This escalated over time, as one or the other of us would find other companies offering some kind of holiday or christmas blend of beans while we were shopping. Some years we would wind up with a half dozen or more bags of different holiday blends…
Category Archives: life
A song for the Christmas tree
And part of the blame goes to me having a really awful sinus headache on Sunday.
War on Thanksgiving?
As ridiculous as I think all the stories about a war on Christmas always are, I have to admit that I like Buzzfeed’s use of the “War on Thanksgiving” label in this and related stories: Your Shopping Guide To Stores That Won’t Ruin Their Workers’ Thanksgivings.
They’ve compiled two lists:
- Big national chains that are opening on Thanksgiving and making their employees come in on the holiday,
- And the chains that are remaining closed the entire holiday.
I wound up in a chat online this week about the phenomenon. I have always felt a little guilty because my entire adult life I’ve had jobs where we get both Thanksgiving and the day after off as paid holidays. Meanwhile, my mom worked retail and always had to work either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas (a few years both). And each serious relationship I’ve been in, my partner has either had to work the holiday or at least both the day before and the day after.
And for the last many years, visiting my mom for the holidays has required us to rent a hotel room. Mom’s previous two living places where so small, the entire place would have fit inside our living room. When she was still living in Vancouver, that also meant that if my sister and her kids were there, they were all sleeping at Mom’s place, where there was no guest room.
Anyway, that means I also feel guilty about the people at the hotel who have to work that day, in part, because of me.
I still feel bad about the times I’ve had to run to a store on a major holiday. Though I must admit, the year that all of the sinks clogged up while I was in the middle of cooking (first Thanksgiving after Ray & I moved into the place, first time his mom had come to have a holiday dinner with us, and all of my sinks clogged!), that when I showed up in the checkout line with multiple bottles of drain opener and a plunger as my only items, the cashier laughed, and then said, “Thank you for making me feel like working this shift was worth it.”
Anyway, there are the lists, if you want to boycott or just send a letter to the folks in charge. I’m really hoping that they have so few people show up to shop that they don’t do it next year.
I am a crazy optimist, after all!
What’s for dinner?
Not all anniversaries are good
Sixteen years ago this week, several bad things happened.
It began in the wee small hours of the morning of the 12th. I was awakened by the sound of a crash. I stumbled into the computer room to see one bookcase knocked over, and my husband, Ray, on the floor having some kind of seizure.
He had been sick for a few years. There had been surgery and rounds of chemotherapy. Just two weeks before, the specialist overseeing his treatment had cautiously told us that instead of only having two years or less to live, Ray might be looking at five to ten years.
They had been telling us the “two years or less” line for more than three years, and I had kept refusing to believe it, so I’m not sure why I took the new prognosis as such good news. Other than the usual human tendency to reject news we don’t like, and accept news we do.
I remained surprisingly calm as I tried to hold him so he wouldn’t hurt himself further and call 9-1-1.
Until something happened. I still can’t describe it very well. He was still seizing, but something changed. The light in his eyes was different, or something. Until that moment, I believed this was something treatable. Something we could fix. But when that change happened, I suddenly stopped believing… So by the time the paramedics got there I was in more than a bit of a panic.
I could go on to list the other things that happened, the many stages of denial (for other people, denial was a single stage, for me it went through an incredible number of nuanced phases over the next couple of days). Then, while hugging and crying on my friend, Kristin’s, shoulder, I jumped over the other phases. I’d been crying off and on for hours—days, technically (though I’d only slept a couple hours out of the previous 48+, so it seemed like one really long, horrible day).
So on the 14th I signed some papers. Then a couple of nurses turned off the monitors, removed the respirator tubes, and turned off the rest of the machines.
I held Ray’s hand. I said “Good-bye.”
I don’t remember if I cried again. My last chronologically-in-order memory is taking hold of his hand that one last time. My memories for the next few months are like a collection of shattered glass pictures.
He promised me he would stay with me for the rest of his life. And he did.
