pjthompson | Entries tagged with presents

1. They are selling Halloween cookies in the cafeteria. I got a black cat one but felt somewhat like a cannibal when I ate it last night.

2. As if Min agreed it was an abominable thing to do, at about four this morning she started having a loud game on the hardwood floors in my bedroom. I threw the covers over my head, but it sounded like she was batting something around or chasing something. I assumed it was one of her catnip toys and she was telling me, “Eat a black cat, will ya? I’ll show you!”

3. This morning when the alarm went off and I swung my legs over the side of the bed, I heard Min give her little, “I’m here!” meow. I turned on the light and saw her tail sticking out from under the bed. “What are you doing under there?” I asked and reached under to give her a pet. She disappeared all the way under the bed. I shrugged and went about my business, but when she still hadn’t come out for breakfast, I knew something was seriously strange.

4. I peaked under the bed as best I could, but with my bad knees there was no way I was kneeling on the floor. Min had moved to the other side of the bed by then. I got the broom and gently swept the handle under the bed. Min came out and started a dodge and weave game at the end of the bed as if chasing something that had been dislodged along with her. I still got no visual on the Whatever, but by then I had strong suspicions that Min had brought me a present during the night and turned it loose under the bed. I’m afraid I grabbed her and went into the other room for about ten minutes to give the Whatever time to escape.

5. Min was not pleased. When I released her she went right back in there, but came sauntering out a short time later as if the Whatever was no longer there to fascinate and compel. Either it did escape or it’s dead and will start stinking shortly. The exterminators will be coming out soon.

And now, two more day poems:

Min

warm purrs, silky fur, shining eyes
head rubs on bare feet:
you are my joy.

bleeding trophies, hawked up hair,
loud games at four a.m.:
you’re still my joy.

***

Driving

along
shadow-dappled roads,
Lauridsen’s rose songs in the air:
the world unwinds, sighs release chains
binding my head, the sun shines
once more.

***

Crone

I thought I understood
but it was yet another posture
something not truly comprehended
until your skin ripples on your bones,
and your toes curl walking the walk.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Things that made me happy: getting books in the mail

I love getting books under any circumstance, but when I get them in the mail it feels like I'm getting a present! Sometimes literally, but even if I've bought them myself.

Yesterday afternoon I got the last two books in my Christmas gift certificate orgy. People know I like getting book certificates so they tend to give them to me. Which makes me very happy. I got $80 worth this year between Barnes and Noble and Amazon, and the book glut commenced. I tend to spend every last penny, plus some of my own money. Which means I often buy used books as well as expensive or more esoteric books I might not necessarily buy otherwise. I think I did really well for myself this year.

(Ha! Jimmy Durante singing "Make Someone Happy" just followed Coldplay on iTunes.)

( This year's book haul. )

Current Music: Viva la Vida - Coldplay

• Mom's feeling good. I am a very grateful girl. Everything else is of minor importance.

• We haven't lit a fire in the fireplace in the three years I've lived at the house, and I suspect it hasn't been lit for a few years (at least) before that. So I called the chimney sweep. He's coming a week from tomorrow. Busy season—that's the soonest we could get him. And yesterday, we bought ourselves a Xmas present of a new fireplace screen and matching loggy pokey things. A steal at Target. I would have done almost anything to avoid going to the actual Target store, but the roommate balked at the $30 shipping (apparently fireplace screens and loggy pokey things didn't qualify for the as-advertised free shipping). So, I spent Sunday at Target. Oh the humanity! =:0 But the hearth looks so pretty now! It made us both happy.

• I haven't written a damned thing since Mom got sick. I haven't been in the right frame of mind, and I got sick myself (minor stuff, finally feeling better). I may get started again when I'm on vacation, but we'll see. I always plan a lot for my Xmas vacations and then do a full body collapse.

• I will be on vacation (in town, at home) from December 24 through January 4. I so need it!

