The Weekend of Awesome

Let’s see… it’s Wednesday, so I’ve finally recovered from the barrage of total neatorama that occured last weekend. My husband David’s birthday luau, and some HTML and CSS geekery, and then on Sunday evening, we actually MADE IT TO WOOTSTOCK V2.2 IN CHICAGO!!!!!!!11!! (my bangs, they go to 11).

If you’ve spent any time reading here, you know we’re really big fans of going to Hawaii, and we’ve been to a bunch of luaus and other Hawaiian-type dinner shows over the years. We’ve even gone with friends, and done goofy things with them just because we were in Hawaii.

But Friday’s dinner at a local strip-mall based eatery called the Tiki Terrace was one of the best times we’ve had in years – at least, without having to spend 6 hours stuffed into Economy Minus and suffer jet leg. While we were waiting for the dinner-and-a-show thing to start, we were discussing some of our adventures from long ago, when we totally BURIED STEVE and would have left him there if we could have.  Because we’d still be there if we had.

If Only Steve Had Stayed Buried

That’s our friend Earle on the left, and David’s best friend Steve in the middle,  who organized the evening at Tiki Terrace. Earle’s wife Sandy couldn’t be there on Friday or we almost would have had the old band together (we went with 5 friends in 2004).

Earle also enjoys Hawaiian culture and so I was pretty sure he was enjoying the ambiance at the Tiki Terrace.

Anyway, it was hella fun, because there was a special guest at the show. I started to get excited, thinking it was one of the performers we might have seen on our visits to the islands, but it turned out to be vastly better than that. After all, this is a place that features ginormous Easter Island statues and superior tiki decor, all in a long narrow dining room stuck in a suburban strip mall. My sister-in-law Gloria and I discussed the origins of Tiki culture, which we decided were probably rooted in the collective conciousness of thousands of WWII GIs coming home with island crap and deciding to start a bar, while we waited for the special guest to come out.

Aloha from Tiki Elvis

Tiki Elvis wonders if you are lonely tonight

Yes! It’s Tiki Elvis! He sings for you! Admit it, you were expecting maybe Iz? Or Don Ho?

Sure, it’s kitschy — very kitschy, but also cozy and friendly and fun. They’re open 7 days a week, but the hula show is only on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s like a one-night vacation, and we’re probably going to go back when the mood strikes us (reservations are probably essential for show nights).

Serious Hula, Bro

They also have some very good hula dancers, plus the obligatory host who sings a little, jokes a little, and dances a little — and the bartender will come out and sing something if everybody claps hard enough (he’s very good,  but any resemblance to Tiki Elvis is strictly coininkidental).

The surprising thing is that everybody in the front of house is pretty young – even the host, who sported tailbone-length hair and some serious tattoos when he came out to do a New Zealand men’s haka with the other male dancer. They were both very impressive, and actually I got a little irritated at the tableful of tween girls who were shrieking and giggling at the shirtless tattooed guys wearing nothing but muscles and tightly knotted pareus.

Guess I could hardly blame them, it was clearly their first adult-type birthday outing (they were wearing lots of that Libby Lu girly-girly makeup stuff).

The service is friendly, the crowd is clearly there to have a good time (there was one very large party celebrating a big birthday) and the menu is pretty reasonable (it’s all prix-fixe luau food, but appetizers and desserts are extra).

The only problem we had was that we finished dinner a little too close to the beginning of the show, and our dessert orders couldn’t come out until long after the show had finished, so we did wait what seemed like a really long time for our tropical desserts. Our waitress was cute and pretty attentive, but she did kind of disappear when we were wondering if she’d forgotten about the sweets.

David was adamant about not going up on stage for any hula shenanigans so we all maintained radio silence when the time came for the obligatory “let’s get all the birthday people up here and make them do the hula” portion of the evening. Honestly, the guys they DID get up there did a fine job of goofing around, and the stage was kind of small anyway.

So once it was over, we all headed for home, wearing our luau finery, and it looks like we’ll have to make a group trip of it this February for Steve’s 50th… oh, dear.

