gaylord

A few months ago I made reservations at the Gaylord Texan hotel in Grapevine. I figured that it would be a nice way to celebrate Perry's graduation and we could enjoy their vast climate controlled atrium since I figured the weather would be cold and dismal in mid December. I was wrong. It was just as nice outside as in the atrium: 72 degrees.

Perry and I stayed at the Gaylord two summers ago and had a good time. This time wasn't as great. The food wasn't as good we remembered and the place was packed with families, complete with strollers blocking the walkways and screaming children darting in front of you. It was also over-the-top decorated for Christmas.

They even had a huge gingerbread house with a mosaic on the side. You could smell the sugar before you could see the house.

This is the part of the interior that I prefer.

Around midnight we ventured out to the atrium again to get something to eat from the 24 hours cafe and it was a lot more peaceful. It was kind of like walking through a deserted Disneyland.

spring

We had freezing temperatures last week which killed the last of the plants outside. It was kind of weirding me out that my rose bush was still blooming well into December, but I was still sad when I came home from work and all of the buds had turned brown.

Everything may be dead outside, but it's spring in my living room. New stalks are emerging on my ZZ plant and the Christmas Cactus is about to start blooming.

This makes winter a bit less gloomy.

graduation

Perry graduated from university last Friday. When we went to his parent's Christmas party yesterday they presented him with this:

As much as Perry likes to pretend it's not, graduating is a big deal. He is the first one in his family to do so, and he didn't exactly have a linear path to his senior year.

His freshman year he became severely depressed, stopped going to all of his classes which he then thoroughly failed, lost his full scholarship and dropped out of school. After a year of working at the local convenience store and seeing a psychiatrist, he dipped his toe back into school by taking a few community college courses. When that went okay, he re-enrolled into the same university that he had left.

Three years later he has his bachelor's degree and is excited to start his career. Even though it sounds a bit patronizing to me, I am very proud of him. I admire him a lot.

normal

I watched this music video today.

And I guess I was already feeling a bit despondent after hearing about the elementary school shootings, because I started crying about two minutes into it.

It made me think about how hard people try to be "normal" and how we will fight against our nature and suffer just so we can fit in with those around us. Everyone seems to have their own definition of "normal", but usually it is whatever you're raised with and the people you're surrounded by.

In my community, being Christian and heterosexual is normal and growing up, I always assumed that I was also. It wasn't until my late teens that I began to question whether normal worked for me.

As a teenager, I had never heard of anyone's definition of God that made sense to me. I didn't like that people gave God the worst and pettiest of human emotions like anger and jealously. If there was a God I believed that he/she/it didn't care about if I believed in him/her/it and was nothing like human. In spite of all this, I still labeled myself a Christian. So, I stopped.

I never had to question my "assumed" sexuality. It was pretty obvious to me that I was heterosexual, so that one was easy.

As a female, it is also normal to want to have babies. I had never felt that strong, biological desire that I heard other woman talk about, so I figured it was one of those things that would just happen in time. At age 30, I'm still waiting, however I've have come to realize that having biological children is another "normal" that I will most likely never fulfill.

Do these things make me "bad"? I don't think so. I think they make me me. I have not doubt that denying or ignoring them would make me unhappy and unfulfilled.

There are no rules on how to live life correctly. I think that's why people want some. We are given absolute freedom over our lives and we want so badly to give it away. Myself, included. I feel that as children we are a bit of victims of circumstances. However, as we get older we have important decisions to make and need to take responsibility for our own happiness, and the first step in doing that is finding out just what makes you happy: not society, nor your family, not your friends. It sounds simple, but it may be the most difficult thing that some people can do.

trees

My Christmas tree (ornament for scale): 

My parent's tree (grandfather clock for scale): 

You can absolutely tell who loves Jesus more.

Ornament and cookie party

Every year my mom has an "ornament and cookie exchange" party around Christmas. Every year thus far I've been off of work the day of the party. But not this year. And I don't think I'll do it again if it's on a work day. I was tired about two hours into it. Very tired. I even made my cookies a day in advance.