• The electrician is coming out to fix the track light that the painters broke last summer. We discovered yesterday that it was hanging from an exposed wire. Oops. We've been living with it in this state for many, many months, but knowing is different from ignorance and we're sure it's going to cause a fire. The electrician doesn't think it will be too expensive. Alas, the heating man did not have such "good" news. We're going to need a new furnace to replace the misfiring thirty-year-old in the attic. That's going to hurt, but we can probably scrape it together between the two of us and shifting accounts around. We do not have a mortgage, thank Ggod/dess, and are in no danger of foreclosure. In that, we are truly blessed.

• I've starting crafting things again—mostly small assemblages, jewelry, minor league textiles, things I used to do a lot but got out of the habit. I'm really loving it. I found I needed to do something with my hands as well as writing. It makes me feel more balanced.

• Friday I'm having two crowns done on my upper left jaw. I broke a tooth a few weeks back, and I've needed a crown on that back molar for some time. I may have let that one go too long. He won't know until he gets in there whether I'll have to have a root canal.

• For some reason, when I feed Min in the afternoons when I'm home on the weekend, I am now required to pet her and say, "Yummy food, yum yum," before she will commence eating. If I do not engage in this ritual, she looks up at me as if to say, "Get on with it. I'm hungry." As soon as I engage in the ritual, she eats. She doesn't pull this in the morning when I feed her, nor does she pull this with the roommate when she's fed afternoons on the weekdays (she has a whole separate ritual with her, but I won't go into that). Min's a precocious little darling. You do something once and it becomes a ritual. And she's extremely odd. I don't know who has spoiled this cat so badly. Cat spoiling ninjas, most likely.

• And I got a new Oster food processor for Xmas! It's so pretty in stainless steel. Now I'll have to knead some dough or grind some meat or something.

It's been a week of small and petty challenges.

It started off last Friday when I began a special two week eating program to detox from sugar. I am, and I remain, cranky. I look forward to eating cereal again with a ferocity that's not to be believed. That was the same day my internet connectivity at home went away. It's still not back. I hope to have that problem solved by tomorrow afternoon, as I'm having a cable modem installed. For $10 less than the DSL was costing me. Even after the introductory offer is over, so that's a small victory. But if you don't hear from me over the weekend, you'll know what happened.

Oh, and yahoo has been eating my mail. So if you sent me something and I ignored you, I may not actually have gotten it.

That same Friday evening I got a phone call from my Visa Security and Fraud folks trying to confirm some purchases. Everything was cool until they got to the $500 charge at a Target in San Diego a few days before. Not made by me. I still had the card in my possession, so she explained a scam that's going around. Sales people, et al., she said, sell Visa numbers to scammers who make fake cards with fake IDs to go with them, then sell them on the black market. The sales clerk at Target was alert, apparently, and refused the charge, but the Security person assured me I wouldn't be libel for the charge in any case. It did mean I had to destroy the card and get a new one. This was the same account that was compromised in the Choicepoint hacking scandal a few years back. At the time, my instinct was to close the account and get a new one, but my bank assured me "it was highly unlikely" my account number would be compromised. Uh huh. Should have trusted my instincts on this one, although the Security person last Friday said it was "highly unlikely" that was how my number got out there. Uh huh. I think perhaps my bank/Visa didn't want to go to the expense of closing accounts and opening new ones.

When we mentioned this the next day to our neighbors across the street, they'd had the same scam run on them. Also in San Diego—which does make me wonder about that hotbed of crime and vice to the south. Get this: a guy went into a bank, slapped down his fake Visa and said he'd like $500 in cash. The bank duly forked it over and he left. Apparently, he thought it was so easy he went back a little while later to the exact same branch and tried it again. That teller got suspicious this time and went to talk to the manager. The guy took off.

So my new Visa arrives last night. It looked like the envelope had been tampered with. That happens frequently with packages and interesting-looking mail in my neighborhood. I wonder if somewhere down the line I'll get another call from Visa Security and Fraud?

Then Amazon said my mother's birthday present wouldn't get to me until two days after her birthday, but it arrived last night, two days early. Which was a good thing. Except one of the books was not what Mom wanted. Oh well.

