Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Nose Sweat.

1. Black Friday.
Mr Swami started black friday off with a bang. I heard him say the S word then run two quick laps behind the computer desk. Turns out? He fell asleep at the mouse and dumped coffee on the keyboard. He drained the keyboard & set it to dry over a floor vent once he had calmed himself. Then he remembered that we had given away our newer spare keyboard and the 'puter did not want to recognize the antique one we found in the basement. Luckily once it dried out it worked okay.

We ended black friday by going to see A Christmas Carol - presented in the original Klingon, not Charles Dickens' inferior English adaptation. Actually, A Klingon Christmas Carol (at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis) was so much fun! It told the basic story of bad Scrooge, 3 visiting ghosts and redemption from the point of view of the Klingon warrior culture. All the actors spoke only Klingon, with English subtitles projected above the stage, like they sometimes do for opera. And there was a Vulcan narrator on stage now and then who narrated a bit in English. I think Mr Swami & I have found a new Holiday Tradition!

2. Cyber Monday.
Not as many free shipping offers this year as opposed to previous years. I ordered from a couple of places but was remarkably restrained. Hooray for me!

3. Nose Sweat.
I have been watching too much Food Network lately and it has started to drive me crazy how often the chefs they show in cooking shows are dripping sweat from the tip of their nose! Kitchens are hot places so this must be just a fact of chef life. Anyway - when they have a close-up of a chef and a drop of sweat drops from his (usually his, haven't seen a her yet) nose while he is looking down - I do not need another close-up to know that the sweat has fallen into whatever he is cooking/plating at the time. Now I wonder how much nose sweat I have consumed in my lifetime. I mean, really wonder. Maybe even freak out.

Oh Crap-ito

It was nice to have Mr Swami home for a 4-day weekend.

It was nice of Mr Swami to cook us a huge skillet breakfast (making lunch quite unnecessary) for 3 of those 4 days.

But.

He used up waaaay too many potatoes! (Being a midwest country boy he likes potatoes for breakfast.) Now I have to go to the grocery store two.days.before.Thanksgiving because I don't have enough left to make mashed potatoes for everyone. *cries* I HATE the grocery store in the days before Thanksgiving! HATE IT!!!!

Easy Friday

Mr Swami has the day off so we slept in really late. He made me breakfast in bed. :)

Now we are putting up Christmas lights & wreathes & snowflakes. We need to buy some outdoor timers this year. In previous years we just used one of those click-on things with the little remote - but this year I think we will just switch to a couple of timers and be done with it. We need two timers because we have stuff on both sides of our driveway and this is the easiest way to be sure we never suck up an extension cord in our snowblower. Tom tried that last year and while it was a very exciting 2 seconds of his life he doesn't want to do it again!


Now we are loading up some old electronics to take to the County site. Old TV, old Brother All-in-One, etc. Our plan is to make the third garage parkable again. For some reason the third garage became a dumping ground a few years ago.

Fifty degrees and beautiful in MN!

Birthdays & Random Stuff

Today my baby boy turns 24. Yikes! I'm not even saying how old my oldest is, lol. (Her birthday was the 15th.) We celebrated son's bday this weekend and got him a ice cream cake from DQ - his perennial request. I think that's his request because I don't particularly like ice cream cake so the chances of me stealing an extra slice is exactly zero and the cake will be his all his!

I've been trying to figure out the nature of my likely craziness. I can see Evil Sister's craziness & faults very clearly. (She's hyper-controlling and the queen of passive-aggressive back-stabs.) Other sister is also a bit nuts (non-conforming?) but in ways that are rarely if ever focused on me. So I figure I must have some similar flaws. Mr Swami refuses to discuss this issue with me, which is both reassuring and worrying.

Today I am doing my first Thanksgiving shopping trip - all the non-perishables. I hate shopping when the holiday zombie shoppers are blocking the aisles looking for stuff they only buy once a year. Usually the zombies are a husband & wife with a cart parked between them and they cluelessly block the entire width of the aisle while trying to decide whether pumpkin pie filling and pumpkin puree are the same thing, and what is the difference between condensed & evaporated milk.

I bought outdoor LED lights from Lowe's yesterday. The truly amazing thing about this is that Outdoor Light Grinch Mr Swami specifically asked me to! He did a lot of work this fall replacing some fence posts near our driveway - now he wants a 100ft light string along the top of the fence so everyone can admire his lovely posts. Okay by me!

Disaster Avoided!

Whew! I have spent the past week searching for my address book. I love my address book! It has all my secret passwords & personal stuff in it, and a few phone #s and addresses that I don't have stored anywhere online - so losing it was a disaster!

I always keep it in the same spot in our home office. Sometimes it will be briefly left by another telephone but it is never just arbitrarily stuck someplace. Tom knows where I keep it and he is positively anal about putting stuff like that where it belongs if he finds it in a wrong place. Yet somehow? When we re-organized the family room (moving most of the furniture) my address book wound up hiding between paperback books that I read years ago, on a bottom shelf of a large bookcase. I'm sure I did it. It did not "hide" on its own. *whacks self in head*

This is what it's going to be like getting old, isn't it? Losing your own stuff to random inconsistencies. *cries*

Tickets! Get Yer Tickets Here!!!

Today I am ordering theater tickets for the December Holidays, when my family will be here. This is a lovely way to go broke, lol. Six tickets for Ella and eight tickets for Triple Espresso. I can't think of a nicer way to go broke.

In other news - Holy Moly is it nice outside! With apologies to the sinking Seychelles - I really like global warming falls.

Wednesday Randoms

1. Your Stimulus Dollars are finally resurfacing the road I use to get into town. I wasn't sure if you would get it done before winter, but you are. So thank you!

2. I am getting about 3 Christmas catalogs in the mail every day now. I love them! I go through each one and carefully fold down the page corner when I find something I really want/need. Okay - want. Sometimes I will find 10 or 12 things in each one! Then I throw the catalogs away.

3. They are trying to ruin Splenda! (I put 2 Splenda packets into my morning mug of coffee; it is an essential on my shopping list.) Yesterday as I was tossing the box of packets into my cart I noticed that it said "now with fiber" and had a whole little front-of-box spiel about how most people don't get enough fiber. So I flipped the box over & checked the ingredients. The "fiber" they are adding is corn cellulose, which I assume is the crap left over after they have squeezed everything else out of the corn kernal. Or maybe it is just the cobs - who knows? One thing I do know is that I do NOT want another source of corn by-product in my diet! Corn is evil! I did find that the smaller boxes were still corn-free so bought 2 smaller boxes. Phew!

4. Mr Swami has requested more outdoor Christmas lights this year. I almost fell off my chair! This is the man who hates putting up lights. However, he did replace a bunch of fence posts this summer and he wants to run a string of lights along the topline of the fence. All the better to admire his new posts I guess.

5. Oh! Bonus on the newly surfaced road! I can listen to my car's CD player again. I gave up on it a year ago because the endless potholes made every CD skip like crazy.