But that’s not all the awesome! There’s even moar!

Helpless Flailing Eventually Results In New Church Website Going Live

Okay, not that awesome actually, but it’s been kind of an issue for some weeks/months/years that the design we went with after the merger was not what we had discussed when I stepped back from being a webmistress and just maintained the church blog (more or less).

Actually, it got to be kind of depressing how I could not seem to get a link to the blog from the church main page, because the previous webmaster had hosted it through Yahoo and kept losing the link every time he updated some news item on the front page. I had given up asking him to put a real, premanent link on there… but he was very busy with seminary so it wasn’t a very big priority.

Anyway, he’s on track towards ordination as a deacon now and had to hand off the web duties, and there was no one else at church with ANY kind of ability to do a web page, so I was asked to take it on. I agreed, as long as we could completely re-do the site, and host it, and convert it over to a WordPress installation much as I had done with the old Holy Innocents site. For one thing, I wanted to be able to do most of the rejiggering, with David’s help, and not have to do it with Front Page, which I had not been crazy about before.

And so here it is although it’s really just a fancy mockup of what I hope to do with it – the main page will probably get a major makeover as I re-learn the stuff I want to do with images in GIMP and catch up on what CSS can do – for now it’s arranged with simple tables (please don’t view source, eek). I did at least manage to produce the background images and banner image (the photo strip isn’t my work, it’s one element I brought over from the previous layout).

There were technical problems and delays getting the domain registration transfered from the previous hosting service, and frankly it took much too long because of it being too complicated… but the middle of last week, it was finalized at last, and I had been fooling with a highly customizable blog template, creating pages to put the content in, and messing with what became the static front page.

Saturday night it was almost ready to “cut over,” and I was messing around on Facebook uploading some photos I’d found on my hard drive when I got an IM from the former webmaster, chiding me about the lateness of the hour and reminding me I had church in the morning. So that turned out to be fun and I’m glad for him that he’s finally on his way toward ordination, after kind of being stuck in the process while at St Nick’s. What with one thing and another, we didn’t actually cut everything over from old to new until last night, but it was essentially done Saturday except for minor styling changes.

So yeah, talked to people at church, got the final “Oh, Ginny, I’d like you to” aesthetic tweaks from Father Steve, and then it was time to go home and prepare for what became THE MOST AWESOME AWESOMENESS that occured on Sunday night, ever, in the history of the world.

W00tSTOCK CHICAGO V2.2

W00tstock Chicago poster

Poster by Len Peralta/@jawboneradio (CC Some Rights Reserved)

David had his iPhone and his brand new Canon EOS 7D, the one with the really good video (used in a recent commercial). I had my iPhone and an excessive amount of screaming w00tiness.

Both are in evidence in the following:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlHtIrOtYqE

I can be heard laughing in the background saying “eBay!” at one point. But mostly it’s Mr Savage’s party piece (with rather impressive hardware).

There was just SO MUCH w00ty goodness, so many funny people and cartoonists and musicians and people doing readings from books and talking about losing their Rocky Horror virginity… great overview here, in  fact, as my memory is just one happy shouty jumble.

I took a few pictures with the iPhone and tweeted a HELL of a lot:

Flickr

Sign in the parking garage we eventually found right around the back of the Park West venue. Duh. $20 well spent.

Flickr

Paul and Storm singing “We’re the Opening Band.”

Flickr

Ceiling Cat was the default desktop on the media screens when they weren’t playing cartoons, Moments with Wil, or showing pictures of destitute Stormtroopers panhandling. Some of the comedy came from minor glitches with volume or opening the wrong file. Everything got a big laugh, because everything was funny. It was the kind of instant geek nationhood that springs up at a good convention.

Wootstock Tweets

mai tweets, let me show you them

Here’s a great picture of Peter Sagal that David took – in character as a henchman who dreams of being the hero for once.

WWDTM's Peter Sagal, as The Henchman

Thanks to @jernst, there’s audio, and it’s all shareable and whatnot.  You must listen! It’s too big to upload here.

There’s all kinds of photos on Flickr and Twitter, and there’s stuff from Minneapolis, the next night in the tour, all over everywhere.