More doctor's visits for more petty annoyances. Nothing too bad, so I'm grateful. And I'm still alive, so I'm grateful. I remind myself, "This is what the living do." Which is also the name of one of my more favoritest poems of all time (and a wonderful book, too). You can read the title poem here, if you aren't poetry-averse:

http://www.blueflowerarts.com/mhowe.html

I am living. I am grateful. The petty sh*t just lets me know I'm still part of life—as much, maybe more so on some days—then the passion and the glory. And there are good and wonderful poems now and then to make me see the world fresh and be even more grateful to be amongst the living.

Random quote of the day:

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it."

—Truman Capote

Thankfully, I haven't felt that way about most of mine. But there have been one or two...

Writingness of the day:

I hit 100 pages, 25k on Charged with Folly yesterday. Doesn't seem nearly as much as I'd wanted to have done in two months, but it's what I've got. It's been difficult getting writing done the last couple of weeks—lots of interruptions of my regular time slot—but I still managed to squeeze in another chapter. Which means I'll probably be posting it on OWW in the next couple of days. As to picking up the pace on the writing, I'd like to think it will happen, but it probably won't, especially this time of year. Presents or no presents, the holidays eat up a lot of time.

I was also complaining to a friend that I'm not in love with this novel like I've been in love in the past. I'm liking it, liking how the story is developing, I'm committed to writing it, but I'm not enamored of it. I never got that honeymoon feeling that I always have at the beginning of a novel (until reality sets in and I begin to see it sucks about as much as anything else). This one has been more of a slugfest. Maybe that's a good thing. It'll cut down on the unrealistic expectations and make this more of a "working writer" experience.

My friend asked me if I thought I'd reach a point where that feeling of struggle might ease up—and, actually, I do. Right now I'm trying to balance the adventure/action parts of the story with the worldbuilding parts, and struggling not to do the infodump thing, and that's never fun. I mean, the imaginative parts are, letting myself cut loose. But getting it all to balance and flow, that's work. I do believe that fairly soon I'll be hitting parts of the story where I'm not having to do that kind of balancing act because I've established the world enough that I can just let the characters interact and do their damnedest. It might get more fun then.

In the meantime, I soldier on.

Random quotes of the day:

"There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."

—Frank Herbert, Dune

"[The asylum] was a lovely setting, unindicative of the mental anguish and dysfunction it sheltered—much like many individuals one meets in the course of a day."

—Jeffrey Ford, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

Disclaimer for the Quote of the Day:

These quotes do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, The Universe or its subsidiaries, Leonard Maltin, Siegfried and Roy, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. However, they frequently reflect the views of the Cottingsley Fairies.

No, no, this isn't going to be one of those posts about how stressed I am over the holidays. Quite the opposite. My significant others and I, as well as my significant co-workers and I, have all agreed not to exchange presents this year. We decided instead to feed each other lavishly. Some of those significant others are sick and that puts even the feasting in doubt, so perhaps there will be Christmas in January, or even February. Hard to say at this point.

I'm in the strange position of not having to run around to the stores. I have to say I'm happy about that—I hates shopping, I does (and I wonder if that means I have to turn in my Girl Card or something). But one of the weird side effects is that I sometimes find myself driving past the malls and thinking, "Hot holy hell! Where'd all these people come from?" A beat later I remember, and that's a strange and embarrassing feeling. I am so completely out of the picture this year.

The Mom and I will go to our traditional Christmas Eve dinner at a nice restaurant, I will cook a sumptuous meal for my ex-roommates at some point, and I will bring in my bacon-potato mini frittatas for the potluck on Monday, but . . . that's just about it. Oh, one friend said she'd already bought me a silly gift so I've already bought her something silly in return, but that really is it.

It's weird. But very restful.

