LIGHTBOX, BABY

Lightbox

smoooOOOoooosh

Ooooh the beauty, grandeur and joy of the holidays. 

How I did revel in the fairy lights and my beautiful tree and the Crazy Christmas Barf Yards throughout the lower Bay Area.  Some real treats, I gotta tell ya--

Tiny townhouse front patches filled to the last square centimetre with huge blow-ups all jostling for wiggle room. Epilepsy-inducing light displays of such discordance as to warrant an FAA investigation into air traffic interference for sure, cresting rooftops then cascading down gutters and walls to the ground below to create miasmic displays of weird character tableaux and Santa landing strips.  Cuz he sure as hell ain’t gonna make it down within twenty feet in any dimension of that chimney. It’s a major cause of traffic in neighborhoods and an absolute delight, among many others.

smOOOoooooooossssshh

OOoooooh Christmas music, especially at work.  I would have cheerfully played the christmas mp3 chip another two months than replace it with the regular chip again--6 versions of Let’s Go Fly a Kite and four versions of the Immigration Song and five versions of Rainbow Connection?  Mele Kalikimaka!  All I Want For Christmas Is You!

Not to mention the eight versions of God Only Knows What I’d Do Without You (most of them by completely inappropriate children’s choirs) and the 4 versions of Desperado (same).  Then there’s the heavy concentration of Carpenter’s lovin’, Jeebuz-lovin’, America-lovin’ and John Denver lovin’.  Oh, and some truly terrible renditions of just about everything including Road to Nowhere by some unattributed men’s choir who couldn’t carry these poor tunes in a coffin as a team of pall bearers.

smmm00oooooshhhhh......

So everything was going so beautifully.  And January was not looking so crowded and stressful as last year. Then...

Smoosh.

I woke up one day a couple of weeks ago and could not get out of bed.  I tried a little kindness.  I’ve been working hard, it’s been a long retail season, I can loaf in bed, it’s only...

11AM.

I went to bed at 10.30 the night before, ostensibly because I was just soooo tired, but really because I could not think of any reason to stay awake.  I had slept for twelve hours. The weight of Things to Be Done, yes, right there.  Glum Post-Holiday Gloomies, yup, present and accounted. Logical.  But not The Reason.  As the days went on, my brain shut down and my soul turned black.  Seeing people was painful, noise was painful, being touched was painful.  F*&king SAD. Sad, stupid, retarded, asinine brain lapse. So tired. 

In response, I am angry and resentful.  It’s not like losing a few days here and there to a cold or the flu.  It’s like having the entire meaning of my life surgically drained with a large-bore syringe jammed straight into my cerebral cortex.

So I have gone to doctors and friends and talked about it. How brilliant are friends???? I have purposefully socialised.  I have read new books and gone to movies.  The light box is out and shining as we speak.  GingerMan has ordered his new car which he has dreamed of and saved his pennies for ages to commute ecologically but for size means my car will now be parked in the driveway.  Which will open an area less-than-car-but-just-more-than-treadmill-size in the garage.  The car won’t arrive for a while, but I want to acquire the machine soon, just to get moving.  I have never found the Exercise Endorphin Promised Land of which others speak, but walking all over Edinburgh and London for a month last summer left me feeling really really good about myself, stronger and streamlined, so I just want to get on it.

I’ll try to get back to the fun New Year Fairy 2013 Looking Forward blog next week.  I have the last of the 2012 photos of good times, and a heartwarming story about a chocolate cake that learned to hate me, but tasted brilliant anyway, leading to the Fairy 2013 Slogan.  So hang tight, friends, see you on the light side.

Pin It Now!

BARENAKED XMAS ROCKIN'

Barenaked ROCKIN’

To begin, I’m layin’ down my favorite holiday tracks for this year.  As with last time, however, I have a soundtrack for today’s blog:  Chris Isaak’s Christmas on TV.  It’s just a cool, twangy christmas honky-tonk tune. Toodle-yoo-off you go!

