In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,†as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.†Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.
People are the actual worst.
First, let’s get this shitty picture of the Holland Christmas tree (the opportunities for getting pictures of it with all of the light strands working were very limited) out of the way:
Also, here’s my cat being supercute:
I worked Sunday night, and after a nap Monday afternoon, we headed to Tiffin for Christmas Eve.
We went straight to Jim and Beth’s house for tasty Christmas Eve dinner and some Swiss Family Robinson watching.
Here’s a picture of a bunch of Links watching the movie together:
After a suitable amount of obligatory (though mostly enjoyable) family time, we went back to Randy and Lis’s house, where Brian and I watched Hangover 2 On Demand! and then spent the least comfortable night EVER on the old air mattress…we’ve slept on it a ton of times, and while it’s never been quite like a real bed, it’s never been as keep-you-awake terrible as it was that night. I don’t know what the/our problem was. I had only slept, like, 3 hours on Christmas Eve day, so I REALLY wanted to sleep, and it just was not happening.
We get up early on Christmas day to open presents and have breakfast with Brian’s parents. Here’s Randy looking at the photo book of us that we gave them because we give terrible, self-centered gifts:
Here is Randy and Lis’s Christmas tree…it is cute, for a sad, dead tree:
I got a spice rack (with free spice refills for 5 years!) and some other stuff, including a calendar that featured these gems:
We taught Lis about Grumpy Cat:
After a tasty breakfast, we headed back to our house. Here’s our couple photo for this Christmas (shoutout: Australia):
We exchanged presents, and I was embarrassingly out-Christmassed.
My Dad brought his mostly thawed turkey over for some on-the-fly spatchcockery and thrown-together meal preparation. We had no gravy, and some things that I like to make from scratch (cranberry sauce) were store-bought, but it came together quite nicely…I didn’t think the turkey was much smaller than last time, but we may have even overcooked it doing only 80 minutes. Spatchcocking is CRAZY.
Matthew and Amanda came over to hang out for a while and exchange presents. Here’s Amanda watching a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr_cn66sYc8 – watch it, you won’t regret it) Â about the four-headed arm-like penis of the Australian echidna:
Other Christmas photos:
Matthew and Amanda brought me this book that they found on their trip to California:
(I do not think I know enough/am a good enough knitter to make a cat.)
Here’s a braggy photo of some of my presents I got…
Yes, I did get some books about travelling to Australia and a rechargeable hand warmer. Â And! a special therapy light for people who are SAD!!1! Â I have used it twice, but I’m already knee-deep in a run of terrible scheduleness, and I’m not expecting MIRACLES. Â Maybe once I get out of fluctuating scheduleness after New Year’s Day, my life will improve drastically.
We all got each other UT stuff this year…we’re going to need a new hobby for next year:
My most anticipated present from this Christmas (TOLEDO EL GNOMO!):
My peoples were supposed to be around this week so that I could see them and their spawn and whatnot. Â Early this week, the forecast was calling for 8-12 inches of snow on Wednesday, so everybody either fled NWOhio early or postponed their trips. Â It was very reminiscent of the great Groundhog Day Snowmageddon (that cancelled Dara’s and my plans to go to Punx) because we got a fraction of the snow they had forecast. We ended up not getting enough snow to fully cover the grass…THANKS, BABY JEBUS FOR RUINING ALL THE FRIEND CHRISTMAS. (Also thanks, work schedule, for making me feel so miserable this week so that even if people had been around, I most likely would have preferred to lay here and do logic problems like the gross sloth I am). Â Â Whatever, the New Year will be better, I said for the 20th consecutive year.
The Lady Rockets hosted a second tournament the Thursday and Friday before Christmas…The Toledo invite. As was the case with the first tournament they held earlier this month, the other teams were, um, not the best ever. Thursday, Dad, Brian, and I went early to “scout” at the first game. The Prairie View A&M Panthers beat the Hampton Pirates. Then the Ladies beat the Evansville Purple Aces.
Friday, we went a little early and watched some Evansville vs. Hampton consolation game action because we crave even the worst Lady Basketball.
Bossman offered to work some usher magic and get us into some vacant court seats for the Lady Rockets game Friday night, and because we are terrible people, we abandoned my Dad in our normal seats.
I take this picture 23282 times a season, indeed:
The new scorer’s table looks sharp approximately 10% of the time:
Naama is starting to seem a little closer to her pre-injury self. Yay Jewie Yay.
The “Championship” Game…this game was alarmingly close in the first half…I thought we were going to watch the saddest, most disheartening upset ever from courtside, but then the universe righted itself and the Ladies won handily.