I don't bake very often, but I never make cookies besides the ones for this yearly party. With cakes and brownies, you mix shit together and pour it in a pan and put in the oven and you're done. With cookies there isn't one "just put a pan in the oven and you're done" part. There are several. You're stuck in the kitchen for a hour, just taking cookies in and out of the oven.

These were my cookies this year:

They're cinnamon roll sugar cookies and they're not exactly winning any beauty prizes, but they tasted really good. They're a soft sugar cookie rolled with butter, cinnamon and brown sugar and then iced. There was really no way they wouldn't taste good. I've won "best tasting" a few times at these parties, and it was never because the cookie I made was that fantastic, but because I had one of the only edible ones there. People try to add too much razzmatazz to their cookies, like weird spices and vegetables. Just keep it simple. People love cookies because of butter and sugar, not sage and zucchini.

There's also an ornament exchange part.

I had no idea what kind of ornament to get the first time my Mom threw this party, so I was wandering around Target looking for something to get and I was surprised by how many ornaments were really weird and gaudy. So I got one of those. One year it was a glittery cucumber, then a shark in a hula skirt, a hippo in a Santa bikini, a bucket of beer.

haircut

I am extremely lazy when it comes to my hair. In the morning I comb my hair and put in up in a bun, and that's the last I think about it until the evening when it's time to take a shower. I've never colored my hair. I don't own a hairdryer, curler, straightener, etc. I think hair was one of those things I tried caring about in high school, but my hair was determined to be straight and limp, so I let it have its way.

One of the perks of being a girl is that I can let my hair grow out as long as I want and it's socially acceptable.Yay! I don't like getting my hair cut, so I only do it once a year. I also don't like strangers touching me, so I haven't been to a hair salon for a haircut since I was a kid. My mom has been my designated hair cutter over the years. I don't exactly have a complicated hair cut or anything; if you can cut in a straight line, you can cut my hair. I let my boyfriend give it a go last year and he did well, so he now has the job.

Last week I could tell it was time for my annual haircut because I was getting slight headaches after having my hair up all day, which is the usual sign it's getting too long. The only problem was that I told Perry to cut a little too much off.

So, this isn't exactly "short" hair. The problem is that it's now too short for me to put up in a bun properly anymore; hair pokes out everywhere and it looks pretty awful. I turned to the internet for ideas of what to do with my hair until it grew out a bit longer. I was lucky enough to find an alternative fairly easily. I just wanted an updo that was fast and that would actually stay put with my extremely slippery and thin hair. I ended up settling on a style called the "Gibson tuck." The internet made it look really easy. You just make a pony tail then flip it up and tuck the tail in your hair. It actually worked for me.

The only adjustment I had to make was to add some claw clips to secure it, or else my hair would try to come unflipped after an hour or so.

Here's a side view. I like how with this updo, your hair will naturally try to cover your ears.

Tea Time

My mom has made it a tradition to visit the Dallas Arboretum every December and have their "holiday tea". It's always a good time. There's three courses: a soup, an assortment of tea sandwiches, and then an assortment of scones and cookies. Each course has its own flavor of tea. This year my mother, middle sister, Perry, and I went. My sister doesn't even really like tea, but she likes the food.

my sister staying classy

Normally when we go to our tea in December, it's cold and drizzly and cloudy so we almost have the whole arboretum to ourselves. This time it was 83 degrees and sunny, so there were actually other people out and about. It felt odd with it being so warm. A lot of the flowers and roses were still blooming.

Another factor that might have contributed to the crowds was that the arboretum was hosting a Chihuly art exhibit. All of the installations were beautiful. They ranged from enormous to subtle.

The arboretum is already full of photo ops, but the art exhibit provided even more. There were even some professional photographers out with light reflectors and everything.

See that little girl behind the hulking guy in the black shirt? Well, apparently this wasn't her first photo session. She was voguing up a storm for the camera.

This girl was doing a photo shoot in an awesome rainbow dress. My mom thought that they might be taking pictures for her quinceanera. Teenagers keep looking younger to me every year.

Look! It's that sassy diva again. Work it, girl!

