We can haz Christmas tree!

So, we got a Christmas tree, our old fake one having expired last year.

I wanted a "live-with-roots" tree, or a "dug tree" as they are apparently called. However, all the real trees in the area were cut. So, we thought we were going to have to drive an hour and a half to the nearest tree farm that I could find online. Ecch.

However, all was not lost! We were leaving Lowe's, dejected, when we happened to drive past the Bugpit Farmers' Market. They had live-with-roots trees! Lots of them! We happily purchased one, and were saved from having to drive to Timbuktu. :D Yay!

(On another note, we discovered, AFTER this, that there were not one, but TWO tree farms selling dug trees right on the road to Caroline and Mr. C's house. Oh well. We lived.)

I was JOKING, people

Look, World At Large. When I said I didn't want to go shopping today because "I wanted to live", it was a joke. That's all. A figure of speech. There was no need, none whatsoever, to start actually killing people in order to prove my point!

http://www.newsroomamerica.com/usa/story.php?id=439053 I cannot honestly say that I can think of anything that could possibly be a good enough deal to justify trampling someone, folks! Sigh.

Happy Thanksgiving

We ate a great deal, as per usual. Mom and Dad's pets, Agnes and Cookie, were very happy to see us. (Agnes is a plump tabby cat and Cookie is a Japanese Chin a la Pumpkin.) Cookie will soon be going to the vet's for his grooming. He likes it there, so he is happy. I say, burp.

A Thanksgiving Tale

Gather 'round the fire, kiddies, and I will tell you a tale of Thanksgiving past. Crossposted, too!

This event is one of the many reasons why we no longer do holidays with the Samoa side of the family.

It was Thanksgiving of 2005. The day before Thanksgiving, I got home from work and Mr. Samoa said Mother Samoa had called. The message was that I must make sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving! It was an emergency! There were none! The earth was doomed! Now, I'd never cooked sweet potatoes before in my life, Mom always gets the canned kind. But I wanted to do this up right. I got my boss' sweet potato casserole recipe, we ran around getting all the stuff to make it with. We had to go to TWO grocery stores before we could find any brown sugar, and even then it was some kind of weird organic brown sugar because that's all there was. All this the night before Thanksgiving, right?

So I got it made, we headed to the ILs. We all sat down to dinner, we're eating, when Mr. Samoa noticed that Dad Samoa, Mr. Samoa and I were the only ones eating said casserole. (Remember? The one that the earth was going to come to an end if it wasn't made?) I had noticed, too, and had pretty much thought "Weirdos" and moved on, but Mr. Samoa said something like "Have you tried the sweet potatoes?" or whatever. At which point, Mother Samoa chirped, "Oh, we don't like sweet potatoes! We just thought you wanted them!" Tagalong cheerfully agreed. Now, fortunately for them, the carving knife was nowhere near me, or I'd be typing this from jail. Dad Samoa looked like he couldn't decide if he wanted to die from embarrassment or strangle them both. Yeah, no more ILs for Thanksgiving. (And that's *before* you get to Dad Samoa and the turkey-fryer-in-garage yearly dance with death. :P But I digress. )

Want to know why I'm blogging...

At 2:30 in the morning? BECAUSE I'M STILL COUGHING, THAT'S WHY. I feel fine otherwise, but I'm STILL FUCKING COUGHING. The count so far is we-lost-count-at-12 bags of Ludens cough drops, 4 bottles of Vicks 44 "Chesty Cough" cough syrup (I have porn-star cough syrup. Hee.) and about 3 boxes of Kleenex. I am going to cough for the rest of my life. I'm fairly confident of this at this point.

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday, Mr. Samoa

Happy birthday to you!!!

(He is 32 today!)

Oh my

So we had Mr. Samoa's birthday party yesterday at Pizza Dwelling. Tagalong came, and brought her fiance, his kids, and Daisy. Fiance and kids are all very nice fellows. I did, however, come to a disturbing realization. After all these years of going around and around and around with me... Fiance is basically a male version of me, sans the bitchy. I don't know what to make of that! :D

TODAY

Trying to work up the energy to go take a shower. :P Spoke with Caroline. Saskia is doing very well, and squeaky. :D We likes the squeaks!

FRIDAY

BossLady annoying me, but so what else is new. Got paid, finished Mr. Samoa's birthday shopping.

