Wish One Down!!!

At work every year we have a rotating holiday schedule. One year I have Thanksgiving and New Years off, the next year Ｉget Christmas off. Because I work graveyard, my holiday is actually the night leading into the holiday. So not Christmas night, but Christmas Eve night.

This year is my year to get Christmas off, which is great because I'd rather be at my mom's on Christmas Eve as it's too hard to work the night before, drive an hour and a half to my mom's, enjoy the day, sleep at some point, and  then drive back for my shift that night. It can be done, but I hate it. My normal weekly shift begins on Wednesday and I have every other weekend off. This is my weekend off and I was planning to go to my mom's for the weekend, but I would have had to go back to work for Wednesday night, have Thursday at my mom's, and be back to work Friday night.

My counter part (there are only one of us on shift at a time, 3 shifts a day- so only 6 of us total) has offered to work my Wednesday shift so I don't have to go home until CHRISTMAS NIGHT!...

My Christmas wish was a week at my mom's and enough money to buy the gifts I wanted for family and friends. I'm sure someone with a big check will knock on my door any minute! lol

Merry Christmas!!

11 Pipers Piping

Last night Burp and I spent the evening some very good friends of ours in the car, sipping cocoa (or mocha), eating cookies and driving around looking at Christmas lights. Usually I burn us a cd of Christmas songs, but this year I just didn't get that far. Not long into the fun, I was quite excited because the station we were listening to played my fav. bands back to back- Weezer and Green Day, Burp however didn't feel this was Christmasy enough. He demanded we sing Christmas carols.......

Apparently, it has been many years since I sang carols.

He doesn't pick an easy song like Rudolph, or Frosty, or even Santa Claus is Coming to Town...... No, he picks the 12 Days of Christmas. We made it through the bird section just fine, 5 GOLDEN RINGS!
Beyong that, we were screwed.

Ty: I think it's 6 Swans a laying
Me:  Hell, I thought it was swimming.
Ty: That's it.... 6 Swans a swimming!
Me: Ok, What's 7?
Ty: Uhhhhhhh
Me: Where are the Milking Maids?
Ty: Is it 7 Lords Leaping?
Me: 8 Maids a Milking, 7 Swans a Swimming, 6 Geese a Laying...
Burp: 9 Ladies Dancing!
Me: You're just being silly now.
Burp: No the Ladies are next.
Ty: It could be...
Me: Do you know 12??? We should start backwards.
Ty: I have no idea what twelve is.

(There is much laughing and bad singing involved in this debate)
Me: ok, I know... (At this point, I grab my phone and start dialing)

ring....... ring.......... HELLO?

Me: MOM!!!! Quick.... what are the gifts of  the 12 days of Christmas?
 .............silence............
Mom: Ohhhh geez Psam.... I don't know....Where are you stuck?
Me: 8-9-10-11-12
Mom: Uhhhhhh ....
Ducky in the background...: 10 cows a humping

 Thank you Ducky!

***

Some people look at me weird when I try to explain how close my mom and I are, even though I commonly might go 3 weeks without talking to her. It's this kind of stuff. (except I usually get an answer) My mom is not thrown off, dismayed, disturbed, or confused by my random anytime of day or night calls.

Me: Mom.... quick, go outside. Look up. Turn west. What's that really bright star kind of to the south, low?

Mom: Psam...... that's not a star... that's...blah blah blah... (see I will obviously make this call again.)

Me: Mom, what was that movie where.......?

Me: Mom, I'm making..... what temperature? How long?

Me: Mom, where do I find that verse where God tells ....?

Me: Mom, Anne Boleyn had six fingers, right?

Thank you for being a cool mom!

For thos of you about to google, or call your own moms....

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Twelve drummers drumming,
Eleven pipers piping,
Ten lords a-leaping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree!

Burp was totally right, and we (in very wrong, random order) got all of the gifts except 11 pipers piping.... we never even came close.

Update: Gracie

I just thought I'd pass along a little update.

I saw Gracie the other night at Cub Scouts. She was up walking! She doesn't have full control over her leg but she can get around a bit. I am hopeful that she'll be just fine.

Talk Thursday: Once Upon A Holly Berry

For me, Christmas is all about family and tradition. I can't think of anywhere I would rather be during the holidays than in my mom's kitchen chatting as she stirs something bubbling on the stove with a Kahlua in my hand and Christmas music playing lightly from the other room. I even love that I hate her annoying-as-fuck Christmas clock.

