.  “You look tired,” she said.  I gasped my agreement.  “I would be done now if that were me,” she continued.  I stared at her for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry, then told her to go play.  Greg told her that people don’t like to be observed while working out, which is true for me because I’m always afraid I’ll look like an idiot, even when I’m the only person around.  I asked him if he heard what she’d said and he replied that he hadn’t, so I told him.  He laughed.  Then he came out and said that I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would.  Apparently that’s supposed to mean that I’m in better shape than originally thought, despite the fact that I get winded running up the steps to the clerk’s office at the courthouse every day (I’ve been doing it for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but you would be wrong; and lest I make it seem like that’s a small amount of stairs, there are somewhere around two dozen steps just to get into the courthouse, then three more flights up to the clerk’s office).  I could probably have phrased all that better, but my brain seems to have fallen asleep from all that exercising I did this morning.

In other news, the sinus infection that’s been threatening for so long finally hit with a vengeance on Friday and I spent Saturday on the couch.  I spent most of Saturday morning asleep.  Yay sleep!  We went to Ankeny this weekend and did lots of wedding planningy type things, such as picking up my wedding dress.  YAY!!!!!!  Then I (accidentally) got super-drugged-up on cold medicine and Excedrin and felt like a space cadet all of Sunday.  A word to the wise: Don’t mix two NyQuil liqui-gels with three Excedrin and a muscle relaxer.  Bad things will happen.  It was much less fun to go shopping and try on pretty dresses in my drug-induced fog than I had originally anticipated.  But I still have to have it bustled and there are still other dresses to pick out, so I suppose I can deal with it.

Yay wedding dress! 🙂

I finally got around to sending my cell phone in to be fixed.  I guess I procrastinated a bit with that.  You would think I would have gotten it taken care of right away and I did try to do just that, but then I got lazy.  Now I have to wait four to six weeks for my pretty pink phone to be usable again.  Stupid phone breakage.

And in laptop news, we finally gave up on waiting for Dell to send the cds they promised to send.  They kept pushing back the ship date and when Greg called to find out why, they told him they had the cds in stock (and they weren’t on back-order like he’d been told before) and they didn’t know why they hadn’t been sent out.  *looking very earnest*  They promised to send them out right away, overnight even.  They still never arrived.  So we finally managed to get them to send us prepaid shipping labels and we shipped it back to them.  Once they’re satisfied, they’re supposed to send me a new one with the right operating system on it.  It will probably be another month at least before that happens.  Stupid Dell.  Their computers are great, but their customer service really sucks.

My God I’m tired!  I blame the early rising this morning, the muscle relaxer I took after my lovely warm shower, and the stupid sinus infection that won’t go away.  And by won’t go away, I mean that the two doses of antibiotic I’ve taken haven’t managed to banish it yet.  WORK FASTER, MEDICINE!  I WANT TO BREATHE!

*sigh*  In the meantime, I suppose I had better get back to work, although I’m really not sure what it is that I’ll do to pass the time and keep from falling asleep.  I felt rotten enough yesterday that I toyed with the idea of calling in sick today so that I could stay home and rest up from the weekend, but I’m a goody-goody, so here I am.  At work.  Where I’m supposed to be working but am blogging as a way to put off doing anything even remotely productive instead.

Happy Tuesday!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

On cell phones and why I’m mad at them today

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So today I went to enter an appointment in the calendar on my cell phone.  I would be so lost without it that it’s just plain ridiculous.  Anyway, I was halfway through typing in the appointment when my phone shut off.  Weird.  I’d had to turn it on when I dug it out of my purse because it was off then, too.  Double weird; I hardly ever turn my phone off.  I was in a hurry because I had to eat and run some errands, so I stuffed it in my purse and was on my way.  When I got to where I have lunch, I fiddled with it again and it just kept turning itself off.  Stupid phone.  By now I was super irritated, so I contented myself with ordering lunch and reading the new Catherine Anderson book I got last weekend, annoyed at the thought of having to cut my reading shorter than I wanted so that I could stop at the cell phone store.

