Chrysalis, Solstice, Lint Roller, Something

Christmas came and went, and my mostly unintentional but nonetheless tenacious year of mourning came to an end as well, spitting me out the other side somewhat bewildered but mostly unscathed.

My sense of self is tethered only to memories now, not places. Childhood home is gone. Grandparents are gone. Fucking dogs are even gone. Parents grown old. Kid grown into a man bounding off into his own life. Traditions, muscle memory, everything we did and do Because It's What We Do... all in the long ago and far away. Stuff that's going to happen someday, really, if I just hope hard enough? Not gonna happen. Here and now? As good as it's likely to get.

And I guess I'm okay with that.

Blank canvas, lump of clay, pile of raw lumber waiting to be imagined and sketched and built into something else. It's all that's left.

Time to get to work.

End Times

End of the year, that is. Despite the changes that rolled in, moving some people around the country and sending some people into eternity, the calendar relentlessly marches along. Christmas knocks on the door and dances inside, trailing familiar players and trappings in a cloud of new traditions and arrangements. I'm not sure who's in charge now that my grandparents are gone. I think it might be me. My parents and uncle and aunt spent a week here, sightseeing and helping prep for our annual holiday party. Now they are back home and I'm taking a breath before the next wave of relatives from my girlfriend's side of the family come to town and trying to remember that we're still waiting for Christmas Day to come.

My grandparents' bedroom was always off-limits in December, partly to shield scattered unwrapped presents from prying eyes, but mainly to shield my grandmother's dignity from relatives seeing the utter chaos that lurked behind the door during those 24 days, paper and ribbons and boxes covering every horizontal surface as if a Christmas bomb had gone off mere moments before, no matter when you looked in there. I went back into my own bedroom this morning to retrieve my shoes and realized that one more circle has come full. Jesus. The Christmas Bedroom Bomber has tracked my genetic code 1,600 miles from southern Illinois and detonated several megatons' worth of paper, ribbons, and boxes all over every horizontal surface. And so it goes.

Life Continues, Chapters 1 and 2

Thanksgiving week really throws a wrench into things like, say, funerals that require people to travel from a couple different states, so Grandma's wake and funeral has been put off until Monday, allowing us to spend just enough time dithering on Travelocity to watch ticket prices magically jump $200 in the 5 minutes it takes to confer on whether 44 minutes is enough time to change planes in Phoenix (it isn't) and then decide to take the flight that turns that layover into a whopping two hours and eighteen minutes, all the while gritting our teeth and trying not to think about the fact that it only takes ninety minutes to drive to Phoenix.

Whatever.

So if the first step in what is turning into Mary's Epic Funeral Week Extravaganza was booking flights and cars and hotels and wrangling family members who have decided to make the coming weekend the opening ceremonies for the Douchecadet Olympics, the second step was more of a side trip in the completely opposite direction. That being the road to Mesa and my (still very alive) maternal grandparents' house for Thanksgiving, where we were joined by some elderly second cousins and two neighbors from Calgary. Suffice it say that it was fairly pleasant until the inevitable spectre of politics popped in for pie, and the consensus around the table (with one abstention; I'll let you guess who) was that George W. Bush will be deemed by history to have been one of our greatest presidents, possibly the greatest ever. Also: if you voted for Obama to prove you're not racist, who are you going to vote for to prove you're not stupid? I almost think "Sarah Palin" is supposed to be the totally sincere answer to that one, but it was hard to tell.

It went ever so slightly downhill from there, so I graciously excused myself before I stabbed somebody in the face with a pie fork.

The grandma we're burying was a passionate Democrat. End of story.

Anyway, here's a preview of Chapter 3: get up insanely fucking early on Sunday, inconvenience a friend by getting her to give me a ride to the airport, fly on a goddamn airplane to Phoenix, sit around for 2 and change, fly on another goddamn airplane to St. Louis, take a shuttle to the rental car lot, drive two hours to the tiny ancestral Illinois hometown just in time for the wake, endure the wake for three hours, get carryout from an actual Mexican restaurant in the tiny hometown that's gotta be filled with guys wondering what cracker nightmare they wandered into, for fuck's sake, have a drink, go to bed, wake up the next morning, go to funeral mass, drive to the next town over for the burial, drive back, have a drink, hope that the moroseness devolves into bad singing rather than factionalism and gunplay, go to bed, wake up, kill a morning, drive to St. Louis, fly to Phoenix, sit around for another two and change, get back to Tucson at 11:30 pm.

