Another day

  • We smelled of chicken and candy canes

    I’m sitting here right now enjoying the glow of my fully lit Christmas tree. Before P left for the ranch last Friday, I pleaded with him to please, SIR, figure out what is wrong with the illumination on our tree. So he switched out the fuses and BEHOLD there was light. And then he grabbed his hunting bags, kissed me goodbye and said he’d see me sometime before next Thursday.

    Great.

    Thanks for being specific.

    So I started off the weekend at Caroline’s class Christmas party. This is Caroline before she left for school that morning. Please note the constant motion. And the wee elf jeans. And the poor photography.

    The party is where I discovered that it isn’t the best idea in the world to give a room full of second-graders a bunch of green icing and ice cream cones and tell them to make trees. Unless of course your end goal is to see how many things you can stain with green food coloring, in which case ACES.

    To my credit, it wasn’t my idea.

    On Friday night we ate Mexican food with Mimi and Bops because that’s what we do on Friday nights. And then Caroline decided to kick off her Christmas vacation by waking up at 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning. And I kicked off Christmas vacation by handing her the remote control and telling her to find one of her recorded Christmas movies to watch while I spent the next two hours drifting in and out of sleep. Which probably explains why a fear of claymation figures and abominable snowmen has now embedded itself into my subconscious.

    A little bit later, I dropped Caroline off at a birthday party for one of her friends and then I sped off to MJM Shoes in a desperate quest to find her some red shoes to wear for Christmas because she has inherited a narrow foot from her father’s side of the family and it’s darn near impossible to find pretty little flats that fit her feet and cost less than her first semester at college. However, I totally scored the cutest little Michael Kors red flats for $19.99 and they actually fit. And she actually likes them. It’s a Christmas miracle.

    Later that afternoon I called Gulley to see if her boys wanted to go with us to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Will wasn’t sure at first because he’d just set up what promised to be a lucrative pecan stand in their front yard and hated to leave his business venture. However, he was swayed by the promise of buttered popcorn and still managed to make $5.00 before we arrived to pick him up.

    We all loved the movie and the popcorn and the Dr. Pepper and the assorted boxes of Sour Sprees, Sour Patch Kids, and Sour Straws. Apparently all we want for Christmas is some dental work.

    (Oh, I just realized that I totally forgot the part about organizing my shirts. I did it in between the birthday party and the movie and realized that I own eleven white tank tops. I don’t even understand.)

    (Yes. That’s all I have to say about the shirts. I’m sad that I used it as a ploy on yesterday’s post because it’s confirmation that my life can be kind of dull.)

    Anyway, Gulley and I originally planned to load the kids up in the stay wag on Saturday night, stop by Starbucks for hot chocolate and drive around and look at Christmas lights. But by the time we got back to Gulley’s house after the movies, I was starving and in desperate need of a meal. I guess half a bucket of popcorn wasn’t filling enough.

    (On a side note, Caroline and I saw a commercial for this disturbing game called Pop the Pig where you feed the pig these little hamburgers until he pops. Allegedly, it’s the number one selling game in Europe. Or maybe it’s just marketed by the same people as L’Oreal Elnett and they just use that as their primary marketing scheme for every product. Anyway, Caroline told me she wanted that game and I told her at the rate I’m currently eating she’ll have a real live version by Christmas. Seriously. I’m off the rails. I’d blame PMS but P says I blame everything on that.)

    So instead of picking up hot chocolate, we drove through Church’s Chicken and cruised around in the station wagon eating fried chicken and looking at Christmas lights while Gulley and I took turns yelling things from the front seat like, “QUIT FIGHTING ABOUT WHO’S GOING TO SIT IN THE BACK ON THE WAY HOME AND ENJOY THE BEAUTIFUL LIGHTS” and “WE DON’T NEED TO TALK ANYMORE ABOUT WHO TOOTED BACK THERE. JUST LOOK AT THE BABY JESUS IN THE NATIVITY!” The whole thing kind of felt like a punchline to a Jeff Foxworthy joke.

    The kids all wanted to have a sleepover so I said the boys could come over to our house. As Gulley went to pack their sleeping bags, Will looked at me and said, “Mel, I’m a little afraid of what your breakfast might look like. Maybe you better just take us to Shipley’s for donuts in the morning.”