When I become suddenly and inexplicably wealthy, I will travel the world and take pictures of people taking pictures of people in front of famous places and things: The Tower of Pisa, The Eiffel Tower, The Golden Gate Bridge.

a song odyssey

Once upon a time, I was listening to my Walkman (that's right) on the school bus on my way home from middle school, when a glorious, epic song came on the radio. After the station played it, they didn't say the title or artist. So, typical of my adolescent obsessiveness, I listened to my Walkman every day on the way home from school for the next two months, hoping they would play that song again so I could find out the artist. (This was before the internet, guys. I remember listening to the radio in my bedroom with a blank tape at the ready, just in case one of my favorite songs came on so I could hit the "record" button.) I never heard that song on the radio again.

Over fifteen years later and that song still bothered me from time to time. I wanted to hear it again. The internet was around now, but I was 12 or 13 when I first heard that song and I couldn't remember any lyrics or even key words anymore. All I remembered was that there was a part about a space shuttle launch. I actually found lists on the internet like "top ten songs about space travel" and "space music playlist for astronauts." I still could not find it. I even brought up my dilemma to my boyfriend once. He was convinced I was talking about David Bowie's Space Oddity. I was sure I was not. But, really, what did I know anymore? Like I said, I couldn't remember any lyrics and I had only heard the song once in my life. Maybe it was Space Oddity. Or maybe it wasn't. Or maybe the song that sounded awesome to 12 year old me would sound awful to present day me. So, I gave up on my search about a year ago.

Then, yesterday while I was making up the bed, I heard the chorus to that song playing in the other room. I recognized it instantly and remembered all of the lyrics in the chorus "Earth below us, drifting, falling..." And it was still awesome! But it was a woman singing, not a man like I remembered. My boyfriend was listening to his Shiny Toy Guns station on Pandora and apparently they had done a cover of it.

 I would like to present to you: Major Tom by Peter Schilling

thanksgiving break: part two

I thought I should finish up my food and movie marathon week. Also, I can give my review of Cloud Atlas now since I've seen it. I liked it. Bam. That's my review. The awkward makeup when they tried to make the same actors different ages or races took you out of the movie a few times. All of the story lines were very different, from humorous to horrific, but they all carried on the theme of corruption and oppression and making a break for freedom from said corruption and oppression. Like I said: I liked it.

Monday

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We had lunch at Kobe Steak and Sushi, which apparently isn't cool enough to have a logo online, so I just added a generic picture of nigiri sushi, since that's what I always get when we eat there. My boyfriend loves sushi rolls: the more ingredients and more complicated, the better. I like plain simple nigiri: seafood and rice and delicious.

We saw Lincoln afterwards. When we got out of the theater and were walking back to the car, Perry asked how I liked the movie. I said I was disappointed. He shrugged and said that it was what he expected it would be: an overly romanticized look at Lincoln's presidency. It was. This movie wasn't bad, it just had no soul. Which is pretty bad, actually.

Tuesday

Okay. After day four days of going out to eat and the theater, what we most wanted to do was not go anywhere. So that's what we did.

Wednesday

No restaurant on Wednesday either. We were still living off of the mountains of to-go containers we had in the fridge from the previous places we had eaten. However, we did see a movie.

I didn't see Life of Pi in 3D since I think 3D is by and large a gimmick, but I think this one would have been worthwhile to see in 3D. It's a very beautiful movie. I have never read the book, so the ending really caught me off guard, which I like in movies. I felt like they explained too much to the viewer at the end, which I felt was unnecessary since most viewers were probably already connecting the dots between animal and human. However, one of the last lines of the film stuck with me "And so it goes with God." I didn't really understand that line until the next morning when I was brushing my teeth before work. It was Pan's Labyrinth kind of good and easily the best movie of the week.

thanksgiving

I had to work this Thanksgiving. Actually, I've had to work every Christmas and Thanksgiving for the past seven years. I work in a hospital laboratory so working holidays is standard. I see my parents fairly regularly anyway (they only live 30 minutes away) so missing out on a holiday has never been that big of a deal. I work my ten hours, and if I'm not too tired, I visit my family afterwards. This Thanksgiving I was feeling pretty alert when my shift ended, so I drove out to my parent's house.