I took this picture to show off oldschool @FSOAllieOop:
Also, I got these lovely notecards as a present from Bossman and Sue…they are Emily Smith original photos!
As we’ve already discussed, it’s Christmas card season.
I do so enjoy getting other people’s less awesome (than our) Christmas photos and cards…I do NOT enjoy getting weird Christmas cards from my estranged mother.
I looked at the envelope and knew it was going to piss me right off. I thought about throwing it away without opening it, but it was heavier than a normal card, so I had to check for enclosures that my dad’s money bought. She sent me a weird Christmas card with that came with a built-in keepsake daughter bookmark (because I am 11 years old) with a $25 TGIFriday’s gift card in it. Also, there was some jibber-jabber about missing me or something. I threw the card away, because I’m a stone-cold bitch, but we went to Fridays yesterday.
Last year, my mother sent my dad over to my house with a Carruth cement groundhog and a gift card for Brian (all paid for by my Dad, obviously) pre-divorce. Um, OK. It is also worth noting that she gave my brother’s girlfriend Amanda a gift card to Bath and Body Works, and Amanda worked at Bath and Body Works at the time. I guess I was lucky I got that weird stone groundhog and not a gift certificate for radioactive iodine or something.
Since losing her marbles, my mother has apparently decided that just throwing weird unnecessary and unwanted money at us (gift cards and Carruths) is a terrific idea. Yeah, maybe, if she was making her own money or had a new sugar daddy who was funding this (ew, I just made myself throw up a little)…but that’s not how it is. She is getting something like $2K/month from my dad to sit on her ass, after her sad, hard life of never having to work and being able to buy whatever she wanted (cigarettes, romance novels, hair frosting kits). So anyway, it’s hard to get jazzed about super-stupid presents. I thought about trying to sell the gift card and give my dad the money, but that seemed pretty complicated.
Anyway, so here’s us:
Waiter: Hello! What brings you to Fridays?
Me: (looks around awkwardly) Oh, um, we have a gift card.
We had enough Fridays to use up the gift card and skidaddled out of there.
I hate when my mom tries to communicate with me. It’s only happened a couple of times since the Great Schism, but she really tries to play the victim and make me feel bad, and I hate it hate it hate. Every time, it upsets me, but not because I miss her or feel bad…in fact, my most intense feelings are 1) guilt that I *don’t* miss her, and 2) anger about her greed/laziness/grossness. Aside from my fretting about my dad coming home every day to an empty house (well not really for right now, he has a boarder) and wondering about his finances and if he’ll ever be able to retire, my life is actually easier without having to deal with my mom. She was such a pain in the ass the last 5 years or so (if not earlier – probably 2001 when she started watching Fox News 24-7), it’s kind of a relief to be states and states away from her and not communicating with her. Thanks for birthing me, letting me start rotting my insides with Tab and Diet Pepsi when I was 5, etc., etc., see you later.
Anyway. So here’s hoping that’s all that I’ll hear from her this season. I wouldn’t put it past her to come up for Christmas (with her sister?) and show up at my dad’s (he’ll call the sheriff, supposedly) or my house (I’ll close the door and cry? I don’t know).
Let’s see…So aside from that, I’m generally just having a really stupidly hard time right now. Like everyone else, that whole Sandy Hook Elementary School thing is weighing heavily on my mind. There’s so much I could bring up about that and never make a dent in it. I feel like everyone is trying to seem really sensitive and upset about the whole thing to prove that we’ve not all gotten so used to terrible mass shootings lately…plus I think some of the Mommies are competing in their sadness and outrage (and are also SOOO inconvenienced by the protective measures that THEY THEMSELVES ARE DEMANDING…) – plus some of them seem to be spending a good bit of time reminding the childless that we CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND.
I’m not a fan of guns (duh). I’ve generally found that people who ARE fans of guns are assholes about it.
Once, when I was 22, a friend of mine got a “job” travelling with the Barenaked Ladies tour working for the charities that set up tents/booths outside the show. Because of my love of BNL, she got me a one-night job doing that with her when they played at Pine Knob. I no longer can recall what the charity we were working for was called, but the basic idea had nothing to do with gun control…they wanted us to talk to people and advocate that they HAVE A CONVERSATION with their kid’s friends’ parents (and other adults who host or look after their children) about the presence of guns in the house…and if there are guns in the house, are they locked up? Kids accidentally shoot each other in the face playing with guns they find in their own homes or their friends’ houses or whatever ALL THE TIME. (I really have no idea how often, but you know what I mean.) Basically, it’s worth asking about and you can do whatever you want once you’re informed…but you would have thought we were prying their guns out of their hands and melting them down in front of them…and as you can imagine, we were two of the softest-spoken unassertive nerdy girls in the place at the time. We took some serious abuse. At a Barenaked Ladies concert. Trying to talk about keeping kids safe, with no mention of getting rid of guns or making them less available. Awesome.