Monday at work was…. painful as we didn’t get home until about 130am. The show is billed as “3 Hours of Geeks and Music” but actually it’s closer to 4 or 5 (depending on how much digressing is going on, and how long it takes to get through the last song).

Give you an idea; during the show, a recurring them was “but I digress.” So David registered a domain, www.butidigress.net. Don’t know what he’ll do with it – maybe collect lists of cover bands and tribute bands (hard to explain why that would be funny, watch some of the videos).

Yeah. I can’t wait until the next version comes out.

Dear Wally, Wish You Were Here

Vietnam Reflections

Dear Wally (nobody ever called you Edward except your dad, and the Army),

A lot has happened since 1968. Your two daughters have grown up, and you’re a name on a smoothly polished, black granite wall in Washington DC . They’ve both struggled a bit (maybe because you were taken away from them far too soon) but seem to be fine now. You’re a grandfather, can you believe it? Neither can I. In fact, you have an amazing step-daughter and a couple of cute step-grandkids; you know how the living always say “life goes on,” and it did.

Jolly Roger  TopFlier kite

I never thanked you for your service, because I was just a buck-toothed, cross-eyed little kid when you left for Vietnam. But you taught me some important lessons when you used to be the Army guy across the street that married my sister; I have no fear of stomping tomato worms (how did you know I’d turn out to be such a tomboy?), and I still like flying kites, although I’ve never found one to top the simple, 10-cent TopFlite Jolly Roger you bought at the local drugstore. It looked grand up there in the sky, all piratey and swashbucklery, but then the string broke, and you had a crisis on your hands. It was either stop the kid from crying and find her kite, or give up and go home. To your credit, you drove around in the empty field looking for it, after we walked around trying to see if it had fallen from the sky and gotten tangled up somewhere. Not sure, but I think you may have distracted me from the depressing sight of it caught on a telephone wire by telling me it must have flown for miles and miles.

You did well in the Army (well, your dad being an Air Force colonel didn’t hurt) and you and my sister Tudy had some interesting postings (Fort Bragg, Germany) with your oldest daughter before the time came for you to be sent to Vietnam as an officer in 1968. By then, of course, you were a captain. You looked very brave and strong in your uniform at the airport when we sent you off; that was in Salt Lake, where you’d moved your family to be near Mom “in case.” You’d already dealt with tragedy, losing your baby son Michael in that car accident when you were all on the way… that was terrible, and I guess my mom and everyone thought the Army wouldn’t make you go away after that. Especially as Tudy was pregnant with Heather by then and Holly, your first born, was just getting to school age.

But off you went, striding purposefully into the strong glare of the sun at the old Salt Lake airport after saying your goodbyes at the departure gate (you wouldn’t believe the b.s. we go through now to travel by air). It was hard to see you against the sun in the doorway, where you turned and went away, never to return in the same form. The little pins and badges you wore glinted, and you were gone.

I hope you like the memorial in Washington DC; it’s probably more popular than the war it commemorates ever was. It ensures that people won’t forget, I guess, and it’s moving and sombre. But people continue to leave stuff there, and I’d always thought it would be nice to fly the Jolly Roger just once more and leave it there for you, to be carefully catalogued with your name and the date and archived by some volunteer… of course, the kite you chose because it was the most bad-ass and un-girly in the store turned out to be a classic, and something we now call a “collectible” worth between $30-100.

Bet you’re laughing your ass off now, and wishing we’d tried a little harder to find it that day, hey?

I can’t even begin to explain the “virtual world” concept, but there’s a Vietnam Memorial in Second Life, too. I’ll be dropping by there later today – and maybe I’ll try to make my own little virtual kite to fly there in your honor.

In church yesterday (I don’t think you were all that much into God stuff but anyway here it is), a friend who’s had his own struggles with life after the service gave a special prayer in honor of Memorial Day and guys like you. He read something from a magazine he’d found, that concluded “all gave some, some gave all.” Some country music singer turned part of that phrase into a song a while back; you probably would have liked it a lot.