When I walked up to their back porch, this is what I saw.

I suppose if my brother was going to torture himself by watching the Cowboys lose again, at least he was doing it with style. I imagined him getting ready for the game to start: putting his jersey on and my father and him carrying that big television outside. So much optimism.

My parents had three of their children and one grandchild visit them for Thanksgiving this year. My parents had five kids. Those kids obtained significant others and (some) had kids. Getting us all together at the same time is a mess. There are obligations to the families of the respective significant other, work, and just plain old conflict. My oldest sister has recently separated from her husband. My middle sister is dealing with having to split her child's first holidays with three sets of grandparents. My youngest sister is currently not on speaking terms with my middle sister. My brother is still upset that I am dating his ex-friend.

And then there's my parents. They greeted me and gave me my annual ornament, just like they have every Christmas for the past 8 years, even though they know I don't put up a tree. They shoveled piles of stuffing and cranberry sauce and turkey into tupperware containers when I said I had to go. My parents are really what keeps our family together. This family started with them and I worry that it will end with them too. Without my parents around, would my siblings and I still find the time to visit each other? All of them? My father hardly ever sees his family, and my mother broke off contact with hers a long time ago. Maybe this slow drifting apart is just the natural way of things as we all start our "own" families.

You're Old: Target Women

There's no real reason for this post; I just love this entire series of "target women" videos and I found myself watching some of them again today.

leggings or: how I learned to stop worrying and love dresses

Oh, hi. I'm not a fashion blogger. I'm not even fashionable. But I am a girl and I think almost every female in modernized countries has had a fashion epiphany at some point, so I'm going to share mine. To start off, I'm going to admit that my epiphany is something that's probably common sense to most other people of my sex, but it was pretty revolutionary to me, so that's all that matters.

I love dresses. I hate dresses. I have since I was in middle school. The right dress is comfortable and makes you look good with no effort on your part. The wrong dress is terribly uncomfortable and makes you look awful no matter what kind of figure you have. A t-shirt and jeans was just a lot easier, so why would I even bother with the more difficult dress option? As a result, I gave up on wearing dresses a long time ago.

I think it was last year that I started to feel dress envy. I would see girls at the store wearing dresses that were cute and casual and they looked effortless. I wanted that. Wearing jeans every day had finally started to feel limiting. It would be nice to throw a dress into the mix once in a while, so I decided to give dresses another shot.

It didn't go that well at first. I didn't want to wear floor length dresses, but I felt really exposed wearing what I thought was the most flattering length of dress on me (a few inches above the knee). I knew I wasn't really "exposed" so I thought  I was just going to have to get used to it. Instead, I just shoved the few dresses I had bought in the back of the closet rather than feel awkward and uncomfortable wearing one. I thought wearing tights might help, but I quickly realized that I can't wear tights over a hour without getting a run in them or snagging them on something. Plus, I still felt naked with them on and wearing tights in the Texas summer just seemed silly.

I think I saw a girl in the gorcery store wearing a dress with leggings when it finally clicked. I'm sure I had seen tons of girls wearing dresses with leggings before that, but these wheels turn slow, guys. Leggings. They're a lot thicker than tights, so I wouldn't feel naked and they're cotton so they won't snag like tights. 

I bought capri length ones for the summer and ankle length ones for the winter. And now my wardrobe options have completely opened up. There were still other problems I had with dresses, but they seemed a lot easier to solve than the "naked feeling" one. Dress a bit too baggy and shapeless? Put a belt on it.

Don't feel like showing your arms with a sleeveless dress?  Put on a cardigan, dummy.

It really did take too much time and effort to figure all of this out. Sometimes I feel really bad at being a girl. But still, I'm kind of proud of myself for persevering since I was pretty close to giving up and trying again in another 30 years.

thanksgiving break

Friday evening marked the beginning of my boyfriend's Thanksgiving week break. Normal university students only get a four day weekend for the holiday but, since Perry is student teaching middle-schoolers this semester, their breaks are his breaks and their break is a week long for Thanksgiving. His plans for his week of leisure are to go out to a restaurant and the movie theater every day until Thursday when I have to go back to work. Three days in, and we're still on track to realizing our goal.


