The First Annual Holiday Card Awards!

Happy Holidays everyone! I am enjoying this holiday season SO much that i decided to celebrate some of the warmth i received via the postal service during this joyous time of year. i even have pictures of all of the cards so you can really experience it with me.....the mail is all in for Christmas, so there would be no better time for such fun. join me, will you?

Our first award is titled "The card i received with the best landscape". There are so many different kinds of holiday cards, you know!

and the winner is......Modamas Fine Painting! Modamas Fine Painting painted our house in SF, so it was all pretty for selling. In all of the years i lived in California, my favorite apartment was right around the corner from where this pic was taken.


This leads me to our second award called "the card that made me the most homesick"
and the winner is.......

Modamas Fine Painting again! Wow! they are really starting strong!

Next is a very special award...."the card where my name was most accurately portrayed AND spelled". This is a tough one...i didn't change my name when i got married, i don't like certain nicknames, and my last name can be a doozy to spell. and the winner is?......

Modames Fine Painting Again! The got my name %100 perfectly!

And our final award. The most coveted award of all. It is the "this card is so special that it almost makes me forget about ALL of the other cards i received".

The Winner is.....
whatever. have you figured it out yet? we didn't get one single holiday card from anyone i ever met in california, including my family. not one card from a friend. none. wait.....except modama's fine painting.

maybe the day after christmas our mailbox will be overflowing with cards declaring happy holiday wishes from people that love and miss us and wish we never left California. If that is the case, those cards will be eligible for next year's awards. Hopefully there will be more categories next year.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

at this point, neil might suspect me of having a little thing goin' on with santa

seriously. it's like santa is my new BFF. i have proof:

you know what that is? it's a mother effing christmas tree. it's a beacon in our window, declaring our love for the big fat man in the red suit.

i also went to a cookie exchange with a bunch of catholic school teachers. man, can they put down some wine at 2pm on a sunday!

i did an ornament exchange, also. but this was just with some awesome ladies who can also put down quite a bit of wine. it was a dinner though, so it's not so scandalous.

i bought presents. i wrapped them. i even bought little sparkly gift tags. they will be shipped tomorrow cos they can't arrive late! it's christmas, people! get to it!

neil's sister will be coming over on x-mas day. i got a ham.

i even got a holiday tunes CD. it kind of sucks.

so my point is that i have realized my way around this christmas hell. it is for folks who eat, drink, shop, and like sparkly things. people knock valentines for being a holiday "invented by hallmark", but at least everyone's cards are on the table (ooh! pun!) for that one. christmas is supposed to be about the birth of christ. for those who believe, this should be a very large deal. but somehow it has been turned into a blow-up plastic santa lawn ornament competition for the masses. and these are the masses that believe! i declare that i will no longer see what Target calls christmas. i will make my own. and i will try to get neil to let us name our first born son "linus", as linus seems to be the only one that gets it. and he's a 5 year old cartoon character. sheesh. so on to more food, booze, and sparkles for me, i guess.......

part 2: rememer my shock at 15? try 1.....

and that was at the warmest time of the day. last time i checked, it was -9. minus 9 Fahrenheit which is 41 degrees colder than freezing. i am seriously considering converting to Celsius (just on an emotional level because i can't figure out how to reprogram our various thermometers). it's such a kick in the balls to hit zero and have nothing to show for it other than "now it is just really a lot more colder than before when it was really a lot cold and freezing already".

some of us are having a harder time adjusting than others. every time i step outside, the cold causes my throat and lungs to sieze up. it takes a bit of getting used to, is all i am saying.

and the dogs keep coming down with "snow toes". they haven't learned that this kind of cold necessitates their visits outside to be incredibly efficient. they dilly dally around and then inevitably have what i would call a "WTF" moment when their little toes are just too cold, too fast. they try to walk without the use of their feet. they don't know that this isn't possible. it's so pathetic that i can't even laugh like the heartless christmas hating biotch i am. poor pups....

merry christmas to all..... just 11 more days until the Best Day Ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

our perfect dogs

some dogs are just born perfect:
but not our dogs. this was taken after moose coughed up (and out) one of the treats we were using to lure them into place. he coughed. treat flew. and he gobbled it down, for the second time.