After eating a very quick lunch, I headed to the post office to get something in the mail and then I hurried over to the local cell phone store.  Of course, they couldn’t really do anything to help me except suggest that I go back to the store where I bought the phone and see if they could do something with it.  I’ve only had the phone since the end of November; it’s brand new!  Apparently that’s one of its problems.  My phone had just come out in November or right around then and evidently, it had some issues at first, so either it’s that and they may have to exchange my phone, or it’s a software thing and it just needs to be updated.  I’m hoping for the software thing because they can’t switch text messages and I want to keep some of them, so I don’t want to have to turn my phone back in as part of an exchange.  So I guess I get to go to Waterloo tonight with the kids to see if I can get my phone situation taken care of.  It wouldn’t be quite so bad if it wasn’t my only phone…Okay, yes it would, but whatever.  At least if I had a land line I could still call people.  I hate being phoneless.

It’s funny how much cell phone malfunctions bother me.  It proves just exactly how dependant I am on my cell phone and when you really stop to think about it, that’s probably not a good thing.  Without my cell phone, it feels like I’m missing a limb or something, and it never used to be that way.  Then again, that was back before I had a cell phone and it’s getting harder and harder to remember those days.  The really sad thing is how I don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore.  I used to be a walking phone book, as I suspect we all were at one point.  Now, no one knows anyone’s phone number because all phone numbers are stored in our cell phones for easy, one-touch dialing.  It reminds me of what my dad always says about calculators: “That thing’ll make you stupid.”  And it’s true.  I rarely do mental math anymore because I’ve come to depend so much on my calculator’s ability to do it for me.  Any sort of addition or subtraction or anything, really, that involves carrying of numbers or anything with decimals or percents, I just can’t do without my calculator.  My brain has grown weak from lack of use.  It’s the same with phone numbers.  Unless you’re someone I talk to frequently on the phone or someone I’ve known forever and your number doesn’t change, chances are good that I no longer know your phone number.  It’s really quite sad.

But on the bright side, it’s Friday!  Hooray!  And I have a story idea!  Hooray!  And I have a book to read!  Hooray!  And possibly plans for the weekend!  Hooray! Plans that involve shopping!  Hooray!  Is anyone sick of all these exclamation marks and shouts of hooray yet?  Hooray!

🙂

I am so ready for the afternoon to be over.  Only one more hour and forty-five minutes!  Hooray!  I need to lie down…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Again with the snarkiness…

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But this time it wasn’t mine.  Well, okay, it reminded me a lot of mine, but this time it wasn’t me, I swear.  This was an article from Wednesday’s Iowa Falls Times-Citizen, or rather, it was a letter to the editor of that newspaper.  Here is what Jory Rapp of Alden had to say:

It saddens me, as well as angers me, to think that it has become so “politically incorrect” to say, “Merry Christmas.”  We are so afraid of offending someone for one reason or another that stores won’t put Merry Christmas in their ads, school concerts are called “winter concerts,” and such ridiculous rot as that.  It seems like it’s wrong to offend everyone else; everyone, that is, except for the Christians.

If memory serves me right, wasn’t our country founded on Christian beliefs, values, and morals?  We trusted in God to establish, guide, and bless our country, yet now we spit in His face and are outraged at having Him be part of our country and its government.  Then we have the audacity to moan at the shape our country is in and ask why God allows certain things to happen.  If we would look to the Bible and the history of the Israelites, we would see what happens when people turn their backs on God, when they choose to worship other gods and idols.  We are headed down that path and if we continue to kick God out of everything, one day we will be standing in the midst of a disaster asking, “Where are you, God?” and His answer will be, “You didn’t want me around, so I left.”

This Christmas season, I will remind my children that we celebrate because God chose to send His Son to this earth as a baby to one day be the Savior of all mankind and that we are to share that gift with others.  I wish everyone a very blessed and “Merry Christmas.”

 I thought this was very well written and I pretty well agree with it.  If Ben Stein can stick up for “Merry Christmas” even though as a Jew, he doesn’t celebrate it, why can’t the rest of us?  “Season’s Greetings” has got to be about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  The holiday is Christmas.  If you have a problem with that, go back to wherever you came from.  Or celebrate Festivus.

And now, on to snarkier matters…

It appears that the Idiot Brigade is back in full force.  I swear I got stuck behind every idiot driver in Grundy County Wednesday.  I was nearly hit by someone who decided to switch lanes without making sure there was no oncoming traffic and then again by someone who decided to take his half out of the middle while I was trying to pass him.  If he’d come any further into the left lane, he could have knocked me right off the road.  And then yesterday I was nearly run over by some idiot at a stop sign who was watching around the corner instead of right in front of him, where I happened to be walking.  Jerks.  What is it about winter that brings out the idiot in people?

