Friends

heading up to Galt soon. Will have dinner with my family, stay in lovely downtown Galt (ok, really the 3rd exit) and have breakfast at my Aunt's tomorrow. Then home. Will be a long 24 hours but I'm sure it will be nice once I'm there.

So... Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Felix Navidad, Mele Kalikimaka, and all that jazz to you all my lj friends. I hope you have a wonderful day no matter how you celebrate (or don't).

xoxoxoxoxo

The Jackie Kennedy ornament was made and sold by Dallas's Sixth Floor Museum when they first opened. But they weren't around for long because people complained that it wasn't appropriate. They discontinued making and selling them almost immediately, I hear.

Also, note xtreem_aaron's most important contribution: a pug in a sleigh. His reason for the season.

And again, sorry if some of them are blurry. I'm a terrible camera operator.

I suppose I could just go into the next room and use Mom's computer, but it's one of those cases where my laziness actually makes more work for me. In the interest of brevity, things:

--The drive to Columbus was uneventful. Left at 6:15 (mostly due to the fact that Mark was up at 3:30 and was just ready to go--and, honestly, I was awake at 4:30 despite my best efforts at staying asleep), and got here around 2.

--Had a bit of a long-ish stop in Wheeling, WV for lunch, gas and wrapping paper. Lunch was particularly amusing (at Quaker Steak and Lube, because Mark had never been. Wings=decent, burger=meh) because as we were leaving Mark started up Grindr (a hook-up app on iPhone for the 'mos) and said, "hey! I just passed that guy coming out of the bathroom! I thought he looked a little too well-groomed for that place!" Turns out (we learned after a bit of chatting) he was in town from San Francisco for the holidays. Amusing.

--Mom, as usual, has an obscene amount of cookies. And I have eaten an appropriately obscene amount of them.

--Had dinner, and then went out to the Eagle in Exile with Tad and his friend Brian. Friendliest crowd I've experienced in Columbus yet. Nice.

--Tad is definitely coming to DC for MAL. Yay. Promises to be entertaining.

--My antipathy toward religion is raising its head much more aggressively just lately. I prefer it to be more nonconfrontational, but I'm feeling very "biting my tongue" this year.

--Oof. This bed is tiny.

It was requested that I take photos of some of the things on our Christmas tree. I am shitty at photographering, but here you go. I have more that I'll post up here later today after I vacuum the house.

With explanation:

1. A homemade mini-pinata. I can't seem to make the little mark over the letter "n" on LJ but you know what I mean. I have no idea what's inside the thing.

2. A couple years ago when they rebooted the "Rocky" franchise, a line of action figures came along. One of those action figures was the side of beef that Rocky punches. We liked that.

3. This is a vintage Santa figure, clearly fashioned out of leftover unused baby doll bodies and faces.

4. My mom gave me that old bird ornament. It's from whenever-ago, like from when she was a kid is my understanding. She also gave me the old blue ornament next to it. The "OnoChord" flashlight was given out at Arthurfest a few years ago when Yoko Ono performed. It still lights up, but you should only use it when Yoko is singing. So some day when she comes over I'll make her perform "Walking On Thin Ice" and flash it along to the beat.

5. Morocco Mole. I know some guy with that fake name too.

6. We are on exactly one celebrity Christmas card mailing list. And it's the man who directed "Female Trouble." (He and MM became familiar back in Texas when MM was the artistic director of Dallas's USA Film Festival.) We look forward to his card coming every year because it's always a freakout. One year it was this ornament with a plastic cockroach inside. Nice. The white ceramic dove is Jonathan Adler.

7. Mini detergent boxes from some old doll house. There's really detergent inside.

I'm good at it.


This box contains my mom's annual jar of La Mer face cream. After she divorced my useless alcoholic stepfather, she decided to be nice to herself more frequently, even though she was absolutely not well-off, and would buy herself a 2 oz jar each year on her Neiman Marcus credit card that otherwise she never used. You live in Texas, you kind of just have a Neiman Marcus credit card. Then the stroke happened and now I get her a small jar for Christmas if she's recently run out.

It should have arrived at my brother's house already for him to give her on Friday. I gotta check on that...