So this past weekend, I did not engage any pro-gun people in debate, at least not on purpose…partly because, you know, what’s the point, and partly because there are so many other factors in what happened and I don’t even know what happened and I’m not going to read more about this and the teacher ladies trying to stop the gunman or trying to protect the kids or hugging the kids while they died, etc. I’m just not…and yet I can’t even escape those things because they are EVERYWHERE and MOSTLY INACCURATE reports that are sent out without any verifying or anything…
Anyway, so this business happened:
After I got called an idiot and a bimbo by some random on the internet (who’s not even that random, I guess, he’s a friend of a friend, so it’s not like I was an anonymous redditor or something), I sat and contemplated what my response should be for a while. Really, what stuck out was that the person attacking me appears (from his profile picture) to actually be a “middle-aged white dude with vigilante fantasies who has armed himself like it’s Red Dawn” (Here’s his profile picture a little blown up but still (I think) made unidentifiable):
Awesome. That’s pretty much all I can say about that.
I wasn’t insulted by this dude calling me a bimbo and an idiot. I was upset that this random dude thought that was appropriate. I’m not the most proper person in the world, by any means, but the way people act online (see any comments on any article, ever) is GROSS. I’m definitely an old, but Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, people don’t realize what there are OTHER PEOPLE out there. It reminds me of how they say that when people drive, they don’t usually think about the other drivers being PEOPLE…who maybe are having a bad day or whatever…they just see another CAR.
My outlook was not improved by reading about all the people who were tweeting terrible racist things (use your imagination) when NBC preempted Sunday Night football for the President’s remarks at a memorial service for the Sandy Hook victims.
ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS?
“Hey THE INTERNET, I think we can communicate on a higher level.” Also, I think we can all have common decency if we try REALLY HARD. Ugh.
I’m actively moping and gaining weight/not exercising and approximately 3 seconds away from crying at any point any day (this probably has a SAD component as well, bite me and my growing large ass, except for the part where said fatness makes me MORE miserable and it’s a feedback loop of awful). Also, as soon as all my people who live out of town who are coming to NW Ohio for the holiday have visited with me and gone home, I’m taking a vacation from Facebook for a while (and starting a Whole30/exercise plan to try and “snap out of it”).
I’m so in a funk and also exasperated.
Brian has lived here for more than 4 years, and his people are retardedly, frustratingly difficult to lure up here. It’s only a 60-75 minute drive, but you would think we live on the moon. At OSU-UM day, I asked Brian’s cousin’s wife about coming up to go to the Lights at the Zoo, and she seemed excited and offered up a date (this past Friday) that worked for us. The boys worked out the plans last week, and cousin Doug and fam left Tiffin for our house as soon as Doug got off work. Doug had been here before, but Becky and the kids hadn’t.
Becky had said she wanted to see our basement, so when they got here, they got a basement tour and then we left for the Zoo (in separate cars). We had not anticipated the long wait to park…we waited on the Trail for 40 minutes or so, just to get into the Zoo lot…we might have tried to park off Broadway, but with kids and being in two cars and them not being very familiar with the area, we decided to ride out the wait on the Trail. Once we parked, we had a 15-20 minute wait to buy their tickets (which actually was a semi-expensive clustercuss, since I thought we could use the coupons on pepsi cans for free kids admissions with the purchase of an adult ticket, but that coupon was only for Monday through Thursday). No one seemed very pleased after all the waiting.
I thought the kids would be amazed by the lights, as they had never been to the Zoo lights before, but I think they were pretty “meh” about the whole experience. If they’ve ever been to the Zoo at all, it’s been a long time – so they wanted to see animals…and the animals were not so much available. They saw a seal laying in a spotlight on a rock first thing, and that was about it. Eventually we saw some tigers and penguins in pretty dark quarters, and we did see the train sets (same trains as 30 years ago – and same Swanton RR club dudes, I think) and some bugs when we were inside, but that’s about it. The kids were most excited about buying shitty popcorn and/or pretzels. Whatever. I was sure the polar bears would be out doing things, but they weren’t, and I was sure that we’d be able to see some monkeys or primates somewhere along the way, but not so much. Oh well, at least we saw the #8 most awesome Christmas tree in America. Maybe taking the kids in the summer would be more enjoyable for everyone.