On a more positive note, thank God it’s Friday!  I am so looking forward to the weekend.  No getting up for work and struggling to make it through the day, no idiots to deal with on the road because I fully intend to stay home and be exceedingly lazy, nothing but chick flicks and romance novels.  Oh, and Christmas present wrapping.  And Christmas card writing.  And maybe a little bit of 4-H paperwork.  Woo!  I love weekends!

Merry Christmas, y’all, and happy Friday!

(c) 2008.  All rights reserved.

Perhaps a little more snarkiness…

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…After all, I was seriously upset last night.  I suppose it’s a stupid thing to be that upset over, but I think the reason it bothers me so much is that music has always been such a huge part of my life that it really irritated me to see a performance where it looked like nobody really cared.  They were shooting for mediocrity and barely achieved even that.  I was always taught to strive for excellence.  Those kids (the fourth graders in particular) had a serious problem with projection; we sat about as far away from the singers as you could possibly get and could hardly hear them most of the time.  At one point we couldn’t even understand what they were singing because they weren’t enunciating at all.  I remember quite vividly a lesson I received once on enunciation during kids’ choir practice at church.  Let me tell you, I enunciated perfectly after that.

It also really bothers me that in so many public places, we are encouraged not to say anything even resembling a remembrance of what Christmas is really all about.  Christmas is first and foremost about celebrating the birth of Christ and his life and works.  Secondly, it is about spending time with family and friends and thanking God for the blessings you have had and continue to receive.  It is not about shopping and buying and spending and receiving.  As a kid, I remember not really caring so much about the family part and the religion part.  But now that my mom and both my grandparents are gone, I really cherish the times that I can spend with my family all together.  Those times are few and far between.  And the older I get, the more I can appreciate what God has done for me in my life and the more I find myself…apparently forgetting to take my hot water out of the microwave so I can have some hot chocolate.  Excuse me.

Okay.  Yesterday I heated up some water twice in order to make a cup of hot chocolate and I forgot about it both times.  I think I remembered it as I was leaving work for the night.  Today I’ve only done it once so far.  Let’s see if I can remember to take it out of the microwave while it’s still hot this time.

Anyway, I think I’m a little calmer now.  I am just so sick to the teeth of all this stupid political correctness garbage.  Kids don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in school anymore because “it might infringe on someone’s right not to believe in God.”  You can’t have the Ten Commandments in courthouses anymore.  Oh, and by the way, no Christmas carols in the annual Christmas concert because someone might be offended.  Really, how much farther are we going to let them take this?  If you don’t want to hear Christmas music, don’t go to the concert.  If you don’t want to say the Pledge of Allegiance because you don’t believe in it, don’t say it!  If you don’t like the way we do things in our country, go somewhere else.  Otherwise, shut your yaps and do like the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the separation of Church and State, but I think in some cases we’ve taken it a bit too far and much farther than the Founding Fathers intended, Christmas concerts and prayer in school being prime examples.  I’m not saying I want to live in a religious state, but seriously, people, use some common sense.  By not allowing such expressions of faith as singing Silent Night in a school Christmas concert, we are effectively offending ourselves.  I’m offended that kids are not allowed to sing a religious Christmas song at the Christmas concert because it might offend someone else.  The community in which I live is predominantly, if not entirely, Christian, and I think it’s stupid that we are not allowed to sing Christian Christmas songs during the Christmas concert.

Okay, so maybe I wasn’t done being snarky.  I’m sure I probably just talked in circles around my main point of wow, we’re all being stupid here, folks, but oh well.  I guess I’d just like to know why what was okay for us to sing as kids in our Christmas concerts is suddenly not okay to sing now.  For crying out loud, they could have at least sung something like Silver Bells or Jingle Bell Rock or Let it Snow!  Let it Snow!  Let it Snow!  While these are all nice songs in their own way, they’re no Angels We Have Heard On High or O Holy Night, but they’re at least Christmas classics.  Where were they in the program?

Okay, okay, I promise I’ll get off my high horse now.  I’ve been looking at my archives list and I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for over a year!  I know, that’s not much for some people.  I have one friend who’s been at it regularly for the last five years.  But for me to actually keep something like this going this long is pretty cool, especially given that I haven’t been doing a whole lot of actual writing lately.  I so need a free time machine.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I remembered to retrieve my hot water from the microwave so that I can have some hot chocolate.  Yummy!

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