I'm just getting too old for Christmas and the holidays in general. And I don't even drink.
Since there still aren't a lot of people around, I'm splitting the yarny goodness into two posts so you get some entertainment value from my ramblings. Here are the first three offerings from the Yarn Fairy.
The top skein is from Dashing Dachs in "Enchanted", and the bottom skein is from hazel knits in "Chuckanut Drive". I have no idea what a Chuckanut Drive is, other than what I do to Hubster when I get pissed off at him on the freeway. (That one was for you, Marin.)
These are both by Creatively Dyed Yarns in their "Ocean" series. They're a merino/seacell blend.
I couldn't resist this beast. Bigger is better, right? This is by Perchance to Knit in "Waikiki Sunrise" and weighs in at a whopping 6.7 ounces with 840+ yards. And it's fingering weight, is soft, and smells really, really good. What in the hell am I going to make with this? I don't know. I might just use it as a pillow for the time being.
I want to thank everyone who left comments and/or wrote to me privately for their very kind words, condolences, and shared misery. While I don't like to dump on all of you, I really needed to. It was especially depressing after that glorious anniversary we had. So how did I handle Christmas?
Let's start with the shopping.
Hubster and I are both procrastinators. It's a given that we'll wait until the last possible minute to do anything. So the fact that we went shopping the Friday before Christmas was a testament to our fortitude, our wanting to change our bad habits, our... oh, who the hell am I kidding. We just wanted to get the crappy thing done.
For once, Mom and Grandma were easy. We bought them a DirectTV system. It was especially nice that installation was free, as was a receiver box. Then we bought that newly released Christmas classic on DVD, "Halloween", directed by Rob Zombie, director of my two favorite flicks, "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects". There's even a group on Ravelry for "The Devil's Rejects". What does it have to do with knitting? Nothing. But I joined it the minute I saw it. Anyway, while we were at BestBuy, I thought we might get the kid (the big, nasty one) something for her gift. What did we get? A $50 gift card. I gave it a lot of thought, too. I saw them at the check-out counter and grabbed one, then blurted out an amount at random.
The little ones were a bit more difficult. We went to Toys "R" Us, that paragon to kids' consumerism. I was all hot and bothered to get them one of those Corvettes with the battery - they go something like 10 mph. Then I saw a pink and purple Jeep (their favorite colors). Then I saw the price tag. They were almost as much as the real thing. So I figured the Escalade with the working radio and bass speakers in the back would be cheaper. Yeah. Bite me. So after squabbling with Hubster in the middle of the aisle (see "Chuckanut" above), we whipped out the cell and called my mother to see what gifts she had bogarted. My other bright idea was to get them a drum kit, but she had already bought them some drum thing. So we settled on a play kitchen and this cool stationary bike that you plug into the TV and ride. It's got software for learning colors, numbers, the alphabet, etc., while you play a video game. Pretty neat stuff. When I was a kid, I had The Flintstones Stone City, which was a plastic sheet with Bedrock printed on it and a couple of the cars, some houses, and Dino; an Easy Bake oven; and the best damn collection of Tonka Trucks in the neighborhood. Tell me that a Tonka bulldozer won't bury your beheaded Barbie doll in two different graves. (See "The Devil's Rejects" above.)
After standing for 30 minutes in a line that stretched clear around the store with one register open (it was 11:30 p.m.), I went up to the Customer Service desk to bitch. The dedicated employee informed me in a bored voice that everyone had called in sick, that the 30 employees standing around the store and beating off were temps and not authorized to run the registers, and that she would be working another register as soon as her very long line of two dissipated. Wow. So I marched back to our line and announced to everyone just how wonderful the staff was, whereupon the man behind me decided that we should play a game. This game consisted of us knocking things off the displays with grandiose waves of our arms, taking the candy necklaces off the hooks and seeing who could hit the big items on top of the shelves by flinging them wildly, and yelling "OOPS!" every time we messed something up or didn't knock over a bicycle. It passed the time with nary a dirty look from the security guard who was by now talking with the only other employee authorized to run a register (the aforementioned Customer Service dronette).
Christmas Eve was spent at the prison but, as usual, the chaplain screwed things up. I thought I was there to teach my class; it turns out that it was the Christmas Party. As I'm finding out, things are seldom what they seem at a prison. First of all, I had gone out and bought a bunch of matching sweats (tops and bottoms). Since I can't wear certain colors on the prison grounds, I showed up in a bright red outfit with Christmas trees across my boobs (so what if the two on the ends were sliding off the mountain?). I showed my badge to the guard, started walking into the prison, and she yelled, "Wait!". So I went back to the guard shack, thinking that she wanted to tell me something. She wanted to tell me something, alright. She informed me that I couldn't wear my spiffy outfit into the prison because the inmates had red jumpsuits. I told her that red wasn't on the list of prohibited colors. Well, it turns out that I had an outdated list. Lucky me. So I asked her what colors I could wear. She looked at the list, scratched her head, and said, "Brown". Great. I didn't have a brown set of sweats in the lot. Actually, I can wear red or any other color (except blue), as long as my tops and bottoms don't match. Don't want to get gunned down by a gunner in the tower, now do we? So when the chaplain finally showed up to give me a ride, we informed him that I couldn't wear what I had on, that Hubster had already left, and what in the hell was I going to do? So he scouted around the prison for the next 20 minutes and returned with a pair of black parachute pants. I was the height of fashion. At least they had red piping down the legs so I coordinated. And what was worse? I didn't have on any underwear because I never wear them with sweats. Shit.
The party was really nice; my boys were there, I wasn't harassed too much as I walked the yard (my bodyguard wasn't there because he didn't know I was going to be so early), I got to open doors for inmates with my set of prison keys (what a sense of power), lunch was actually edible, and we had outside performers come in to provide entertainment. I stayed for about three hours and then left, since Hubster was sitting in the parking lot. I slept all the way home and knitted all evening. I'm happy to say that Hubster cleaned the house for me and turned it into a semblance of a home. I still hate it, but it's not cluttered anymore. Now all I have to do is clean my studio.
Since this post has run so long, I'll save Christmas Day for my next post. I'm also updating my yarn review page tomorrow because something isn't working right; I can't get the pictures on there. I was lucky to get them on here; the network is being really twitchy. But I'll be putting up lots of beautiful yarns for you to see and read about.
Off to work on files for the business and knit.
And to Chuckanut.
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