rewind. first i had to just get the dogs to sit together, facing the same direction.
done!

then for the antlers. when moose graduated his basic obedience class, he was the first in his class to be able to tolerate wearing a party hat to celebrate. it's a simple enough process. show dog hat. treat. move hat closer to dog. treat. baby steps until you finally have trained the dog to associate the annoyance of a party hat on its head with treats.
sttttaaaaayyyy.....

success!


well, we never trained moose to tolerate items on matilda's head. silly us for not thinking that one through.
note: matilda antler in moose's mouth:


and to be honest, matilda was never really taught the party hat/treat game. she just tolerates our crap because she is insanely loyal and eager to please. she was nervous...ears back and eyes looking for reassurance.


maybe moose being equally humiliated made her feel better. because in time, they both seemed to relax and ease into it:

until it all fell to crap.....again.....and i just needed to give Tillies some scritchies as thanks.
i love our dogs. this is no secret. i loved them as much as i loved them until i saw this picture:

and then i loved them more. what a lovely mess they are. i wouldn't have it any other way.

15

i need to call Molly back. She left me a message yesterday..she left THE message yesterday. it went like this: "i hate thanksgiving. i hate christmas, too. i hate a lot of things, but i don't hate you." pretty much sums it up, don't you think? well, it does for me.

i tried to be a person who likes the holidays. i went to Target and got a little something for Walter, but he didn't really enjoy it.....
don't worry, we will try again. the hat is actually made for cats. the cats don't know this yet. but if christmas is going to suck for me, it is going to suck for EVERYONE.

i am normally not much of christmas shopper, either. but i tried. i bought gifts for friends. really cool gifts, too. and then the door latch to neil's office failed and moose chewed them all up when we went to the movies. merry christmas everyone...er....Moose.

yesterday, i put up christmas lights outside. just one string of the new fancy LED lights they make. not knowing where the extension cord was, i just put up the string so Neil could easily just connect the extension cord when he got home. but i put the string up backwards, so he had to redo it all anyways.

i am just very bad at this.

the one thing that i am enjoying is the weather. it is snowing. but it is 15 degrees out. 15 degrees is an adventure, people. that crap is COLD. numbingly cold. awesomely cold. everything is prettier in the snow. but i can only enjoy it up close for very short periods of time when the big 15 is in effect.

even my car is cuter in the snow:

somehow, while my body systematically shuts down in the cold, the dogs take to it particularly well...a leisurely squirrel patrol:


moose was made for snow.



i am working on it. it's my Obi One Kenobi as far as this whole holiday season thing goes so i'd better suck it up, huh? please send scarves.

Milk

i have long believed that one should not be allowed to live in San Francisco before seeing the movie The Times of Harvey Milk, the documentary that won the Academy Award for best documentary the year it came out. that year was 1984, by the way. 1984 was quite a while ago. Anyways, it is not so much that this movie is one of my favorites. i mean, how can a documentary be a favorite movie? rather, it has always just been the subject matter...important times in San Francisco, led by a man named Harvey Milk. It is the movie that documents not only this man's life and his impact on The World, but it also documents what makes me most proud to be from San Francisco.

So obviously, i have been waiting for the release of Milk with bated breathe. i remember, while we were still in SF, thinking "how awesome will it be to see Milk in Denver, and get to see all the SF scenery as an extra nostalgic bonus?" i can make a mountain from a mole hill like no one's business, folks. Screw T-Day. Milk is out.