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without my mom. There has always been other people around during the holidays, but it's still all about us. (At least in my mind)

When I was in elementary school, mom and I used to paint Christmas scenes on store windows and stuff all around town. I lived for this.. Not because I'm overly artistic (cuz I'm not) but we just had a lot of fun. It was kind of like the kick off to the holiday season.

Every year mom and I would drive an hour to go to the tree farm, walk through and pick out our tree, and chop that sucker down. Hmmmm except for the year we got the live tree. LOL. The tree was actually not bad, but the problem is that you have to figure out what to do with the stupid thing after the decorations are removed. I think ours lived in it's pot for another year then finally found a spot in the front corner of our yard. The tree never grew much. It pitifully stood there for years as a sickly reminder to all those stupid soft hearts out there that sometimes it's kinder to kill the damned tree.

Every year my mom and I would go out to my grandma's and cut holly (see a very weak tie-in to the topic) and cedar and mom would decorate around the windows with them and lights and it looked so wonderful and Christmasy.

As I got older, we became bakers- breads and cookies and candies and liquor. Truth be told, this is probably where my love for cooking comes from and though I'm a wiz in the kitchen, my first passion is baking. We made pumpkin bread and apricot-cranberry bread, sugar cookies, gingerbread bears (cuz men are just too passé), peanut butter balls, chocolate covered cherries, and toffee, and mom makes Kahlua. And the cherries... OMG... lemme tell you about the cherries. Mom would go around February and get a big ass gallon jar of maraschino cherries. She'd drain out most of the liquid and top it off with brandy and let it sit for the next ten months. BOY HOWDY. Like ten and you were trashed. As I got a little older, I discovered that the cherry flavored brandy tasted great in a coke.... or a slurpee. There were a few Christmases toward the end of high school that I was a little suprised there was still brandy in the jar come December.

Growing up, Christmas wasn't a holiday, it was a season that usually started the weekend after Thanksgiving and, if we were lucky, we were able to stretch it until right before our birthdays in February. I hate that I live in a different town and Christmas with my mom has pretty much been reduced to 1 day, maybe 2. I hate that I haven't given Burp a sense of those traditions. We kind of have one.. We usually invite some friends and go to Dutch Bros and get something warm to drink and stop and buy some cookies and drive around listening to Christmas music and look at Christmas lights. It's fun and he always looks forward to it. He also looks forward to doing the surprise stocking stuffer with grandma. And crazy Christmas socks. HE LOVES THEM!!

My very favorite part of Christmas is looking for the perfect gift for each person. I love it. (I wish I could be a professional shopper... I could get into that) If I could have a Christmas wish granted, it would be a whole week at my mom's for Christmas, and enough money to buy what I really wanted for people.

Regardless, I love Christmas..... as much as I try to pretend it isn't coming this year.

House panel passes college football playoff bill

Read the ESPN article -->> "House panel passes college football playoff bill"


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 It's about time Congress got to the things that really matter!!!

OMG It's COLD!!!!

18 degrees out... The only time I've been warm in the last few days, has been in the shower.

"!8 feels like 9" What the hell? Can you really tell that 9 degrees feels that much colder than 18? It's all fucking cold!!

I need an electric blanket...

Talk Thursday: We Are Glass

I spent most of this week pretty depressed and when I first saw this topic I saw my life as little shards of glass and was at a total loss as to how to put them back together. I usually have an "Everything will work out" attitude and I spend so much of my life pretending that everything is ok that when something big comes along that I can't ignore, it devastates me. Everything comes crashing down around me..... That is where I've been all week.

I was going to try a poem. I haven't written one in soooo long. I had a few lines jotted down... It was so emo. (I hate to admit it, but my poetry was emo before emo was emo! I may have invented emo)

Two things... sometimes the simplest things help ground you. I talked to my parents... They're so wonderful. And a really good friend found me after 10 years of lost contact. It warms the heart a bit to find out that someone spent the last 3 days setting up myspace and facebook and all sorts of accounts- just trying to find you... (That's why I never gave up the Psam name... in hope that my old chat friends would find me.) I am so happy to have a chance to have Kris in my life again.