Well… glad *that’s* over. I don’t know why my birthday tweaks me out so much but it’s been an issue for a long long time. Now I just need to get through Christmas, the other part of my I hate the last 2 weeks of December life, and then back to real life LOL

Yesterday turned out fine, of course. The pipes bursting in my office was/is a pain but I’m back in my own office today, at least temporarily. Looks like a bomb went off in here though :P But yay, I may be crammed in here with all the furniture moved but I'm back in my office!

You know, I remember when I was oh not that much younger, what I really wanted for my birthday was cock… I wanted to get laid, it rarely happened but it's what I wanted for my birthday LOL Yay for getting laid but nowadays… well, I wanted shrimp hehehe I mean, of course, a nice penile distraction would be pleasant but for my birthday I was craving shrimp and dick was wayyyyyy down on my list of I wants for the day LOL LOL LOL So, instead of pursuing weenie, I took my mom and Bob to Red Lobster and had lots and lots of shrimp. Coconut shrimp, fried shrimp, garlicy buttery shrimp… shrimp shrimp shrimp. It was the yum. Otherwise, I really didn’t do much of anything yesterday, except for cower and hide from the evil birthday gods. I worked through lunch and worked late, went to the gym, and went to dinner and ate way more fried shrimp than I could have even approached working off at the gym an hour before LOL

So, yeah… now I’m 42. For-ty-twoooooo! How in the heck did I get here? Fooooorrrr-tyyy-twooooooo… yeah, it’s just weird. Tho… I’m sure my grandma, who turned 83 today, thinks 83 sounds weird too LOL

Will be a hecka busy workday today trying to get as much done as I can so I can *not* come in at all tomorrow and only make a very short short stop here over the weekend. Hopefully I can get it all done and enjoy 4 days off without coming in much at all.

Happy Wednesday y’all

My reviews of "It's Complicated" and "Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" have just posted on Movies.com

Enjoy them.

More should be posted later today...

http://beta.movies.com/movie-reviews/film-reviews/dave-white

Last Christmas my....I guess you'd call her my step grandmother...did something unspeakable and utterly callous to me in front of the entire family.  It was so unexpected and calculated that six months later I was still a big gobsmacked and unbelieving. It's hard even now to speak of it but perhaps with this public confession I can lance the boil of poison that grew upon the hole in my chest where my soul used to be.  You see, suddenly and without any warning whatsoever, for the the first time in 20 years...

...she bought me a Christmas present.

I know right?  How creepy and diabolical is that?

Of course, taken unawares, I had not recipricated and purchased a present for her hence doubling...nay..quadrupling my shame.  I was tempted to try to palm one of my mother's picture frames from off of the coffee table and quickly wrap it in the paper scraps littering the floor but dammit I just couldnt get the 967th picture of my mother's dogs out from under the frame. 

The gift was nothing large.  She didnt give me a cut in the will or anything; just a box of candy but still she willfully and maliciously broke the 20 year NO-GIFT detente between her side of the family and my own.  There I was the peaceful and oblivious Kuwait sitting there minding my own business dusting cookie crumbs off my sweater and BAM! she goes all Iraq on my ass and hands me a present to unwrap. 

"Next year" I swore under my breath, "I'll be ready for you, Old woman..."

That was one year ago this week...and I'm not ready.

My step grand mother...or SGM for short...is the absolute clone of the grandmother from the Dennis Leary Christmas classic, The Ref.  She runs that side of the family with an iron trustfund.  More impervious to health concerns than Wolverine, nothing slows her down.  NOTHING.   I'm not sure exactly how old she is now but I dont think age is really a factor in this equation.  Until Sarah Connor can lure her onto an iron hook over a vat of molten metal, she'll keep going and going and going.  And of course, she has absolutely everything. 

My mother suggested I get her a box of candy this year but to me that just sounds cheap.  There's also the matter of ESCALATION to consider this time around the yule log.  See if she got me a box of candy last year then she'll be expecting me to get her one this year. Armed with that assumption, she might choose to up the anty and get me something slightly bigger...like a personal grooming set or something.  Perhaps a lovely flashlight or some other Big Lots contrivance.  Therefore, I must be cunning like the wolf, quick like the panther, and wise like the slow tortise and preemptively out gift her at the exactly correct price point.  Too over in price and I look pathetic and toady but too under in price and we'll come to a draw this year still leaving her ahead in the arms race by virtue of last year's victory. 