So much to do, so little patience for doing it.

2010, Post the First

I had to think for a minute about what the date is today, and then count forward and backward a few times to figure out which day of the week we're dealing with here. Apparently it is Saturday, which after a Friday that felt like a Sunday creates more confusion than I can deal with after only one cup of coffee.

People a few blocks away from here spell out messages in the rocks in their yard. Yesterday's (Friday, so I hear) was

REASONABLE
RESOLUTIONS
START 2010 RIGHT

which takes a lot of rocks. I always wonder how they deal with kerning issues; it's very precise. So my reasonable and only resolution for 2010 is to try not to suck. Fair enough. Also, I would like to make something involving roasted cauliflower at some point before 2011. There you have it.

The girlfriend is off for a day of refereeing, the boy is off at his dad's and points unknown, and back here at Chez Bolt the dishes want washing and the floors could do with some attention and the shed yet again failed to magically clean itself out overnight. In other words, life as usual has triumphed over the holiday afterglow and today's bowl games aren't close to compelling enough to justify putting off usual life's demands for another day.

One more cup of coffee and I'll get moving. Oh, yes, and Dick Cheney can go fuck himself.

Year-end Christmas Present Special

New office decoration.

Yes, I do have the best girlfriend ever. No, not the pretend one in the poster, the real one who put the poster under the tree this year.

I Come to Work to Recover from My Weekends

*flump* and Boltgirl collapses into the spring-shot non-ergonomic office chair nicked from the conference room several years ago when the last hand-me-down chair stopped being tolerable, and takes a deep breath.

Our annual holiday party hit Saturday afternoon and evening, and was lovely and exhausting as ever. Despite the large group (~65 hardy souls) and significant number of children under the age of five, absolutely nothing sticky got spilled on the floor, and every last empty bottle and can made it into the recycling bin. While this considerably diminished the usual Easter morning find-the-weirdest-places-people-decided-to-leave-stuff quality of the next day's cleanup, I was impressed. The exhaustion came in large part from--in what is becoming an alarmingly annual occurrence--something large and structural deciding to fall down in the yard, requiring a major construction episode starting 48 hours before the first guests were supposed to show up.

In the end, the new stuff got built and the landscaping got repaired, but I ran out of time to produce two signature dessert items and ended up with the wrong ingredients leading to a substandard batch of the signature hot spiced cider, and exactly one person noticed--that would be me--all of which served to remind me that the point of the whole deal is to reconnect with old friends and share hospitality with new ones and not send anyone home poisoned. And by those most important standards, it was a rollicking success.

Advent Time

My days of lighting the purple and pink candles in the Advent wreath are long past, and I haven't had a decent chocolate-filled calendar in years, but Chez Bolt is quietly preparing for Christmas. Oh, you'd barely notice it from the outside. Some lights are up, but we haven't gotten around to finding the extension cords yet, so they're strictly a daytime decoration so far, and the tree has yet to make an appearance, and the stuffed albino squirrel still awaits his Santa cap.

I have been killing the time between the ordinary calendar and the appearance of the aforementioned harbingers of the season by baking cookies and playing music, reaching back into the past with the muscle memory of rolling pins and puffs of flour and ancient harmonies on the vocal cords as the past reaches forward with bubbling memories of scents and reverberation, and we meet somewhere in a middle where my grandfather still hangs boughs in every room and my grandmother scurries about a warm kitchen.

The house is shuttered now, of course, my grandfather long the property of the stars and the saints and my grandmother fading in the haze of a nursing home, and a thousand miles away I cut her shapes into dough and play his chords and, for the briefest time, collapse the years and the distance and feel Christmas again.

Merrily, on high.

Humbug.

Christmas season sort of unofficially started today, I guess, maybe, although if Target is your cultural calendrical referent, it may have started sometime before Halloween. Ecclesiastically, I do not think we're into Advent yet--haven't been paying attention on that score for a while now--although the chocolate-filled Advent calendar season starts on Tuesday.

It's all very confusing.