    Later on I told P what Will had said and he told me Will was right to be afraid because breakfast around here usually looks like nothing. Which totally isn’t true. I keep a box of granola bars on hand at all times. But I realize there are some snobby breakfast-types who don’t feel that counts.

    And so we went to Shipley’s the next morning. For the children. It was all for the children. And maybe for the chocolate iced donuts and sausage kolaches.

    Then, later that day, Caroline and I left town to go meet P at the ranch for the night.

    And that was the weekend.

    The end.

    ___________________________________

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  • There’s no business like toe business

    I am sitting here right now trying to come up with words for the weekend and feeling an enormous sense of accomplishment because I managed to make a fire in the fireplace all by myself. And, yes, our fireplace is a real fireplace that actually requires things like wood and kindling. I would be lying if I said that the whole scene doesn’t feel a little bit like something right out of Little House on The Prairie, assuming that Ma Ingalls lit her own fire and then sat on her couch while she watched the lights twinkle on her Christmas tree as she typed on her laptop.

    So, when we last spoke or you last read or whatever, I mentioned that I’d nearly burned my house down in an attempt to microwave some mac and cheese and also possibly broken three of my toes. The update is my house still smells like the seventh circle of sulphuric hell, particularly when I use the microwave, and I’ve downgraded my injuries to just one broken toe. I feel certain it is broken because I kind of want to throw something across the room any time I step on it the wrong way combined with the fact that it is a lovely blue color with some black thrown in.

    In spite of my toe injuries, however, life must go on. Although it is going on while I complain incessantly about my toe. Which kind of reminds me of how I was at the Compassion Bloggers’ Reunion dinner after Deeper Still and was going on and on about how HARD AND STRENUOUS it was to work the merch table and sell all those $2.00 t-shirts. Then Shaun Groves introduced me to Dan Woolley who happened to be sitting two seats away from me. For those of you who may not know, Dan was the Compassion employee who was trapped in an elevator shaft buried under rubble for sixty-five hours after the Haiti earthquake last year.

    This is why I should just stay home and work on my fire-building techniques. I’m really not suited for public gatherings.

    Anyway, I’d promised Caroline a month ago that I’d help chaperone her class field trip to the Witte Museum and even though I was in a lot of pain and at a complete loss as to appropriate footwear, I knew that just like they say in the entertainment industry, the toe must go on.

    (I am so sorry. I could not help myself.)

    I hobbled my way around the museum looking at all the animal habitats and bug exhibits while Caroline basically acted like she didn’t care one way or the other if I was there. And I spent most of my time realizing that I’ve always been bored by most types of science and that my tall brown boots were a bad choice.

    After the field trip was over, I went back to Caroline’s classroom because I’d volunteered to watch the class while her teacher attended the teachers’ holiday luncheon. Before she left the classroom, the teacher asked everyone if they learned anything at the museum that morning. Every hand went up except for Caroline. She said, “Caroline? You didn’t learn anything this morning?”

    “Nothing I didn’t already know before I went.”

    I’m not sure how we’re going to survive the next fifteen plus years of formal education.

    Eventually all my field trip/chaperone/volunteer duties were over and it was time to get ready for the annual Christmas shopping weekend. Mimi and Bops picked up Caroline around 3:30 and I spent the next hour icing my toe and popping Advil in preparation for Gulley and me to hit the mall.

    By the time Gulley got to my house I was all psyched up on the rush of adrenaline that comes with the prospect of shopping and temporary freedom from motherhood. I felt like my toe and I were invincible. And we were. Until I got to the entire other side of the mall from where Gulley and I had parked and realized I was actually in a lot of pain.

    Poor Gulley ended up having to haul my large packages and her own through the mall as I pitifully hobbled back to Dillards. A lady in Sephora even stopped Gulley to tell her she felt sorry for her that she had to carry so many large bags. Which made us completely hysterical.

    And that was the theme for the rest of the weekend. We were completely hysterical. I can’t even count the number of times I laughed until I cried. We covered topics from the PTO to her recent trip to Vegas to Brett Favre to our fear of sending text messages to the wrong person to playing blackjack to how no one is really sad when your pet dies except for you. There was also a moment on Saturday night when Sophie texted me to ask if we’d heard that Will Muschamp had left Texas to take the head coaching job at Florida. Gulley and I admittedly got a little high on schadenfreude.