THURSDAY

Finally got to take Mary the Client out for a morning, and nothing went wrong. This was exceptional.

Catchup time- WEDNESDAY

I don't think anything exceptionable happened on Wednesday, except that it was COLD. Is it July yet?

Remind me

Never, ever, ever to utilize the services of Metro University Hospitals. For any reason. They're nuts.

Having finally pried Saskia out of their clutches, we had Bob the Client up there for a checkup today. The highlights were:

*Getting pissy when we explained that, per facility procedure, we could not bring them Bob's actual pill bottles (we had Bob's administration records, which are more reliable for what they needed them for!)

* Wanting to perform a fairly painful procedure on Bob, then and there, without anesthesia. (Bob settled that one. It did not happen. >:) )

*Miscellaneous bizarre behavior that you kind of had to be there for, but trust me, it was bizarre.

Now, Metro University Hospitals are nationally renowned. What the hell for, I surely do not know. They're insane. All of them. Mr. Samoa is under strict instructions to keep me out of their clutches at all costs. I'd rather brave Krueger Memorial, the local hospital, than deal with these loons. And that is saying something!

I HATE WINTER

I have not been able to properly get warm all. freaking. day. I want to move to Hawaii.

Just checking

Just making sure everything got back to normal, postwise. Blogger does not like me for some reason. :P

Guess what?

SASKIA IS HOME!!!!!


That is all. :D

Awwww

Yesterday, a coworker of Mr. Samoa's made a fairly serious work boo-boo. He felt very bad. Today, Mr. Samoa took him some of the chocolate chip cookies I baked last night, to make him feel better. How cute is that? :D

Howwwl!

It's a full moon. This makes work suck.

They say it's all a myth. It's not. Ask any cop, nurse, EMT, teacher, long-term-care aide. They all go howling, flaming batshit around the time of the full moon. Every. single. one. of them. I'd discuss it more, but I'm still traumatized. :P

Pumpkin

He is recovering very nicely from his, er, surgery. I guess I don't have to ship him to a local restaurant after all!

TODAY

Went to the cemeteries for Veterans' Day. Left flowers on Caroline's mom's grave and Grandma's grave. Grandma would have been 93 today! Also, went up to Metro City and saw Saskia. Nurses were still bitchy (all except one, whose name I wish I had gotten because she was super sweet) but we got a piece of Very Good News. I'm not going to blog it yet until it happens because I don't want to jinx them, but it's Very Good News all the same!

MONDAY

I took Monday and Tuesday off, so I cleaned. Also, Pumpkin went to the vet, and had his, er, "tonsillectomy". He is recovering well. Hopefully, this will put a stop to him humping his brother's head. :P

Catching up yet again

Sunday, Mr. Samoa and I went to the craft store and then to the bookstore. I think we're beggared, but it was fun. :D

It works everywhere!

The Voice of Doom works even on small children!

So we were in the Chinese buffet in the mall last night. They seated a group behind us that Mr. Samoa knew slightly (it was one of his old college professors, Prof's mildly autistic brother, and Prof's 2 kids). Prof is divorced and is a "weekend daddy", which is going to get important in a moment.

Prof had to go get food for the kids, so left the kids with Brother. (I would say kids are about 3 or 4 and 18 mos. respectively) Well, Brother did not know enough to correct the child when he starts trying to crawl OVER TOP OF THE BOOTH into ours! o_O Had he not been stopped, he would have either cracked his skull open on our table or landed square on Mr. Samoa's head. So I decided to take a chance on being bitched out (I figured it was the lesser of two evils between "damaged kid/Mr.Samoa and irate parent"), signed "sit" and said, "Nononono, sweetie, you're going to fall!" So, sit he did, rather to my surprise.

Well, I did not get bitched out. It became rather clear from the subsequent father-son interactions that the poor man had no idea how to deal with kids and rather welcomed assistance. ("Tyyloxx, WHAT are you DOING?" in increasingly crazed/desperate tones). I can live with this; I do not mind doing the disciplining, I DO mind when they're clueless but throw a fit when you try to do it. So, we had here a situation that was manageable, and I must admit to finding myself struggling to keep a straight face!

So, then the kid tries to climb over again. This time I signed "No" and said very calmly but firmly, "NO, sweetie. You need to sit." Little Tyyloxx did a double take, sat back down and was not seen in our booth again for the rest of the meal! Choirs of angels sang.