Friday

 










+

Well I guess Jack in the Box isn't exactly fine dining or anything, but neither of us were very hungry and some fake tacos sounded pretty good as a fast snack before the movie. I liked Skyfall alright. The last act was a bit odd since it seemed like the tone of the movie really changed, but ultimately it was as expected: a fun action film that didn't insult your intelligence too much.


Saturday

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I guess Jack in the Box's fake tacos got us in the mood for real tacos because Perry suggested this new taco place the following day. I've never even heard of Torchy's Tacos before but he'd been there once on his lunch break at school. It was amazing. Really. I had the Mr. Orange and we're going back soon.

Flight was an alright movie also. The bottom line was "Drugs are bad, okay... and alcohol's a drug too, guys." I thought it was going to be more about a plane crashing but it was really about the pilot's life crash and burning due to addiction.

Sunday

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I am in love with this Greek restaurant. The dolmas, the octopus, the soup, the hummus. I have a hard time narrowing down my selection whenever I go there.

I can't exactly give a review about Cloud Atlas since we haven't seen it yet. There's only one showing at the local theater and it's still an hour away. I've see a preview for it and it seems like they're trying to tell a lot of stories, so I'm a bit skeptical about if they can tell them all well.

Whenever I get to do something wasteful and silly and fun like a week-long movie marathon I can't help but feel a bit guilty. I feel guilty about having the free time, the extra money, and someone else to do it with.  But since this is Thanksgiving week I think I'll just replace "guilty" with "thankful" and that will set everything right.

a gift

I was doing some pretty intense vacuuming the other day (that's right, intense) and I came upon this pretty thing under my bed and decided it deserved it's own post.

It's a book that was printed in 1885. It is one of my favorite things that I own and I keep it hidden under my bed and covered with a towel. This book is well over 100 years old now and I am terrified to even open it. The binding is so fragile I wonder how many more times it can be opened before it falls apart. Every page has oil and ink smudges left by past readers and I'm afraid to add more to it. But, I still can't help but look through it from time to time.

 There are about 12 summaries of Shakespeare plays in this book, each with an illustration.

Every one is like a work of art and the colors are still very bright. The pictures really are the star of the show, which makes sense since this book was supposed to be for children. What strikes me as odd for a children's book is exactly which scenes they chose to illustrate from each play.

Bloody ghosts of murder victims.

 Insanity. Don't worry kids she'll drown in the next scene.

I somehow made it through high school without reading Othello, but I'm pretty sure this sad, pretty lady ends up being smothered with a pillow shortly after this accusatory point.

Shakespeare definitely dealt with a lot of dark themes and they didn't candy coat if for the kids reading this book. I'm not complaining or anything. Most original fairy tales are rather dark. When I was a kid my two favorite animated movies to watch were The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Little Mermaid. And not the Disney The Little Mermaid. It was an anime version where the heroine creeps into the prince's bedroom at night to murder him and when she can't bring herself to do it, dies and turns into sea foam.

I feel like I'm getting off track here. Back to the book. I received it as a high school graduation gift from a friend of my family's. I was a bit embarrassed to receive a gift like this since I felt it was too much and I didn't even really know the person that gave it to me very well. Every family member I had was writing me a check for $20 and a man I hardly knew was giving me a beautiful antique. All I knew about him was that to 17 year old me, he was the most fascinating man alive. He was an author who designed his own house. He grew up in the Netherlands and lived there during the Nazi invasion. He played an accordion at our Christmas party. He was amazing and this book just punctuated that amazingness. He passed away five years ago. Whenever I see this book, it reminds me of him and I can remember only great things about him. That's a pretty good epitaph.

Trash pickup

My parents "adopted" a stretch of highway that runs in front of their house about four years ago. All this entails is picking up trash on the side of the road twice a year. Since my parents have five kids (two of which live at home) it's normally not that hard for them to find a few volunteers to help them out. This Sunday, my middle sister and I were the volunteers. I remember that the first time we did trash pickup it was awful. There was a total of six people helping but it still took all afternoon. It was hot, sweaty, stinky work. Since that first time we've gotten a bit smarter about it. We only do trash pickups in the spring or fall when the weather's nice, we wear tall rubber boots, and we bought trash grabber sticks so we didn't have to bend down every few feet.