This  year I need a win.

Tomorrow is my last day to shop and I still have no gift for SGM.  With a pricepoint of $30 max I've tried to find an appropriate gift basket or box.  A Hickory Farms type present would go uneaten and unloved with comments about how she's watching her cholesterol and cant tolerate spicy foods.  A huge assortment of chocolates might be met with comments about how she can only eat one or two pieces a day.  (Plus she took that off the board with her gift o'chocolate last year to me.  FSM forbid I appear to be unoriginal.)  She has 20 million hat/scarf combinations already and the Starbucks basket I looked at today would be a really BAD idea.  Giving SGM caffiene = unmitigated badness.

Tomorrow the search will contine.  She'll win obviously but I at least have to try.  I'm good enough, I'm gay enough, and gosh darn it salespeople like me.

I do keep having one thought over and over again though.  Slipper Socks!  Medium!  Damn you Dennis Leary. Damn you to hell.

The night before, when my motivation to do anything is zero.

So, we're off to Ohio tomorrow.

We've got boxes of presents. A couple of bags of them, too, a bit of stuff for Claude, and we have yet to pack our suitcase, but that won't take long since all of the laundry is done.

The plans are as follows: Leaving at 6 or 6:30 tomorrow morning, which will put us at Mom's house around 2 or 3, depending on the number of bathroom breaks for Claude. This will be followed by a little lounging, and then dinner with Mom, Tad, Alex and Ben. Kate is off skiing in Europe with her cousins. After that, we're thinking of the Wednesday happy hour at Tradewinds II, possibly with Tad, but I would actually imagine probably not. Then Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day, when we will drive down to Pomeroy, OH to spend a day with Mark's family. Then Saturday we head back to Maryland.

Wooo.

And I'm off to have a piece of cake.

I hope that in this holiday season, everyone feels just so relieved that they will no longer be forced to sit on a tarmac for more than three hours (whenever that new rule goes into effect), but I am sure that travel will bring its share of nerve wracking moments.  Thankfully, Chris and I don't have to drive out of MA this year, even if one of our trips is to "East Jesus" as my Nomie used to like to say.  On a recent flight to New Orleans I found myself perusing the safety materials and being somewhat perplexed at their meaning.  I have tried to be more aware while flying after recently skimming The Survivors' Club and wanting to heed the author's sage advice.  One of the key ways to not die in an emergency is to generally be aware of what the hell is going on around you.  The FAA, trying to be helpful of course to those who maybe don't read, or speak other languages, has produced a pretty much entirely visual guide to each airplane you might fly. While well-meaning in its intent, the one I studied was certainly less than explicit in its instructions.  I accidentally hung on to it while deplaning (I realize this may be some sort of federal offense), and thought I might interpret the visuals to all who may be traveling.  So, in my words, an educated guess at the meaning of these puzzling cartoons.

Try not to drink so much at the bar before your flight.  It's bad form when your hair and eyes are asymmetrical.

Really, the moment after an aquatic crash landing is not the time to try to look alluring.  Tyra won't be watching.

Instead, just calmly look for sharks in the water.  You may get an idea of what the hell to do next.

OK, now for the men.  Try to look presentable, for Christ's sake!  This is an airplane.  Wrinkled pants can result when you buckle your seatbelt over your upper thighs, FYI.

Of course you can't smoke on the plane.  But if you are going to stupidly attempt to do so, at least wait until you get inside the bathroom (where the shocking device is), and try not to look like such a homosexual when you hold your cigarette.

Now, for emergencies.  Should an episode of 24 occur, take care of yourself first.  We know that Jack Bauer would administer oxygen to your strangely amorphous child before himself, but go ahead and be selfish.

Frumpy Meryl Streeps should open the emergency doors one way, while Sonny Bonos have another method.  In either case, we object to letting fire or water in through the door, so watch out for that, please.


.

Have a blast when using the ejecto-slide.  Really, you should think of it like a trampoline and leap from the plane.  Try an impossible-to-achieve move like the one seen here. Occasionally, Keith Haring figures will appear after a crash. That's usually bad.