So we went and we saw. i would break down the demographic as this: 80% older straight and gay couples who already knew the "story". A couple of first straight dates (the awkwardness of straight first dates is palpable and it can take over a whole theater if done badly enough), a few younger gay couples, and one straight married couple who used to live in SF and who have very high expectations of this movie because the wife is borderline obsessed with spreading the knowledge of the man Harvey Milk.

and it was good. it was really good. it was good enough that i have opened up the SF Toll to include this movie as well. it does its job and tells the story, and it does it really really well. in fact the most annoying thing about the movie is that it shows that we were smarter in '78 than we are now. we are repeating our previous mistakes, but worse than the first time. the only fault in the movie is that we, the people of 2008, are stupid and the movie tells us this. but that is not the movie's fault, i think. don't shoot the messenger....pun intended.

what struck me was the conversations outside of the theater when the movie was done. is Milk a gay story? Yes. Is it a San Francisco story? Yes. it is also a story about humanity and civil rights. It is an American story. it is a huge chunk of our...yes, "OUR" history and all the younger folks in the theater had no effing clue about any of it before tonight. but now, if they want to live in san francisco, i will let them. yay them! have fun trying to pay rent! ooh, wait...not where i was planning on going with this.

i watched an interview with Sean Penn once. he basically said that if you are making a movie and you need to heighten the situation to get an audience's reaction, you are actually providing a disservice. you don't get to lie to the audience. that cheapens the acting process and the experience of the movie-goer. it is a simple concept that i appreciate him vocalizing. he honored this in Milk.

so yeah, Milk was great. it gives a bit more insight into HM's personal life. But The Times of Harvey Milk is equally great. both tell the story, but the actors that play the real people are probably better looking. if that is where your priorities lie, get thee to a theater soon. if not, update your netflix, quick like.

oh sorry...i have gone on for so long about Milk. it must be all the twinkies i ate.

and now, onto the real important stuff......christmas FAIL:

The Mandatory T-day Thankful List

• Neil.

• Having so many pets that if one or some of them are being terribly annoying and/or ill-behaved, there is always another animal around who is being lovely. Most of the time, this weight falls on the guinea pigs. If they would stop going to the bathroom and if I wasn’t allergic to them, they would be Perfect.

• That Gertie came home after being attacked by a wild (or just very bad) animal. Wait, rewind. That Gertie lived through the attack and then came home with all of her broken parts and that there is such good veterinary care around here that sewed her back up.

• The radio show “wait wait don’t tell me” of which I can now listen to at my leisure via podcast. It makes me feel smart while I laugh. This is a stellar combo that I highly recommend.

• The Daily Show for the same reasons just mentioned.

• The television show “Life”. It’s just good AND it has a red head in the lead. In general, I am a huge fan of police dramas (special T-Day shout out to Benson and Stabler) but there is something refreshingly new about Life. Check it out if you haven’t already.

• Facebook and blogspot for allowing the world to keep in touch in such a passive fashion.

• The Arcade Fire. good band.
  

• Sarah Palin for motivating all those fence sitters to vote against her. Wait, that wasn’t on purpose? But she was SO good at it!

• Our neighbor for bringing over fresh tarragon from her garden. How did I go that long without knowing how yummy fresh tarragon is?

• Satsuma oranges for always being easy to peel, seedless, and as sweet as can be. You rule over all other orangey citruses. Really, the only thing that keeps Cuties at the top is their little stickers. I mean, would Finney get all excited if I put a sticker on her that said “satsuma”? no. so all the moms buy cuties. I get it. I just don’t like it.

• Teenage vampire crap and yes I did already go and see the Twilight movie and I liked it, too. (Edward should have been more sparkly, though. darn you low budget!)
  

• Wind chimes. I need to get some of those.

• My camelback water bottle. Crap, it is dry here. Might as well mention shea butter while I am on this particular topic. and my humidifier. and how when i get olive oil on my hands when i cook now, i don't wash it off. precious moisture.....you will not be wasted.
  

• Potted plants, red paint, coffee, emergen-c, the furminator (it works), scarves, and Neil again. He’s worth a double mention.

Oh yeah and friends and family and my health and all the other stuff people say when they won’t bother to REALLY think about what it is they are thankful for. You hear that Family? I may be in the thankful circle via ichat, but IT'S ON….(blame Anna, it was her idea to get all technologically savvy).

happy birthday

this is my favorite picture of my mom and me:



today would have been her 65th birthday.

i had a dream last night that i was trying to serve her a piece of cake, but in doing so i knocked about six pieces on the floor. we laughed.

that's about as good as it gets, i think. happy birthday, ma. you are missed so very much.