No lights are up yet at Chez Bolt, and the Christmas CDs haven't made the annual migration over to the stereo yet. I may have seen them lacing up their boots for the trek earlier this evening. They will probably make it sometime tomorrow.

We are floating in the singular state of dread that presages a migraine. It's a familiar dance now, a regular pasa doble of pressure and pain feinting and retreating and circling and feinting forward again against the decision that's vascillating between waiting it out just a little longer or sucking it up and swallowing one of the ten-buck pills that promise relief, maybe, unless it's not a migraine, in which case I might as well take a ten-spot outside and set it on fire in the driveway. Maybe if I close my eyes. Maybe if I sip some Bailey's over ice. Maybe if I gouge my left eyeball out it will all go away.

Bailey's is winning so far.

One of the comments left on an online story this morning about the insane midnight shoppers suggested that people make charitable contributions in lieu of gifts. That sorta depends, I think. My ex-brother-and-sister-in-law memorably gave the charitable contribution route a bad name in their family one Christmas many years ago when they made contributions for everyone on their gift list. To their own favorite charity. The other ex-sister-in-law was downright pissed since she'd spent considerable time and money locating works by her brother's favorite potter for his gift. I guess she didn't see a bag of dog food in her name as being quite equivalent. Nice enough idea, clumsy execution; it helps for everyone to be on the same page.

Speaking of being on the same page, in other news, if I join a game of Facebook Scrabble you've started, it hurts my feelings when the game is summarily deleted. What the fuck is with people when it comes to Lexulous? Oh, your rating--which changes hourly, BTW--is too low/too high to be acceptable! Oh, your first word scored too many/too few points! You said hello! You didn't say hello! Delete! Delete! Seriously, people, I can't take this kind of rejection.

Hmmm. Maybe Relpax is the ticket.

Black Friday

No, Best Buy was not graced with my presence in the wee hours last night before the leftover gravy was even finished congealing, nor Wal-Mart in the predawn chill this morning, nor Target or K-Mart or Lenny's House of Rattan or anywhere else that dangled discounted TVs and Barbie DreamJets like so much chum before a tankful of hammerheads.

I don't get the appeal. I like money--and saving it--as much as the next guy, but there is just something seriously wrong with people who willingly give up their post-Thanksgiving stupor with family and friends to go stand in a fucking parking lot with hundreds of other like-minded schlubs to wait for the opportunity to push, shove, tackle, stampede, get in fistfights, and possibly be trampled to death in order to "save" money by "spending" assloads of cash on carts full of crap they are only buying because LOOK OMFG IT'S ON SALE. Oh, these DVDs are on sale for $12.99! Here, let's get fifty of 'em! Yes, my total bill was $700 and change, but look at how much I saved!

One time. I participated in the cattle call exactly one time, at what, looking back ten years, feels like the beginning of the phenomenon, in the hoary days when Toys 'R' Us took the bold, groundbreaking step of opening at SIX IN THE MORNING--oh, the vapors--and my grandparents thought it would be worth getting up that early to save ten bucks on some Hot Wheels garage thing they wanted to get for my son. We dutifully reported about 6:30 and stood in line at the register for half an hour, and after surviving that barely-a-blip-on-the-radar, barely-a-drop-in-the-bucket-of-things-to-come, shook our heads and decided it hadn't been worth it, and felt ashamed.

I can't fathom doing that now. Some people are certainly in it for the sport of it all, the excitement of feeling part of... something inexplicable, the challenge of laying out a plan of attack and storming the store in a coordinated assault. Others probably truly believe this is the only way they can afford to do Christmas the way they feel they need to do it for their kids or spouses or own egos or something. It's a mystery to me. If you'd like to give me a present, I'd prefer something small and thoughtful. I will not enjoy knowing you blew off Thanksgiving dinner to hold a vigil outside the mall and then ran over several old ladies as you dove for the shelf to grab the last whatever out of the hands of the person who reached it a split second before you did. Just bake me some cookies instead, okay?

My shopping today will be limited to a paintbrush I need for planned work around the house later this evening, and possibly a box of cereal in case breakfast beckons tomorrow. Enjoy my contributions, Black Friday economy! Wipe the grudge off the fiver if you need to!

Thanksgiving

The multi-generational pie.