I’m still sad that you’re one of the ones that had to give all. It may not look like you and all the other guys from all the other wars are remembered by this country much (except when it benefits the politicians of every stripe that “run” the place), but you are remembered. In spite of all the Memorial Day sales, and barbecues, and people just sitting around on a Monday dinking around on computers (I know, weird, huh?), you’re not forgotten.

So anyway, Wally, thank you for your service. Hope there’s a nice breeze for flying kites where ever you are.

UPDATE:

So yes, I did make it inworld to see the virtual Vietnam Memorial…

Edward W Crum at the Vietnam Memorial in SL

It’s always Cherry Blossom Time at the virtual Vietnam Memorial – the trees are lovely, the lighting is nice.

Closeup of Vietnam Memorial

So many names, it’s hard to find the one you want. There’s a scripted object that helps seekers find them, though

Too many names. Had a nice conversation with a Swedish woman, who was quietly respectful. Nice.

Red Rocks Mesa Veterans Memorial

Bought a kite, found a desert memorial to veterans, could not fly due to no build privileges at Red Rock Mesa, SL

Flying my Jolly Roger kite over my land in Tintafel; neighbor’s house is a large glowing planet

Second Life image of kite flying over sea

Taken at Surf Camp in PrimWorks, Second Life. That’s an incoming wave…did you end up learning to surf?

Inspired by Simply Left BehindThe Non-Rapturist’s Guide To The Galaxy: Thank You.

Mission Accomplished

It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy.  He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week.

He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately was solved easily. Last time this happened, he had packed a brand new dress suit carefully in his suit bag, got to the conference, crashed in a friend’s room before his room was ready, then could not find his pants about an hour before the very important presentation.

He called me demanding to know if I had packed his dress pants. “Where are my PANTS?!? Did you pack them?”

It was the stress, really. He was nervous about the possibility of picking up a very prestigious award, and about maybe having to make an acceptance speech.

I reminded him that he’d packed up his suit bag very methodically with the brand new suit, and while I was checking the closet here just in case, he remembered the part about the friend’s room, tracked him down, and found his pants hanging in the closet.

Pants crisis: resolved.

Last night, it was more of a laundry/underwear crisis, much more easily fixed. There was clean laundry in baskets, but none of them seemed to contain socks and underwear. Keep in mind that we just got moved back into the master bedroom after more than 3 weeks, camping out in the guest room while we worked on our “3 day flooring project.” Our first night back in our own bed was Saturday, and the drawers which had been stacked up in the middle of the room had all be replaced in the dressers, thank GAWD, but there were still several laundry baskets that needed to be folded and put away.

There always are, I think they breed.

Anyway, David had clearly been searching frantically for his oddments of male netherwear when he shouted down from above “I can’t find any UNDERPANTS! ARRRGH!”

Stress, again: this time, it’s the plain old “early flight tomorrow, don’t want to forget anything, meanwhile I’m giving a presentation before the opening session” variety.

Soon enough, after we went through some baskets and checked the dresser drawers (which may have had stuff misfiled in them during the time they were stacked in the middle of the room), the Great Underpants Crisis of Nought ’10 was over. It was nervewracking and there was the distinct possibility that one of us would have to run out and get a 3-pack of white knittery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary.

So David is off in Orlando, and I’m here for the beginning of the work week thinking about tasks and chores that I’d like to do, but that will probably get blown off if I’m not careful.

Believe it or not, blogging is a task AND a chore, because I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging lately what with how easy it is to just tweet something, and how hard it is to blog something with the iPhone now that both of my little bookmarklets stopped working. Anything seen during the normal workday is either a quick and easy tweet, a moblog picture (another dead easy function set up via Flickr), a del.icio.us link, or not at all, as it’s no longer a simple thing to pick up a link with WordPress’ “Press This” javascript functionality on the iPhone (although it still works perfectly on a desktop machine). I’m not sure why, actually; it may be a security “feature” stemming from some update or other. I didn’t want to bother David with it yesterday since he was trying to get all his stuff ready and packed, and it can certainly wait for his return.