My skin isn't sitting right on my bones today. I want to write, but can't; I want to read, but can't; I want to get out and go somewhere, but I don't. The roommate is definitely bugging me. The sun is shining and we've got temps in the low seventies, but the santanas are blowing, mummifying everything. Which brings me back to my skin not sitting right on my bones—it's mummifying, too.

Usually sitar music calms me, puts me in a different place, but even that's not working. I've got an ancient Donovan song, "Josie," moving through my head as a counterpoint:

I've a weary kind of feeling
like my time has come and gone to waste

Which he wrote when he was all of eighteen. Bless you, baby.

But, you know, the poetry ahead of those two lines was quite beautiful:

The meadows they are bursting,
the yellow corn lies in your hand,
and with the night comes sorrow
as the tide of dawn slips on the land.
The long breezes are blowing
all down the sky into my face,
I've a weary kind of feeling
like my time has come and gone to waste.

'Tis the season, perhaps. This time of year always makes me itch. My friends and family and I have agreed not to exchange presents, so that's not a worry. It's just the season itself that gets to me.

Then again, I suppose it could just be this:

PMS Survival Guide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deW2c0anmTc

It occurs to me that if I was a guy and posted that somebody would be sure to call me a sexist. As it is, I find it funny as all hell. And oh so accurate.

Current Music: Raga Chandrakauns (Alap) - Rahul Sharma

I have some naughty-but-nice family and friends. They all agreed quite earnestly when I said that we shouldn't exchange presents this year because I couldn't afford gifts and didn't have time to make them. "Yes, yes," they said, "that's the only sensible thing to do."

Almost all of them bought me a present this year.

"But-but-but--" I stuttered.

"We wanted to. Say thank you and shut up."

So I said thank you and shutted up. I am unworthy, but I am very grateful.

( Wallowing in gifties. )

( Pix. )

We'll be going out to our traditional Christmas Eve dinner in a little while. We splurge on a really nice restaurant every year, then come home to sit and chat and sip apertifs and unwrap presents. No presents this year, by mutual agreement because of mutual brokeness, and that's kind of odd. I feel relief at not having to buy them, but guilt at not having bought them. Still, I plan on hosting my annual "Christmas in January" dinner for my friends, Lynn and Carl, and that will be a nice thing. No present exchange there, either, which will feel decidedly odd. I love exchanging the gifs--the giving more than the getting. I love the opportunity to do nice things for those I love, and if the move hadn't interfered with all my plans, I might have made some things for folks. Lynn used to call me "Little Miss Christmas." And maybe I'll get back there some day, maybe next year.

For this year, I'm just happy to have friends--in town or on the 'net--and a roof over my head, good food.

Howsoever you celebrate the season, joy to you all. And if you don't celebrate the season, joy to you, as well.

No, not the band, the peculiar Southern California winds. They've been blowing fierce all week long, mostly drying everything out and making messes of highways and trees with insecure root systems and the houses and cars unfortunate to be under them. The winds seem to be calming and last night the weatherman threatened rain sometime in the near future. But here it is Christmas Eve and the sky is a limitless blue, not a cloud. And tonight, we'll have our Christmas Eve supper at a fancy restaurant, then come home to drink aperitifs and open presents and get sillier as the aperitifs flow and the wrapping paper piles up. Tomorrow, Christmas dinner at Mom's and the season will be done...at least until New Year's.

I've been so distracted since fall with medical tests and moving and failing cars and writing projects that the season snuck up on me. I can hardly believe it's come and nearly gone. I feel as if I'm waking from a Rip Van Winkle sleep. Fortunately, I went into Automatic Present Acquisition Mode, so everyone's taken care of and I didn't have to make any last minute dashes to the mall.

So Happy Holidays to one and all. Joy in the season, however you celebrate. Even if you don't—joy.

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Page generated Jun. 8th, 2025 01:48 pm

Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with presents

5 things, 3 poems

Things that made me happy meme - Day Four

A bunch of random things make a post

The adventures of moi

A soldier in the puny war

Christmas dissociation

I've a weary kind of feeling

Burning a hole in my pocket

Joy to you all

A Santana Christmas

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May 2025

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