This year's Thanksgiving pie was cobbled (ha!) together from a filling recipe found in my maternal grandmother's 1953 Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, a pastry recipe from my paternal grandmother's mother, which Grandma taught me to make 20 years ago, and my tweaks of honeycrisp apples and the addition of apple cider in place of the water in the pastry.

Oh, and the pastry leaves on top were Martha Stewart's idea.

The pie made the trip up to the Land of Old Republican People with me and the boy, and while I have been grumbling about this business of (1) having to go to Mesa for Thanksgiving (2) with elderly relatives whose politics and religious fervor do not exactly mesh smoothly with my own (3) without my girlfriend, ultimately it was pretty okay. This may well be the last Thanksgiving my grandparents (90 and 87) see, and I am glad I was with them. My family is flung all across the country, and we have the same stupid shit going on that every family does from time to time, but I'm glad I have them. And pie. I hope your day brought things to be thankful for as well.

Easter Blah, Easter Hooray

It started out as a fairly blah Easter, due to (1) lack of belief in Jesus, at least the resurrection end of things, (2) lack of kids in the house to either color or search for eggs, and (3) backlog of freelance work (me) and work work (girlfriend) that put the kibosh on our vague plans for a hike on what would have been the first free weekend day we've had in ages.

So we spent the day sitting at the kitchen table, me drawing and her editing but me mostly scowling and (mostly) silently cursing a crap Easter day, until mid-afternoon, when we returned a movie to Casa (success!) and looked for a new kitchen table at World Market (fail!) and, what the hell, took the leftover gift cards from Christmas on a field trip to Barnes & Noble.

And lo, there did I an Easter miracle witness.

First off, I'm pathological when it comes to bookstore gift cards. I'll take a chance on something at Bookman's, since it's essentially free and it probably going back to be traded in eventually anyway. But a new book? A nice new shiny book that's sat on no one else's shelf? God, the pressure. So I'd been saving the cards for something special, something that I might want in hardback, something I wouldn't flinch at dropping 25 or 50 bucks on because it's just that awesome, and had settled on The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel, and anything by Daniel Martin Diaz, a Tucson artist who paints and renders in graphite freaky Latino-Catholic-derived stuff that's just totally trippy. And today at Barnes & Noble, there they were, one copy of each, hardcover and spotless, and covered by what was left on the gift cards.


The newest acquisitions.

The girlfriend made me sloppy joes for dinner to make me feel better about the lack of eggs, bunnies, and a ham. She makes the finest sloppy joes in North America and possibly the entire hemisphere, so I felt much much better indeed. It was the perfect capper to the book coup. Hope your day had its own pleasant surprises.

Return to Ordinary Time

Despite the residual conditioning of a liturgical calendar that purses its lips and reminds me that Christmas is not over until Epiphany, my senses shake their collective had sadly and inform me that the holiday has, indeed, dribbled to a close. A few bowl games are still lingering in the hopper and leftover ham is sitting in the fridge waiting to prop up an omelet, and maybe half the houses on the block still have lights up, but it's effectively over for another year, leaving the vast expanse of January and February in front of us. As Januaries and Februaries go, we could do far worse than to spend them in southern Arizona, I suppose, since living in the desert means the winter storm that blew in this morning with low clouds and drizzle grading into rain and sheets of snow sweeping the mountains can be delighted in as a brief diversion giving us a different view, a respite from the sunshine and perpetual summer that is surely returning by midweek.

No resolutions are being cooked up in Chez Bolt this year. I try to avoid them, in any event, given my propensity for setting myself up for enough failure in ordinary time, so no need to up the ante for the holiday if there's no gun to my head. If I was being forced to resolve under duress, I would focus on actual cooking. A Barnes & Noble gift card from the girlfriend's ex-husband (bizarre extended family, we haz wun) was cashed in for Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food, which has filled my fantasy life with all sorts of wonderful stocks, soups, and pastas (only on page 90 so far). Between that and the Top Chef obsession, I hope my kitchen turns out some quality dishes this year for my table and my freezer. And, in this perfect world, I will spend more time and money at farmer's markets and less at Safeway, and maybe save enough to eat more legitimate meals and fewer quesadillas.

Good living. It is my fondest hope and intent. As I head back to a daily grind in which mistletoe and evergreen boughs are conspicuously absent, I resolve to give it my best shot. If not, well, shit happens. May you find what you're looking for in 2009.