Contrary to popular belief, snakes on a plane are actually helpful, and guide you to safety.  Avoid awful blue snaggy shoes, cheap briefcases, again, smoking, and our booby traps at the end of the aisle.

I hope that clears everything up for you and you have a safe, non-confusing flight.  I know I didn't!

 

So… back to Kaiser for more x-rays and tests and then met with urologist yesterday. He was kinda weird LOL I couldn’t tell if he was constantly winking at me or had a bad eye wink tick hehehe Anyway, the sonic surgery thingee is scheduled for January 15th. It’s cutting it a little close for the cruise in February but hopefully all will be fine and quick. He says to plan on a 4 week recovery… total BOO to that. The month before I leave for the cruise and I can’t go to the gym. I’ll just be a big old blob on the ship LOL But, as long as there is no bloody piss… I can live with skipping the gym before the cruise :)

I’m loving the Retroplex channel on cable. I watched Midnight Express last night and then after that they showed the movie Cruising which I haven’t seen in prolly 25 years. Anyway, wow… I only watched the first 20 minutes of it before going to bed (I DVR’d it to watch later) but what a period piece it is. For those who haven’t heard of it it’s a movie from 1980 starring Al Pacino going undercover in the gay leather scene to catch a serial killer. Even tho I was only 12 when it came out I remember the big time gay protests over the movie. The funny thing is, it seems pretty tame now, at least the part I saw last night. And a pretty accurate portrayal of one segment of the gay community, well… except for the stab you in the back while raping your ass part… I hope :P Anyway I’m looking forward to watching the whole thing soon. Maybe it will be our Christmas movie to watch LOL

Not much else going on… busy day at work. Totally behind cause of the time of missed with this stoopid kidney stone. Will work though lunch and late today and tomorrow so hopefully I can not work on Christmas Eve *fingers crossed*

Happy Tuesday y’all
(and thanks for the many happy wishes)

Go read it, forward it, click "Recommend" at the top of the page and leave a comment about me being awesome. I think that's a fair exchange.

http://www.advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Television/The_Best_TV_2009/

Nothing all that exciting happened yesterday at work. I love short weeks. I wasn't super busy, so I was able to help out another department to get some stuff finished up before the end of the year.
After work, I felt like being a lazy bum, so I did some laundry and didn't move off the couch. I watched the finale of The Sing Off. I was okay with who won, but I must say that Nick Lachey is possibly the worst host ever. He was trying to be all dramatic like Ryan Seacrest. It wasn't working.
I did finish reading He's the One by Timothy James Beck. I must say that I have totally enjoyed their books. It's the story of Adam Wilson, a small town Wisconsin man, who on a work trip to New York City finds the man of his dreams. Now he just has to make him his own. The author fleshes out the characters so much that you really care for these people. There were nights I stayed up reading till after 1 am because I had to know what happened next. I know I am totally reading these books out of order, but I don't care. I can't wait to get my hands on the next one.
Happy Birthday shout outs today go to Anna, dendren and raisincub! I hope you all have a great day.

I think of the solstice like a giant Wednesday- a cosmic hump-day.  It's amazing how quickly we have come to this point of the year.  It seems like just a few weeks ago that we started the usually dreadful (for me) gradual removal of light from our lives.  As I have written about before, my movement to a workspace devoid of natural light, plus a desire to avoid the usual anxiety and blues I struggle with this time of year, prompted me to try one of those blue-spectrum seasonal lights.  I have to say that it has pretty much been an unqualified success.  Except for maybe one day (where I skipped the light by accident) my life has been pretty much free of the nervous buzz that I often felt most fall and winter evenings.  Instead, I have been able to deal with life's little blips, some which might have made me really upset previously, like a pretty rational person.  Sure, it could be the change in job, but I gotta give substantial credit to my little light, which with just 15 minutes of on-time every morning while I am checking email, seems to turn on my internal sun.  I am excited now that with the solstice, I can start stepping it down from 100% intensity and maybe phase it out altogether by April.  Here's to Spring!

Here I am basking in blue goodness and eating English Muffins on a snowy Sunday morning:

So, if you deal at all with SAD, I'd say give it a try.  Light therapy worked wonders for me.

A glass of red wine every night doesn't hurt, either...