Anyway, there it is; it’s not easy to blog using WordPress’ own iPhone app, as I just commented on Tiny Screenfuls, yet it’s easy to send a post to WordPress via Flickr, del.icio.us, or Google Reader if you set them up with the right permissions (and in Flickr’s case, a template that applies my beloved CSS drop shadows).

Why can’t WordPress’s app grab a link, for gosh sakes? Why did my handy Press This app stop working right? Grr.

Anyway, my hour of blogging is over, but there’s still a bit more to discuss: my accomplishment of mission.

We had a family member’s discarded laptop, which David got several weeks ago at a family gathering, that he was going to “part out.” After some tinkering around, however, he got it working, but we forgot to take it with us a couple of weekends ago when we met up as a family to visit our young nephew in college for lunch. Darn! So after missing another opportunity to get the now-working laptop back to its home, I managed to meet up this morning after church, although it might have worked to drop it off in the down time I had between O’Hare (5:15 AM) and church (8:15 AM). But no, it worked out fine to meet afterwards, although to make it happen I had to navigate to a shopping mall in Vernon Hills… AND deal with an escalator (I have a weird perception problem that makes it hard to use down escalators, and I tend to balk and head for the nearest elevator to avoid it). Found my family members at the designated drop point, exchanged signs and countersigns (“Hi, you guys!” and “Hey, you made it”), and handed over the laptop.

I thought I had a schedule conflict and couldn’t stay for lunch, but the conflict evaporated, drat it. So: Noodles & Company for me. Later tonight, leftovers. And that’s a little over an hour of righteous, linky-loving blogging.

And thus endeth the post, thanks be to Gawd.

OMG, You’re Still Using AOL? Marketplace’s most popular story today

… and I’ll be passing this along to my sister, who’s still using AOL and probably always will.

OMG, you’re still using AOL for e-mail? | Marketplace From American Public Media

Dalaise Michaelis: As soon as somebody says they are, you know, so-and-so at Earthlink.net or Hotmail.com, really it’s an “Oh My God” moment. Do you know what the Internet is? Yahoo is like, OK. And then if you’re G-mail, you’re like, I can take you seriously.

Vanek-Smith: What about AOL?

Michaelis: You said AOL? Oh wow, is it still around? I mean, Ican’t believe it’s still around.

Burt Flickinger: Had my AOL e-mail account for a little over 15 years.

Burt Flickinger is the managing director of the Strategic Resource Group. He tells retailers how to market things to young shoppers. What do clients say when he gives them his e-mail?

Burt Flickinger: When I give them an AOL email address, they say, I can’t believe you’re still on AOL. I say well, it’s simple, I have one of the original addresses with no numbers so it’s easier for you to type.

Years Too Late For Some

A young cousin of mine died years ago from complications stemming from cystic fibrosis – he didn’t make it to legal age, if I recall. I’m glad there’s a new treatment, sad that it’s too late for so many.

Drug could stop mucus production in cystic fibrosis sufferers – Salt Lake Tribune

What is cystic fibrosis? » Cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition that causes cells to improperly manufacture a protein. The flawed protein results in the production of a thick, sticky mucus.

The mucus clogs and damages lungs and breaks down ducts in the pancreas, causing digestion problems.

It also coats the inside of the lungs, collecting bacteria that a healthy lung would expel. That leads to infection and triggers the immune system.

“Unfortunately, the immune cells’ weapons [against the bacteria] are just as lethal against human cells,” Liou said. “Most of the harm done to the lungs is actually collateral damage.”

That means many people with cystic fibrosis progress from difficulty walking up stairs to using oxygen and a wheelchair.

There are different genetic mutations that cause cystic fibrosis. The trial for VX-770 focuses on a mutation that affects only about 2 percent of people. Researchers hope they can adapt the drug to work for a much wider population.

If the drug stops cells from producing mucus, it won’t reverse any existing lung damage. But for those with minimal damage — younger patients, or those with milder cases — the drug could provide the closest thing to a cure.