Interlude

The Aztecs knew the deal with the end of the year. Their calendar couldn't handle 365 days, so at the end of day 360 they hunkered down for a workweek's worth of days and laid low to keep the world from ending. Coinciding as nicely as it does with our own cultural dead time between Christmas and New Year's, I fully advocate doing the same, with my own personal hunkering involving a comfy chair, a blanket, many hot drinks, the 2009 NY Times crossword calendar, and random bowl games.

Probably not going to happen to the standards set by my rich fantasy life, but so far so good.

In other news, we're busy bribing Afghan tribal leaders to cooperate with us and rat out the Taliban. With something better than guns!

In their efforts to win over notoriously fickle warlords and chieftains, the officials say, the agency's operatives have used a variety of personal services. These include pocket knives and tools, medicine or surgeries for ailing family members, toys and school equipment, tooth extractions, travel visas and, occasionally, pharmaceutical enhancements for aging patriarchs with slumping libidos, the officials said.

Ew. Sorry, women/child brides of Kandahar province! Just when you thought the old geezer's willy had finally shriveled up and flopped over for the last time, here come the Special Forces and the magic blue pills! And a happy Eid al Adha to you too!

In Solemn Stillness

Well, not exactly solemn or still, but waiting for Santa anyhow.

Christmas came for me over this past weekend when my parents showed up for our annual party and my dad, who seven years ago curtly instructed newly-out-to-him me not to bring my girlfriend to his house or mention anything about Teh Ghey to him, bounced into my house with Newsweek's pro-gay-marriage cover story, gleefully told me my Doc Marten knockoffs are so gay, hugged my partner, and generally played the role of father, grandfather, and father-in-law to perfection. He also cheerfully chatted up all 50+ party guests, including his favorite lesbian couple pals of ours. And he made us a birdfeeder for our gift.

We put a rainbow lightning bolt sticker in his stocking. He plans to proudly put it on his Harley and just hopes some punkass tries to give him a hard time.

And that, ladies and gents, is my hope for the future. The rest of it, including the 24-pound turkey and the ham cowering in the fridge until tomorrow and whatever's lurking under the tree are really just gravy. I got my Christmas wish. I hope you get the best of what your season of choice holds for you as well.

Non-politicking at Its Best

I let the Big 3 bailout come and go without comment, not that I didn't have any, and similarly allowed the Bush Revisionist History Tour and Shoe Toss pass without so much as a link to the video (although I did enjoy the mashup with the Three Stooges).

Bad blogger.

Why? Well, mostly because it finally feels like Christmas, or what passes for feeling like Christmas in these parts, with a slight chill in the air and mornings cold enough to warrant long pants and sweaters (and sometimes even a jacket!), and two or three gloomy gray overcast days in a row with clouds draped artfully over the mountains, sometimes spitting rain, sometimes snow way up top, and strings of lights springing up on roofs and trees. The nonstop holiday music finally has some relevance.

Chez Bolt is preparing for the annual holiday bash, this year falling conveniently on the first night of Chanukah/winter solstice (better luck next year, Eid al Adha and Kwanzaa). We are scurrying around cleaning, cooking, baking, and taking on minor construction projects, trying to keep the firewood dry and the flowers alive for just a few more days until the usual 50+ peeps converge on the house for an evening of genuine good cheer.

Until then, of course, I have the genuine flipout over everything that's left to be done to keep me company. Shopping! (even in a year of not buying much at all in the way of presents, I'm still way behind schedule) Christmas cards! (bought? yes. addressed? HA!) Remembering to take a breath or two! And a drink or three? I'm on it.

Searching

Teh Chrismus spirit, I no haz it.

Meh. Feh. Wev.

Maybe it's a lack of decorations. The lights are up on the outside (eat it, Mario; we beat you again this year) but nothing's going on inside except a weird little manger scene art piece thing (as much as a cast-resin item from the "spiritual" section at Kohls can be said to be art) my grandmother handed me at Thanksgiving. Many many years ago it somehow came up in conversation that I had a few manger scenes knocking around the closet--apparently it was the gift for newlyweds in southern Illinois in the early '90s--and she was so delighted at the thought that I was finally collecting something that did not involve dirt, rocks, or dead things slowly pickling in specimen jars that I have been receiving a new mostly awful manger scene every year. This one's probably the best of the bunch so far, I gotta say, and I made a splendid save when she asked me if I keep them up all year or just put them out at Christmas and how do I display them. Oh, I clear out a few shelves for them, I said. This was the right answer. Of course, those shelves are mostly in my shed and occasionally at Goodwill, but whatever.