    I’m just being honest.

    Anyway, by the time we finished shopping on Saturday we’d visited just about every store in the San Antonio area with a significant portion dedicated to the aisles of Target. We were exhausted but thrilled at the accomplishment of being finished with our Christmas shopping and headed back to my house to wrap all the gifts.

    We wrapped and talked and laughed and eventually discovered that VH-1 was airing Top 100 Songs of the 90’s. I don’t think I need to tell you that it felt like the programming team at VH-1 reached into our very souls at that moment. And so we continued to wrap (and sometimes rap) as we listened to the songs that were the music of our lives as we survived college, found jobs, wore denim vests with wrap skirts, mended broken hearts, learned that wine shouldn’t come out of a box, discovered Ross and Rachel, and eventually met our husbands and got married.

    My only regret of the weekend is that we finally wore out and went to bed around 2:40 a.m. after discovering that M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This was number sixteen on the list. Gulley had already fallen asleep on the couch so she asked me the next morning, “What was the number one song of the 90’s?” And I had to admit that we hadn’t made it.

    And now we’ll never know.

    I’d be willing to be money that Sir Mix-A-Lot made it to the top ten though.

    So that was the weekend.

    It was good.

    Now I’m going to go take more Advil and get some ice for my toe while I sit in the glow of the fire I built with my own two hands, several pieces of wood, and more lighter fluid than is probably safe.

    _____________________________________________________

    Today is the Christmas Tour of Homes over at the Nester’s blog. I guarantee there will be tons of gorgeous homes to check out. I didn’t do a post because all my stuff looks the same as last year and it seemed redundant. However, here is my post from last year in case you’re new and are overwhelmed with curiosity.

    There is a chance to win a $200 gift card from BlogHer as part of a new Chef Boyardee program. Click over to my giveaway page to leave a comment for a chance to win.

  • Not to be confused with her cousin, Leather

    I started to write a post full of gift suggestions for the holidays, but it turns out that’s a lofty task when you don’t begin until 9:30 p.m. Especially after you haven’t slept well for the last three or six nights and are a wee bit tired.

    Then I accidentally got caught up in an old episode of Happy Days where Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero are in a demolition derby and Pinky gets hurt and ends up in the hospital. I can’t even express how much I wanted to be Pinky Tuscadero when I was little. She was just so cool and Fonzie really loved her and I always thought they’d end up together. I don’t know that there is a better role model for a young girl than a vivacious redhead who wears pink short-shorts and regularly participates in demolition derbys against the Mallachi brothers.

    So I have no gift suggestions to offer you at the moment and P hasn’t even begun his list of gift suggestions yet and I don’t know when or if that will happen but I guarantee it won’t be before my outdoor lights are hung. I’m holding out hope the lights will happen sooner rather than later though because he mowed the yard yesterday which felt like a step in the right direction.

    And speaking of lights, I have blown another fuse on the Christmas tree and, as of this writing, it is only half lit. I keep telling myself it’s not such a bad little tree, Charlie Brown, but it looks a little sad. I’d do something about it but I don’t really trust myself around electricity.

    In other news completely unrelated to lights or Christmas, I seem to have incurred some type of injury to my Achilles tendon. So my Achilles heel is literally my Achilles heel. I could barely walk when I got out of bed yesterday morning which actually served as a great excuse to do nothing until around noon when the Advil and ice seemed to kick in. I’m not sure what else to do about it, but I know it needs to get better fast because this weekend is the annual Gulley and Mel Christmas shopping weekend and I’m going to need to be mobile.

    (I don’t know why I just referred to myself in the third person just then.)

    If anyone has any suggestions on what I should do about my tendon issue, I’d appreciate it. Just please refrain from any comments along the lines of “My cousin had that one time and it totally blew out and then he died.” I can go to a place of fear quite nicely all by myself. It’s a gift, really.

    And if anyone has any great gift suggestions for Christmas, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’m always looking for great ideas.