When Your Mom Gets Baptized Into Some Weird Church After She Dies

It would piss you off, right? I know it would really make me angry if that happened to my mom, but I can’t check because the information is hidden behind a registration wall AND a “member in good standing/temple recommend number” wall. Because when she was alive, she was really horrified by the idea that everyone in her family had been baptized against their will, after they died, and that someday she would, too.

Well, it’s apparently happened to President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. I think it’s a terrible breach of spiritual protocol, the church’s own supposedly “hard and fast” but frequently broken rules, and the normal bounds of human decency.

ldsbaptism

I ran across this first at Wonkette, but it’s such a personal issue for me (growing up as I did in Utah, as a non-Mormon) that after the first horrified reading, the flip, arch style that usually makes me giggle like a twelve-year-old wasn’t what I wanted to quote. So I went to the source:

AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth: Did the Mormons baptize Obama’s mother, after her death, without his knowledge or consent?

A reader sent me a tip about this last week. But it’s a sensitive topic, sure to cause the President some anguish, so I waited until I could find more information. I now have more information. And what I have is troubling.

A reader contacted me last week, saying that last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, the Mormons had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Baptizing the dead of other faith’s, secretly and without the consent of their families, is a common Mormon practice. For the past fifteen years the Mormons have caused quite a stir by forcibly baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims – in other words, converting them to Mormonism – despite strong objections from the Jewish community.

This issue comes up every few years: the Utah church has to put out a lot of fires and claim that members had overstepped the rules by baptizing people who were still “within living memory” and/or baptizing people who had died in the Holocaust. In a way, this practice completes the “final solution” of the genocide, by erasing the Jewish identity of each victim.

The LDS people who do this are operating from a spiritual compulsion: they truly believe that everyone on Earth must be enrolled in the record archives after death, and supposedly these dead souls can “choose” to accept a faith that has been imposed on their memory via an efficient, if not unholy bureaucracy. These people take on the role of victim when living relatives object to the practice of baptism for the dead, because their beliefs are being attacked. This, I find to be almost as offensive and infuriating as the practice itself. It’s spawned a huge industry, and of course as the archives are available to anyone to search, the hobby of geneology owes a lot to the efforts of countless workers who’ve scoured the Earth, searching out and scanning birth, death, and census records. Not to mention the countless well-meaning members who go to their local temples armed with the records of the dead, being baptized and anointed or whatever takes place, wearing their spey-cial tem-ple gar-mints.

Personally, I think it’s all a bunch of crap.

Sorry, family members and friends. That’s my opinion.

I’m a believer in Christ, and I’d like to think that there will turn out to be a Heaven where all our dead family and friends are waiting for us (and of course, OUR PETS are waiting impatiently, too). But I’m enough of a rationalist to realize that there may be nothing at all after death, or something so unimaginably different from our living existence that it can’t be put into human context, let alone words. I prefer to be a follower of the Way while I’m still alive and kicking, and I struggle try to live a more spiritually grounded life and reach out to people in need. I don’t succeed at it, much, but I try. This whole issue of one faith imposing itself on people’s dead loved ones, no matter what they believed (or didn’t believe), just bothers the shit out of me.

I did try to pull some records from the FamilySearch.org site (no linky love for you! ) and was rather surprised to find that I could get a text document with Mom’s name, birth date, death date, AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER without having to even register. I attempted to register under a bogus name and found that to get to the REALLY good stuff, you have to give an actual record number proving that you’re a member in good standing. But I did look at records for various Colorado Springs relations on my mom’s side – this is probably how my cousin Bill did most of his research for his genealogy hobby, and the family history book that he self-published.

I can almost hear Mom holding forth now on today’s news; she’d be adding another note to her “to be read after my demise” papers via dictation as we speak.

Wish Mom Could Have Done This

This program would really have benefited Mom back when she was forced to give up driving; she also had macular degeneration.

Seniors trade cars for rides :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Transportation

Edgewater resident Betty Steinke, 77, was recently forced to give up her driver’s license because of the severe visual impairment known as macular degeneration.

That left her 84-year-old husband as her only chauffeur. But it won’t be long before Leroy Steinke is off the hook.