Maybe it's a lack of snow. Granted, I live in the desert in southern Arizona, so this excuse is wearing thin after almost 15 years. It's been cold enough in the mornings to be able to wear long pants to work and occasionally a sweater. You can't see your breath all day long, though.

Maybe it's a lack of enthusiasm for shopping. It is certainly exacerbated by the same economy that's shitty all all over the country, even where there's snow and crisp air. Not that I have made it a habit to incinerate cash on overkill presents in years past, but it is simply hard to get too revved up about spending anything, no matter how local I can pride myself on keeping my money.

Maybe it's something else entirely that I'd rather not explore.

Anybody want a drink?

Thanksgiving: The Final Word

Ha!

Post-Turkey Deflation

That may have been the most full Thanksgiving I have had, and the least filling. I have discovered I do not like being on my own on the day I associate more with family/friend confabs even than Christmas, the magical technology of phone calls and the understandable need for the girlfriend to occasionally jet off to places that require, well, airplanes to reach notwithstanding. Given the lack of access to either the girlfriend or the side of the family I normally spend turkey day with, and a crisis of either imagination or shoddy enough ethics when the grandparents put me on the spot last month about my holiday plans, I ended up in Mesa with said grandparents and my 1st cousin once removed (grandmother's niece, genealogy courtesy of Homer) after a thrashing of a day that started in the gym and moved to the office until 2 in the afternoon, when it was time to head north.

Did I mention this was in Mesa? Yeah. Yee-fuckin'-hah. The once-removed cousin and her husband are pushing eighty and are perfectly pleasant until her husband opens the Thanksgiving table conversation with anecdotes from his job as a Wal-Mart greeter. Guns and ammo are flying off the shelves of the Mesa Wal-Mart because people are so worried about Barack Obama's million-man civilian security force which sounds just like the SS to him and after all that's how Hitler got his start and at this point the cousin shushes him. He shrugs. He's just worried, is all. In his gated (!) trailer park mobile home community situated off what passes for a quiet street in Mesa, I sit at my corner of the table and stare hard into my stuffing and potatoes and wonder what the odds are that through some miracle of mitochondrial biology I share zero DNA with these people.

Does that make me a snob? Do I give a rat's ass either way? Not really. The ongoing conundrum my grandmother and her relatives poses for me is how the sentence should be constructed, which side of the comma the relevant information lands on, how to decide what goes into the dependent clause. Do I say well, they're right-wing Evangelicals who repeat Limbaughisms like gospel, but they do care enough about my son to remember cute details of the last time they saw him nine years ago? Or do I say instead well, they might warmly welcome me into their home, but they also voted for the anti-gay-marriage amendment and their next-door neighbors have statues of little black kids with fishing poles in their yard? What cancels out what? Ah, they're uncritically, casually racist, nativist, and homophobic, but they're family. Ah, they're always nice to my face, but they don't hesitate to exhibit beliefs I find repulsive. A but B. B but A.

Homer says I'm far more civil than he is, since I didn't call cousin Harold a fucking cunt when he dropped his Obama-as-Fuhrer bullshit into my mashed potatoes. The mantra in my head is they're old, they're not going to live forever, so I usually choose to avoid confrontation one more time even as I glance at the clock. Don't offend your host (even when he doesn't hesitate to offend you), don't upset your grandmother whose niece and nephew the once-removed cousins are (even though Grandmother doesn't hesitate to upset you by asking for the five millionth time if you can tell a black person lives in the purple-trimmed pink trailer down the street from her own). Homer's through with being respectful to people who would just as soon shit on him and me as look at us. I tell myself I'm trying to find the balance when it's people who were good to me when I was a child and who I still need to see on a regular basis, but it's probably as much chickenshittery as anything else.