Thinking of Kris made me think of my life 10 years ago. What a mess I'd made of things. I was 23, living in a fucked up situation in Canada, a million miles from my mom.... hmmmmm then I thought to 10 years before that.... 13... Yeah, I've already established that my life was a wreck at 13.... a pattern? I went back another 10 years... I was 3, my mom had just left my dad and all of our belongings in Germany and come back home to my Grandma and Grandpa to start over...... yes.. I think there's a pattern.

And not once was I broken beyond repair. I am not glass.

WE ARE NOT GLASS!!!

Glass doesn't heal. Glass can't really be fixed. Glass is thrown out and replaced. And yes, I have been broken many, many times, little cracks or chips and big, huge gaping wounds, but I have never been broken beyond repair. I mend, I heal, I pick myself up and dust myself off, and I overcome.

I refuse to be glass.

Another Thanksgiving Post

I used to have a reoccurring dream every Thanksgiving, for a week or two every year.

It always started with a picnic in the woods- me, Mom, and Asshole. Suddenly we're being chased through the forest by Indians with tomahawks and arrows whizzing past our heads. I'm weaving between trees and suddenly realize that my mom and Asshole aren't around. Fearing the worst, I keep running and come out into a circular clearing lined with painted, spear jabbing savages. I look over to a fire spit and see Asshole roasting above the flames. I panic and look around for my mom, and she is in the center of a crowd being crowned their Indian Princess. She smiles.

Knowing that she's ok, I turn and run away. Soon the forest ends and I come out of the woods and into the sand dunes above our house. I run down the hill and go home. When I open the front door, everything is where it should be, but everything is white on white. It's weird, but I'm so thirsty and hungry- so I go to the fridge and opening it find 3 beers and 2 pepperoni sticks. Knowing I can't have a beer and that the pepperonis will just make me thirstier, I close the fridge and when the light goes out I wake up.

I had this dream over and over for years... oddly, I only had it once after the split up......

OMG, I owe you a Thanksgiving Story!!!

I almost forgot! I promised a story!

So my mom and Ex #2(I'm just going to call him Asshole, hope you don't mind) split up Oct '89 (the worst October ever) and Asshole made a pretense of wanting to stay friends with my mom and dadly to me. So odd as it sounds, we spent the Thanksgiving after their breakup at his mom's house, one big happy family.

At some point the "adults" were talking about "getting caught" by the kids, and my mom and Asshole started getting cocky, that they'd never been caught.....

It was probably a year earlier, so I was about 12, and it was roughly 3 in the morning. I had stayed up late finishing a book and was just about to turn out my lamp when I heard something go bump in the night.....

When I was younger, I was afraid of everything. At night, I would squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that when I opened them and tried to see in the dark, I'd see spots. My spots took the shape of hands with knives and guns. I was so certain that someone was going to break in at night to try to kill me, that I'd put pillows under the covers and sleep in the crack between the mattress and the wall or  under my bed.

At some point I got tired of always being scared, so I decided to scare the scare right out of me. When I walked in the dark I'd hum the Freddy songs until I thought my heart would beat right out of my chest. I would convince myself that there was someone walking right behind me but I wouldn't let myself turn around to look and I wouldn't let myself run. I memorized every inch of my house in the dark. I would walk with my eyes closed and count my steps until I'd embedded a map in my head. If something were to happen, I was going to be prepared.

So at 3 am, I heard something go bump in the night... And I was ready. I turned out my light, grabbed my gun and slipped off the safety. I stood next to the door listening as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. When the night blindness wore off, I eased open my door an inch or two and stopped to listen. I could still here random bumps and thumps. I eased my door open and avoiding the squeeky board in the hall, stepped out of my room.

I heard the bump again. It was definitely coming from my mom's room. I knew she had Asshole in there with her, but I guess my trust of him was already wearing off because it never occurred to me that he would protect her. I knew she had a gun in there, but I didn't know where. If someone had come through her window, would she be able to get the gun before he could stop her?

I tightened my grip on my gun and eased closer to their bedroom door. More bumps. At this point I was fairly certain that my ears were going to explode with the throbbing pressure of blood pounding through my head.

I slowly reached for the door knob.

"Ohhhh Willy!" rang loudly from the other side of the door and I froze in panic. Hot with embarrassment, I quietly retraced the steps
to my room and silently closed the door behind me. Shaking, I engaged the safety and put my gun away. Then I promptly sat down on my bed a snickered myself to tears.

I probably would have taken that night to the grave with me if it hadden't been for that Thanksgiving and it's bragging adults.

I don't like to be bested!