    And I posted this on Twitter yesterday but will repeat it here for those of you who aren’t on the Twitter. If you want a great mix of Christmas music, go to Pandora and put in Sixpence None The Richer (Holiday Mix). It will make you fourteen kinds of happy. I can’t take credit for this discovery, however, since one of you mentioned it in the comments last week.

    I believe that is all.

    Except I just wanted to tell you my Achilles tendon really hurts.

    All my love,
    Pinky Tuscadero

    ________________________________________________

    Remember, if you’re interested in some cute Christmas cards and saving 25% off your order, click on over to my review page and read all about the Little Card Company.

    Also, the NFL Take it to the House program is over today. Click here to read all about it.

  • So on and so forth

    I’m leaving for Birmingham on Thursday morning and so my last few days have been filled with all the random little errands I always run before I go on a trip. I have to stock up on all my travel-size toiletries and make sure I have enough lipgloss and endlessly debate if I can fit four days worth of clothes in a practical carry-on size bag or if I’ll just go for the gold and pack an obnoxiously large suitcase instead. There is no in between. Mainly because I don’t own a reasonable middle-of-the-road piece of luggage.

    And also because I have to pack things like my sound machine and large set of hot rollers.

    So I’m just going to mention a few quick things here as opposed to rambling on and on with about 1,000+ words like I’ve done the last two days.

    1. I’m planning on doing some sort of list with various Christmas gift ideas at some point in the next week or so. In the meantime, Sophie has compiled a list of twenty teen-friendly favorites under $20 and a list of fifteen favorites under $15.

    I have found both lists to be enormously insightful. I’ve also discovered that I have the exact same taste as a sixteen-year-old girl.

    2. Speaking of lists, I’m trying to talk P into doing another list this year for the outdoorsy-types in your life. He hasn’t committed yet, but I haven’t started withholding home-cooked meals and Orange Milanos.

    Here is last year’s list in case you missed it. It is a wealth of information about things I know nothing about.

    3. Behold! The Christmas tree! With its vertically-wrapped lights!

    I took this with my phone. But trust me when I tell you the quality would be no better if I’d taken it with my camera. My camera is hurting.

    4. My dear friend, Travis Cottrell, has written a book called Surprised by Worship. I think I’ve mentioned it before. What I haven’t mentioned is that you can click over to my giveaway and review page for a chance to win a free copy. And, trust me, you want to read this book.

    5. Caroline wore legwarmers to school yesterday. As a preteen of the early 80’s, it felt like a full circle moment for me.

    Please notice the unpainted door frame in the background. It has been that way for the last eight years in spite of the fact that it would take all of five minutes to paint it. Somewhere in there is some insight into my personality.

    6. Don’t forget to check out the NFL Take it to the House program and sweepstakes information.

    7. I ordered my Christmas cards on Monday from The Little Card Company. I’ll tell y’all more about them next week, but LOVE.

    8. I went to the mall yesterday because I had to run in Sephora and also felt like I should make a quick run through a few shoe departments. Did y’all know there are places right in the middle of the mall where people are getting massages and having their eyebrows done? I think we’ve lost some sense of what constitutes an activity that should be done smack dab in the middle of public.

    Or maybe I just have personal boundary issues. It’s possible.

    9. I saw these pajamas at Target yesterday and can’t quit thinking about them. I wanted to buy them for myself but I think we all know that the guilt of buying something for myself did me in and I left Target pajama-less but with a new supply of Children’s Benadryl, some snowflake ornaments and a bulk package of paper towels.

    10. That is all. I just didn’t want to end with 9. It seemed random.

    Kind of like this whole list.

    And now I’m off to see if I can fit four days worth of clothes into a carry-on bag.

    Doubtful.

  • Yes, I’m still talking about my Christmas tree

    So yesterday morning was Monday. And I’ve become a big fan of stating the obvious.

    I knew that eventually the Thanksgiving break would end and it would be time to join the real world again, but that really didn’t make it any better when the alarm went off. It also doesn’t help that our alarm is P’s cell phone and he has it set to some kind of mamba ring tone. He says it’s because he’ll hear it, but I suspect it might be because he knows it drives me insane enough to make me jump out of bed. Or at least to roll over and growl, “TURN IT OFF. TURN IT OFF. FOR ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THIS WORLD, TURN IT OFF.”