I did find a pamphlet from the cousins' church while digging through a basket in search of the DirectTV channel guide, a flyer that promised OUTRAGEOUS QUOTES FROM MORMONS on the cover. Hazarding a glance, I found what looks like a regular feature in the vein of "kids say the darndest things" except that it highlights things the Mormon leadership has said about stuff like parallels between Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, which apparently don't go over too well with the Central Christian Church of the East Valley crowd. Of course this regular mockery and head-shaking didn't keep them from hopping on the LDS Whip Teh Gayz bandwagon. Talk about a sham marriage of convenience.

Anyway. The food was good, if salty salty salty--one plateful was plenty--but there was no wine or whiskey or Demerol or anything else that might have made the conversation more bearable. We left sorta hurriedly in order to beat a thunderstorm that erupted shortly after dinner was over, hustling out the door as the cousin flipped through her guestbook to confirm it really had been that long since she'd seen my son--who owes me hugely now for letting him blow this one off--and cousin Harold squeezed my hand, saying how good it was to visit again, so I left with a nice little dose of guilt for having such uncharitable feelings about such nice people... until I remembered exactly what had spurred the uncharitable feelings, which just left me unsuccessfully trying to suss out "nice" and "shitty" and the line between them and how much blurring family ties are allowed to cause, all while dodging really cold raindrops and trying to load the grandparents and the leftovers into the car, and explaining that yes, I really did need to take off for the two-hour drive back to Tucson that night. Which I did, arriving home exactly eight hours after I'd left to drive up for dinner, tired and conflicted.

This is usually my favorite holiday. This year, not so much.

Happy Market Day!

In keeping with ongoing efforts by me and my intrepid colleague S to force Market Day into the public consciousness, let me be the very first person this morning to wish you a very happy Market Day!

This holiday is currently officially celebrated by only two people--the aforementioned me and S--but you've probably been unconsciously celebrating it for years, or at least as long as you've spent the workday before Thanksgiving scribbling out grocery lists and bemoaning the need to stay in the office when you really should be out getting a jumpstart on Thanksgiving fun. Because, let's face it: Thanksgiving is the best holiday ever, as it is based on food, drink, family, friends, and football, with the most pressing issue not being oh my god what am I supposed to buy Aunt Myrtle for a gift this year but the much delicious-er question hmmm, should I bother with the token scrap of turkey this year or just go for the plate full of stuffing and mashed potatoes? Not that it's ever really a question, of course. Sleep well, turkeys! I do not want your meat! I just want the delicious juices that come out of your legs, thighs, and breast for gravy, lots and lots of gravy! Can you arrange that?

The downside to Thanksgiving is that it's just one day surrounded on either side by work, which leaves you scrambling after work to go shopping and cook stuff if you're a pre-preparer kind of person and crams an awful lot of holiday anticipation, celebration, and letdown into one 24-hour period. So S and I decided last year that the day before Thanksgiving should be an official holiday--it's not like anyone's concentrating in here that day anyhow--on which you're expected to go grocery shopping for Thursday, drink, and generally knock off early. And so we shall call this holiday "Market Day," and there will be the requisite rejoicing.

The boss hasn't gone for it yet, so for a second straight year we're celebrating Market Day in the office--le sigh--with colored lights, coffee with "cream," if ye know what I mean, laddie, and I think ye do, and warm thoughts of the baked goods we would be enjoying if we'd gotten around to baking anything. The holiday season is off to a shotgun start! Happy yam shopping to you and yours!

Sarah Palin Gobble Gobble Gobbles up More Airtime, Traumatizes Nation's Children

Um. *boggle*

The only possible way this could have been better is if it had been rendered in claymation by Nick Park, a la Chicken Run, with chubby turkey feet kicking in the hopper and the turkey worker giving Palin a giant toothy grin as the odd feather floats down into her hair and worried turkeys mill and mutter in the background. As it is, not bad. And here we were in the desert saying it hadn't felt much like the holidays yet! Who's hungry?

Also noted: yet again, Governor Palin makes specific individual references to her sons while blithely lumping her daughters as "the kids." Track's Stryker brigade is safe, or fairly safe, in Eye-rack, and Trig is happy and healthy. Oh, and school's going fine for the kids--perhaps her own girls, perhaps all of Alaska's children? Does she remember their names, or is she afraid of accidentally calling them Broomstick and Purple? Who knows.