Moral of the story: 1)If I can do it, you can too. 2) Parents, take a clue from this man. If for some reason you cannot handle your kid, don't bitch when someone who can, does. At least he got that far!

On the bright side

For the first time since starting at Shady Acres, I have Grandma's birthday off. Grandma would have been 93 on Nov. 11. We are going to the cemetery with flowers, of course. I'll have to post more about Grandma later- she was a trip. :D

Sighhh hhh hhh

Hasn't been a good week at all. I find myself at a career crossroads, I'm still coughing and have reason to think I may have developed asthma, and Saskia is still in the hospital. I can haz hugs, plz?

So it's Nov.5

And, good grief, history has been made. The new American president is Senator Barack Obama, of Illinois, a black man.

I am in (good) shock. I never, ever, thought I'd see an African-American president in my lifetime. I sooner expected a white woman, particularly after the debacle in the primaries where several West Virginians voted for Hillary Clinton on the grounds that "they weren't votin' for no [highly unacceptable pejorative]."

I did have to think about it a minute. Mr. Samoa voted for McCain because he was concerned about Obama's views on gun control, which is reasoning I can tolerate. But I hadn't made up my mind about what I was going to do when I wandered into the polls last night, still coughing. (Yes, I did feel up to it- no thanks to Shady Acres, but I digress.) I had several concerns about the future state of Mr. Obama's health as affected by white supremacist loons, which this country really doesn't need. So I kind of peered at the ballot for a few minutes, as I saw a lot of people around me doing also.

I thought and thought. Mr. McCain really wasn't on my menu (sorry, Ms. Palin, you're a lovely lady, but several residents of the Shady Acres system have a better grasp of politics than you do!) so it was between Obama and independents. I thought about the white supremacist loons, and Mr. Obama's little girls.

Finally I decided. I don't know what is going to happen, but we have to try. Four more years of a rich, clueless white guy, and our country would be a smoking ruin and we'd all be out on the streets. Something has got to give, come what may. I filled in the circle next to Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden.

Apparently a lot of other people did too. Because, praise to Ceiling cat, the president-elect of the United States of America is now an African-American man. He campaigned on a platform of change. Let's all pray for him that he can bring the change that he hopes to be.

C'mONNNNN Nov. 5

Yeah, so I jinxed myself yesterday. We had a vote solicitor today. I did not set the dog on her, but I harbored evil thoughts about doing so.

I was in the bathroom getting ready when I heard Buster flip out. This usually means someone's at the door. I checked the side door (the one we usually use), nobody. So I peered out the front window. I saw, through the trees, what looked like a mailman going by the clothing. The regular one knows to go to the side, but I thought it was maybe a sub; I was expecting a package, so I opened it.

Wrong thing to do. There stands this chick, hands full of Democratic Party crap. (I'm Libertarian but registered as Democrat so that I could vote in primaries.) "Are you Zen?" she cheerfully chirps. There I'm standing, no makeup, slippers, hair in Turbie Twist, and the dog is going batshit. Do I LOOK like I have time for you, lady?

But, I decided to take a stab at being nice. I said, "Yes, I am, but we don't accept political solicitations. Thank you." and began closing the door. As it's closing, she goes snottily, "Are you voting?" The two possible responses for me were "None of your damn business" and "Depends if I feel OK after I get off work" (the truth), so I just continued closing. As I walk off, I hear "But it's about voting!" plaintively from the porch. Eventually, she wandered off. Um, call me a nut, but how is voting NOT political? What else do you vote for? Favorite breakfast cereals?

So, now we have two lovely new "Absolutely NO SOLICITATION" posters, one for each door. And Nov. 5 cannot get here fast enough. :P

Election is tomorrow

NOW will everyone please SHUT. THE. FUUUUCK. UPPPPPP! about it? I really no longer care who wins, so long as I don't have to hear any more about it! Also any further door-knockers (why have they all been Democratic?) will have the dog set on them, in a bipartisan fashion.

That is all.

Other news

It is also Mr. Samoa's birthday month. Any suggestions for presents for him would be greatly appreciated, as I have no clue what the hell to buy him. The man has no hobbies! Maybe we should make him get one.

Happy November!

Only a day late. We have excuses! I was at work and Mr. Samoa was helping ride herd on 30,000 crazed college-age party monsters. More when it's not 11 PM and I'm not tired.