    We all managed to get out of bed and start our morning routine. I dropped Caroline off at school with a coyote skull gently packed in her little sequined leopard print messenger bag. Yes. A coyote skull. She found it at the ranch last week and couldn’t wait to bring it in for Show and Tell. Bless her teacher’s heart.

    Once I got home I knew I could no longer avoid the run I’d been trying not to think about all last week when I decided that exercise should not interfere with my enjoyment of the Thanksgiving holiday. I put on my running shoes, cranked up my sweet tunes, and spent the next thirty-five minutes feeling like I was wading through quicksand. My loose hypothesis is that a steady diet of cream of mushroom soup and butter in various casserole forms has a tendency to make a person feel a little sluggish.

    After I plodded my way around the neighborhood, I came back home to hydrate myself and pass out for about forty-five minutes before running my long list of errands. First up? A trip to Michaels to get more Christmas tree lights. Second? I ran in Charming Charlie’s to buy the zebra-print koozie with hot pink feathered trim that Caroline fell in love with when she saw it on Saturday. I don’t know why she really needs a koozie, but I can understand the siren song of the zebra print trimmed in pink.

    Anyway, I finally completed a whole list of errands and I won’t bore you by going into all the details. When I finally got home I decided to go ahead and put the lights on the rest of the tree so that Caroline and I could get to decorating as soon as she got home from school.

    I continued my vertical light strategy around the back of the tree until it was adequately wrapped, then I put one more strand around the entire tree just to ensure maximum light coverage. And then!

    AND THEN!

    I plugged in the lights and marveled at their beauty. And also at the fact that I managed to buy some sort of twinkling lights by accident and half my tree has a significant twinkling effect.

    AND THEN!

    All the lights went out at the same time. Darkness. Total darkness.

    Fortunately P happened to be home and I summoned him to the living room with a delicate, “OH NO! ALL MY LIGHTS JUST WENT OUT! WHAT HAPPENED? OH THE HUMANITY!”

    He looked at me and asked, “How many strands do you have plugged all together and plugged into this one outlet?”

    “Ummm. Eight?”

    (Or twelve.)

    “That’s too many. It overheated and blew a fuse.”

    Technically, I knew when I was connecting strand after strand of lights that this venture was ill-advised thanks to the directions on the box the lights came in. However, I choose to think of those directions as more of a guideline than the gospel truth.

    P fixed my fuse and told me I’d need to go buy an extension cord and a power strip. So I picked up Caroline from school and we headed to Walgreens to buy the necessary supplies. And then I had to come home and try to reconfigure my lighting scheme. The good news is this gave me the opportunity to evenly distribute the twinkly lights so my tree doesn’t look like it’s bipolar.

    Now it just looks like it belongs in a nightclub in Las Vegas. Which is so much better.

    After the lighting was all straightened out, I turned our T.V. to one of the satellite radio channels that plays continuous holiday music and Caroline and I began to hang the rest of the ornaments as we sang along to Jingle Bell Rock. It was all very festive in spite of the fact that it was a crisp 82 degrees outside.

    All of a sudden a song came on that I’d never heard before. I knew immediately it was Dwight Yoakum. And as I listened to the lyrics I realized he was singing that Mama said Santa can’t stay and Santa looked a lot like Daddy as he drove away.

    Wow.

    Way to bring us all down at Christmastime, Dwight.

    I told P about it and said it was the second most depressing Christmas song I’ve ever heard. The first being that song about the little boy who’s trying to buy new shoes for his mom in case she dies and meets Jesus on Christmas Eve.

    P looked at me and said, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but I have serious concerns about your listening habits. Why would you listen to any of that?”

    It’s a valid point.

    However, he doesn’t know that I’m the same girl who spent much of Christmas 1987 listening to Dolly Parton sing Hard Candy Christmas over and over again on my York stereo with cassette player while I cried over a breakup with a boy whose name I can barely even remember now. I felt like Dolly and I were united in our feeling of barely getting through tomorrow, but committed to not let sorrow bring us down.

    Which is more than I can say for Dwight Yoakum.

  • The giving of the thanks

    I’m going to take the next two days off because I went to the grocery store yesterday and it almost killed me.

    And the worst part is I have to go back again.

    I hope y’all have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with family, friends and your favorite foods!