I think we got this trash pickup day done in two hours. It helped that my dad had to be done by noon so he could watch the Green Bay Packers game. We picked up a total of 12 bags of trash and a kitchen chair. Not bad.

from left to right- trash, sister, father

Every time we do trash day, there is at least one really strange thing we find on the side of the road. This outing was pretty tame. However, we did find our first dead dog. And dead rooster. And skunk tail. Now that I think about it, it was a big day for dead things.

tsunami

I made the mistake of watching this four days ago
and I've had dreams of swirling vortexes every night since. They're not exactly malicious. One night, from a safe and high vantage point I watched as an ice and snow vortex gently carried away a ship. Last night it was a pretty vortex in a pond at night filled with flowers and magical colored lights. I'm sure this is just my unconscious mind trying to cope with and soften terrifying images that I should have never willingly exposed myself to.

But this is real life stuff. This was something a lot of people had to live through and will deal with for the rest of their lives. As an atheist, when bad things happen to me or ones I love, I see it as random bad luck or one of those things that just happens from time to time in everyone's life since no one can completely be free from sadness or loss. I think it takes much more determination to be a theist and experience something like the 2004 tsunami. Most theists try to take into account a loving God when something bad or even terrible happens to them and they end up viewing it as a trial of sorts. But to lose everything you own and everyone you love in a matter of hours seems like too much to bear.

The Blood Brothers - Laser Life

I've given up on trying not to force my musical taste upon strangers. Music is a big part of what makes me happy, so I've decided to finally succumb to the urge on my blog. You've been warned.

The band The Blood Brothers does not fit the genre of music I tend to listen to. When I first heard this song almost six years ago, I didn't like it. I didn't like the high pitched vocals of the one singer and what sounded like total chaos towards the end of the song complete with unintelligible screaming.

However, a day later I found myself listening to it again. Two weeks later I had bought the album and I was in love. I still am.

It's hard for me to pinpoint what it is about any band that I like. With The Blood Brothers I would try to explain it as their controlled chaos and how dense their songs are. Most of their tracks have a beat or a shift that they could probably make into a whole other song, to the point where what could have been half an album for some bands becomes a three minute song for The Blood Brothers.

pride and prejudice

Yesterday I almost had a legitimate argument about artificial intelligence.

My boyfriend mentioned that I should finish playing Mass Effect 3. I got about 3/4th of the way through it and stopped when all of the spoilers about the ending leaked out. I told him I didn't feel the need to finish it since I already knew what option I would pick at the end - destroy all inorganic life forms. My boyfriend is very pro inorganic life in Mass Effect and thinks all sentient machines are our friends and we'll create a better universe together. I'm very anti inorganics because I think they will inevitably become more intelligent than us and then all bets are off. With our lesser developed human brains we can't predict how they'll act. However, I have a strong feeling they'll just kill us off. I accused him of anthropomorphizing machines, he accused me of inorganic intolerance. It had to be one of my silliest and nerdiest moments to date. At 30. Come on.

I was able to cool down enough to tell him that we could stay together for now, but if the inevitable robotic uprising happens during our lifetime, we are to be sworn enemies.

do not be deceived; sexy robots will destroy us all

a terrible "get out and vote" pep talk

I voted early in the presidential election this year. A voting location is only a mile away from my house, so it was really convenient. And I went in the afternoon, so there wasn't any line. Early voting is great.

You know who else loves early voting? Old white folks. They were the only other people there. As a half Hispanic 30 year old, I felt a little out of place. While I was at a touch screen voting booth contraption, I could hear a woman being told by one of the voter-monitor-volunteer type people that she couldn't "help" her friend vote.  The woman explained that her friend had dementia so he needed her help. That was something I've never thought about before.