You may remember from previous years that Brian’s work usually gives out crazy Christmas presents – gift cards for the dudes and jewelry for the ladies – I have some ugly (though supposedly expensive) jewelry from the last few Christmas dinners. Since I started going to these dinners, they were always in Upper Sandusky, but this year the dinner was in Marion (which adds, something like, 1/2 hour each way to our trip). The old man who was responsible for the Christmas presents was made to retire before Christmas last year, but he had already bought all that year’s presents. This year was the first one that he was not involved in. Supposedly our previous Christmas presents were worth $1,000/couple…and this year, Brian was told to expect less by about 1/2…but when we opened the envelope when we finally got to leave the party (after sitting there THREE HOURS), we were, um, very disappointed. I think we may have LOST money on the dinner, if you consider the gas and 7 hours of our time (during which we missed watching Toledo lose the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and also the Ladies beat Marquette). All we did was check our phones and act awkward the whole time, so yay for that adventure.
The only fun thing we did on Saturday was take pictures of Kim’s kids with Christmas lights. Yay for cuteness and being able to leave quickly when the kids get to be kind of annoying.
One time, Harvard the cat forgot he hates me and sat on my leg for, like, 30 seconds. This was on 12.12.12, so it’s possible he was confused and thought the world was ending, or something. It was a weird time:
Oh, check these out…I bought these handwarmers on Amazon and they plug into USB ports to keep your hands “toasty”:
I took some of my Australian goodies to work for my coworkers to admire and covet. Here’s a scary Sasquatch-looking dude wearing my cork hat:
Friday, we had to pick up the house because we had guests coming that night…BabyCat resisted my bed-making:
After I finally wrestled the cat out from under the covers, I went outside to do a cold-weather chore that was super fun: hacking the shit out of the spirea out front:
That day was pretty warm, so I went for a walk after my token yard work. I saw this gigantic Santy not far from our house. The air compressor (or whatever) is kind of loud to listen to all the time. I’m glad our neighbors have too small of front yards for shit like that.
So I stopped running before I got my wisdom teeth out because I am a tard. Every day I get up and think to myself, “this is the day I’m going to run on the treadmill.” Then, I’m like, “No. No, it is not.” The only running I have done is the Smoke the Turkey 5k on Thanksgiving morning. I had signed up for the 12.12.12k a long time ago, mostly because I did the 10.10.10k and the 11.11.11k and wanted to finish the End of the World Series.
The 10.10.10k was on a Sunday morning (at 10:10) at Pearson Park, and the 11.11.11k was a Friday night (at 11:11) at Levis Commons in Perrysburg. The 12.12.12k was on a Tuesday night (Wednesday morning) at 12:12 am. By magic, I was done with my work week Tuesday afternoon because I worked last weekend and was hording days off. I was nervous about doing this race because it seemed like one that would be terrible for a slow person like myself, especially if I had to walk. Smallish races have few slow people, and I knew the course would be loops in the dark around Levis Commons. Plus, and most importantly, I didn’t want to be the asshole all the race director-type people were waiting on at 2am.
There ended up being more than 300 people at the race…though when I was waiting in my car at 11:30pm frantically texting some peeps demanding they talk me into staying and doing the race, every single one of the people milling around was tiny and cute and wearing spandex (I am/was none of those things these days). Luckily I stayed and ran the race. I ended up “running” the whole way, which is a 12.12.12 miracle, since 12k is 7.46 miles. It took me for-fucking-ever, and there were only 11 people who actually finished behind me (I bet there were people who started it and didn’t finish that I also was better than, hooray for me!).
Also cool: meteor shower / shooting stars during the race!
Here’s a picture of my cool t-shirt (word on the street is that the numbers glow in the dark) that matches my 10.10.10k and 11.11.11k shirts:
Because I POWERED THROUGH and plodded the whole way, I was more sore than post-half-marathon for about 3 days. It felt like my calf muscle was cut in half, and holy shit! stairs.
Here’s a picture of my friend Gizmo with red Santa underpants on his head:
Oh, cats in costumes!
In case you have forgotten, here’s our Christmas card photo from last Christmas:
We’re obviously ultra-clever and awesome. For the very small fraction of my readers who have not seen this in their real life mailbox:
Merry Christmas!
Saturday, Rando came up to go to the Lady Rockets game with us. I devised an elaborate scheme to be able to all sit in the first row, where we have rights to 3 seats, but I didn’t need to execute it. Silly ushers.
Former Lady Rocket Haylie Linn (haver of amazing shoulders) is a graduate assistant for Milwaukee, so the Rockets waited until this game for the banners/ring ceremony for last year. Here’s some pictures of Haylie talking to Coach Cullop before the game:
New banners:
I have 293023 versions of this picture, but when they do this, it makes me wish I played team sports ever:
After they won:
I was lucky enough to not get called in during the game (or all weekend, actually), but I got called in Monday evening around 8 (booooo).