16 and counting…
It has been an extraordinary year. Think about it, just 18 months ago, the citizens of North Carolina, a state that already had a law banning marriage between same-sex couple, approved an amendment to their state constitution prohibiting the state from performing or recognizing either same-sex marriages or civil unions. Then, 12 months ago, on election night, the voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state all approved measures in favor of same-sex marriage (and the voters of Minnesota rejected an attempt to amend their constitution to prevent the marriages). That brought the number of states recognizing marriage equality to ten. And it was as if the floodgates had opened…
Halloween silliness
It began way back when a sub-group of the Elfquest/sci fi fan groups we were associated with went to the Evergreen State College the weekend before Halloween to celebrate K’s birthday. Our friend, Mark, bought a piñata shaped like a Pokémon. I think more time was spent trying to figure out how to hang it from the window of the dorm/apartment and a nearby tree than anything else at the party. Though I also recall that the piñata was really difficult to break.
Anyway, K, D, and Auntie have been hosting Halloween parties ever since. The parties always have a theme, and one of the activities at the party is a piñata that matches the theme. There was a skull representing Horatio at the Shakespeare party, for instance, and a moon with little stars floating around it for one of the space themed parties.
There was never any requirement that one wear a costume that matched the theme of the party, but for those of us who are procrastinators and indecisive, having the theme could give you some ideas. The year the theme was “Antarctica” Michael and I showed up in shorts, Hawaiian shirts, leis, and sunglasses. We had a little act we did where we fumbled with a map of the Hawaiian islands. Our costume was “Lost Tourists.” I don’t remember what the theme was that had me dress as the Next Doctor and Michael dressed as his companion, a 1950s hard-boiled detective.
Anyway, having the deadline of our friends’ party pushed us to make a decision, and having the theme gave us something to either conform with, make a joke of, or just ignore.
Then, because of a series of events which culminated in a major appliance failure at their house and has kicked off a long-delayed kitchen remodel, they didn’t host a party this year. Which is understandable, but also a teensy bit of a downer.
So I thought I wasn’t going to be doing a costume this year.
Then one day at work I got an e-mail with the subject line “Top Secret!”
I don’t want to go into all the background, but during the last year among the changes and shakeups have been that the person who had been the VP of Sales for our group has been promoted to the head of our business unit. In some ways it was a very big change, as the guy who had been leading the unit had been in that position for well more than 10 years, and the company (like a lot of American corporations) didn’t have very many female executives. She’s not entirely conventional. She almost always wears black, for instance, and among her definitions of office attire (and not on casual days), is Levi jeans.
Anyway, it had occurred to someone that all of us could get long blonde wigs, and just show up wearing all black and with the wig. Then we could surprise her by coming into her office, all of us dressed as her. We even had “masks” that consisted of a printout of a photo of her that we could hold in front of our faces.
It wasn’t a very complicated costume, and it wasn’t something that anyone outside the company would recognize without an explanation, but it was fun, and silly, and what else is Halloween for?
Missed signals and entitlement
It started at the end of a previous weekend, but I’m going to save that story for later, because it involves a topic that causes some people to stop listening and start arguing. Instead, I will start nearer the end of the week, and rant about bit about a guy on the bus…
“Why don’t you like him?”
I was half asleep late Friday/early Saturday, when a vehicle pulled into the driveway between our building and the next one. I heard the voice of the 20-something guy that lives with his girlfriend in the unit behind us talking with several other people of both genders while they unloaded something from the vehicle with the engine still running.
As the number of voices dwindled down to just a woman I didn’t know and the neighbor (I believe she was driving the vehicle and the other friends were from a separate vehicle out on the street, perhaps?). The neighbor suddenly asks, “So are you going to go out with Adam?”
And she replied, “I don’t like Adam.”
“Why not? He’s a nice guy!”
“He always acts creepy around me.”
“Oh, he doesn’t mean anything by it…”
“I don’t like him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Ah! There we have it. The classic attitude guys have been socialized to have when other guys of their acquaintance sexually harass, touch without permission, and otherwise creep on girls of their acquaintance.
Otherwise known as, rape culture…
Everyone looks great in purple!
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And everyone can be someone:
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And everyone can help:
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Font Folly 