If I'm going to be cynical and...realistic, I'd say that unless you're voting for a Republican presidential candidate, your vote doesn't really matter in Texas and hasn't mattered since about 1980. And I could say that a two party system doesn't really give anyone much of a choice. And I could just say my vote is pointless. It probably is. However, it took literally ten minutes out of my day to do. I've spent a lot more time and energy doing things that were much more of a waste (like seeing Taken 2) so there's no way I'm not going to vote.

an evening with my brother

Tonight's purchases:

4 Bavarian creams from Dunkin Donuts.
2 tickets to Taken 2.
2 burgers and a bag of fries from Mooyah.

Save me from myself.

time waste

Life. Life is beautiful. Life is an awesome responsibility. We are given such a finite amount of time to experience what can only be experienced as a human with human thoughts and emotions. We are given such freedom and such beauty to behold. And this self awareness, this knowledge is such a burden. It is so terrifying. How are we to fill our time? What are we to do with ourselves? How do we make this one life, these few moments which are our existence matter? Please, someone just tell us what to do! We are so connected and yet so alone in the universe. Just give me a distraction from my insignificance, from my inevitable demise, so I can ignore the howling void of eternity and nothingness that surrounds me!

Are you suffering from this human affliction also? Well, just buy a house. It will eat up most of your weekends so you won't have time to sit around thinking and having existential crises.

This weekend I painted a side of the house. That's right, just one side. It's an unpleasant and labor intensive job, so every year for the past three years I've painted one side of the house in the fall. It was three years ago that I noticed that the paint around certain areas of the house was peeling badly, so I had a house-painter stop buy to give me a quote to do the job. He said it would be five thousand dollars. I thanked him for his time and told him I'd think about it. After he drove away I laughed and laughed and laughed. $5,000. If a mechanic or plumber quoted me $5,000 I would probably meekly nod my head and sign a check. But to have my house painted? No. My car wasn't going to blow or up my house wasn't going to flood if I did it wrong. The worst that was going to happen was that my house's paint job would look wrecktastic. And it already did, so what was holding me back?

I bought an extension ladder and some paint supplies a few months later and got to it. My father had warned me about buying a house with wood siding. And in defense of myself and houses with wood siding, I don't think repainting a side of a house every year is that big of a burden. In general. In my case, the guy who renovated the house reused old, old, old wood boards in certain areas.  In order to make them match the smooth new wood boards, he just iced a quarter inch layer of spackle on top of them and painted it. Apparently this is a bad idea. I'm sure spackle has its uses, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. I can tell exactly which boards are the old spackle laden ones, because they are the ones with paint peeling off of them terribly.

Ideally, these old boards should be replaced, but I don't have the money for that. So, I just hack away as much of the spackle as I can, smooth it out, and repaint it. I have a dream of re-siding the house with the no-rot fake wood that some of the neighbors have. What am I doing to obtain this dream? Absolutely nothing. That kind of job will cost about $15,000 so I should be saving up some money starting three years ago.

Anyway, the side of the house I did this weekend wasn't that hard since it was the side of the house with the carport attached to it. In order to reach the tallest part of the house, all I had to do was climb onto the carport roof. I do have that extension ladder, but I also have a fear of heights, so I try to stay off of it as much as possible.

Here's an example of what I was dealing with.

And here's a section after a lot of mind numbing scraping.

At this point I sand the boards to make them a bit less bumpy and caulk and prime. Spackle is not invited. I probably should have included an after photo...

pumpkin carving

I went to my parent's house today and we had a spontaneous pumpkin carving party. My father bought a ridiculously large pumpkin, which resulted in a 30 minute photo session where my sister stuck her infant inside the excavated gourd. It seemed traumatic, but my niece took it well until about the last ten minutes. It bothers me when people treat babies like accessories. Was it cute? I don't know, maybe after you photo shop the pumpkin slime off the baby. I feel like I'm getting off track here.

My six year old nephew cleaned out and drew a face on his first Halloween pumpkin. Everyone seemed a lot more excited about this than he did.

As usual, it was the grownups who had the best time. Here's my brother.

He was pretty proud of his pumpkin for about 15 minutes. Then my father finished carving his.

My dad liked a design on the back of a pumpkin carving kit he bought, so I drew it for him and he carved it out. We're the freaking jack-o-lantern dream team.