After two years of planning, City Hall is ready to roll out a pioneering program that will allow seniors to donate their cars to a new nonprofit agency in exchange for free rides around the clock.

Time and Doing Things

March 7
March is the homeowner’s month.
It is time to put away the snow shovel,
but not yet time to get out the lawnmower.

For the first time in… probably a year or more, the dining room table is cleared off as a friend is coming over so David can take a look at his laptop. The stuff that was on there was a mish-mosh of things that Timmy sent me from Mom’s house; I’ve successfully ignored them all this time because I’d unpacked them with the vague idea of organizing, sorting, and tossing junk and only got 3/4 through the task. It wasn’t especially painful looking at the things, but I tended to get lost in remembrance.

But the occasional visitor can do wonders for lack of motivation here at Chez Gique, and so not only is the table cleared off, but the console table in the living room has been tidied, dusted, and rearranged (though not the lower shelf) and the coffee table has also been cleared of clutter (framed pictures, junk) and dusted.

I moved some of Mom’s tchotchkes onto my desk with yet another vague idea: actually paying more attention to them now and then. Mom had a funny little calendar thing that she got as a table favor at a luncheon years ago that someone made that has a little quote or aphorism for every day of the year, and Mom had kind of used it as a rotating reminder of birthdays, anniversaries, her weight, and funny little notes. Just this morning, my husband David asked me if he should put the snowblower away for the season (fold the handle, shove it under the workbench) and I said I thought we’d get one more big storm. Even though yesterday was unseasonably warm – more than 60F – and we had a big booming rainstorm last night and today, my instinct was to assume that winter isn’t quite done screwing us over here in the Midwest.

And then when I was going through the Mom stuff and looked at her little date thing for today, there it was: her commentary on the changing season. It appears likely that it may be time after all to put away the snow shovel, at least according to this conveniently timed little message from Mom.

She may be trying to tell me to keep the house in its newly less-cluttered state, too, but let’s not get carried away here.

Christmas Disasters | Padre Mickey’s Version

Padre Mickey tells the thrilling tale of one memorable Christmas, when a flaming dessert burned itself into the memories of everyone present (also the carpet, furniture, the kitchen floor) before being kicked back into the kitchen). He promises 2 more visitations of this memory, as recalled by other, saner heads. It’s a Rashomon Christmas! You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing: I nearly coughed up a lung laughing at it.

We had a wonderful meal; lots of good food, and the children opened presents, and oh, what a wonderful Christmas it was! Gramma Connie had prepared a lovely Plum Pudding (Gramma Connie can bake like nobody’s bizness!). And, as is normal with any foody and creative cook, she wanted the presentation To Be Perfect (we were all unaware of Martha Stewart, and quite happy about it, I might add!). Grampa Jim splashed some clear rum on the pudding. Gramma Connie splashed some clear rum on the pudding. Aunt Sally splashed some clear rum on the plum pudding. I don’t think any of them had discussed this rum-splashing with the others. Then, Gramma Connie artistically placed the holly on the pudding, Grampa Jim lit the rum, and, with it all flaming, our hostess, Aunt Sally, slowly walked into the living room carrying the pudding-laden platter into the living room while we all sang, Now bring us some figgy pudding, now bring us some figgy pudding, now bring us some . . .OH MY GOD!!!!

Via Padre Mickey’s Dance Party: Christmas Tales Of Padre’s Family: Rashomon Kurisumasu: The Flaming Pudding Toss.

I’m trying to think of a comparable Christmas Disaster from our own family’s collective memory; there’s photographic evidence somewhere of one from the last Christmas I spent “at home” with mom, before I got married. Mom was making a batch of “disappearing cookies,” which had to be started in a double boiler to melt butter and brown sugar together. She somehow bobbled the transfer of the stuff (I think she was bending down to retrieve something from the dishwasher, and knocked the bowl on herself from the counter) and was covered with warm, sticky, buttery goo. Fortunately, it wasn’t hot enough to burn, but it was in her hair, down her front, and all over the kitchen. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk. Scratch one batch of cookies.