Well Howdy-Ho!  Nice to have you back!  So I just had to refresh my long-playing Xmas playlist, populated with the hits of my childhood-- Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, on and on and ohhh I do love them and always will, but this is a lovely, zippy holiday season and I need some sparkle!  This year has been notable in that I’ve actually bought whole albums, both as they were priced reasonably compared to several singles, and because there were really rich offerings.

While I did have a few Michael Bublè added a couple of years ago from the Let It Snow EP, this year I added his Christmas album (2011), featuring standards and a couple cool originals.

I will shoehorn in a perennial favorite just while it’s playing here-- A SouthPark Christmas.  It’s vile, rude, original and completely awesome.

Barenaked For the Holidays (2004) is possibly one of the best christmas albums of the modern age.  The Barenaked Ladies turn out lots of originals, three Hanukkah songs that are  well done (face it, some of the stuff you hear on the radio sounds like someone said “well, we have to have something.”), crowned by the absolutely killer I Saw Three Ships and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.  Oh! and Elf’s Lament, with Michael Bublè!

Now to Josh Groban, I lovelovelovelove him.  His music, like James Blunt’s isn’t always on my top 10, but his work is beautiful and soulful and rich and this is a crowning glory.  Also like James Blunt, he is a total cutie, completely charming and lovely and referring to the above single, his original work is heartbreaking genius.   Buy the whole album.

I have loved Rod Stewart since I was a kid, and we recently saw him on Graham Norton while eating Saturday Breakfast (Saturday is Graham; Sunday, Modern Family) and I dug into iTunes to see if he had a single or two.  Try a whole kickin’ album-- Merry Christmas, Baby.  More great standards, some neato duets and fun originals.  

Now for some favorite singles, my Top 13:

1) Mele Kalikimaka- Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters

2) Merry Xmas Everyone-Slade

3) The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

4) Fairytale of New York- Pogues and 

5) Santa Baby- Kylie Minogue
6) All I Want for Christmas is You- Mariah Carey
7) Christmas Blues- Dean Martin
8) Christmas Night in Harlem- Louis Armstrong
9) Christmas Wrapping- Waitresses
10) Baby It’s Cold Outside- Tom Jones and Cerys
11) Swiss Colony Beef Log- A South Park Christmas
12) Christmas Time in Hell- A South Park Christmas
13) The Christmas Song- Mel Tormè

Back to hoppin’ round the house like a snowbunny on crack!  Back with more in a couple days!

Pin It Now!

American Beauty: A Thankful Life in Few Words and Several Pictures

So, after family and health--namely a new niece and a *not* broken leg in Scotland; after kicking the winter blues and reveling in holiday decorating; I am thankful for the beautiful, stunning, funny, lovely looking things that fill my life with color and joy all year round.

Peeled Beets

Gorgeous Spices

Polka-Dot Sandals and Pretty Pedicures

Coming Home to Roses on the Table

Surprise Luscious Yarn in the Mail

My Very First Plying When I Though I Couldn't But Did Anyway!

Pin It Now!

HOLLA!DAYS! 2012 IS ON!

~~~Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say/ On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day~~

Before you read any further, go download this zippy Bing Crosby/ Andrews Sister ditty and play  as we proceed and you will experience Christmas the way I always have, as a native California baby.... Go on, I'll wait!

....There we are!  So, Thanksgiving was PANDEMONIUM! I worked a bunch, and due to the gracious gesture of a co-worker, I was able to switch and take Wednesday off to prepare for the 20-family-member melee.  The result:

Black Friday is never too black round Penzeys, so we decorated and celebrated with customers their Thanksgiving triumphs.  Now it’s Saturday, which is....

TREE DAY!

Already I attacked the unsuspecting bushes:

Now the tree’s up, but we’ve discovered this may be the year Santa will bring us an After-Xmas End-of-Season-Sale New Tree to last the next 7 years.  

It’s not the fuses, and we’ve plugged and re-plugged.  Poor thing.  But with about 230 ornaments, I’m gonna Charlie Brown the hell outta him one last time.

The SAD is still nowhere in sight, and I am nearly more joyful every moment I realize I’m happy than I am just being happy.  Dunno if that made any sense, but it doesn’t have to.  

Hero Tree Pic to follow, for now, Happy Christmas Season Starting!!!!!  Much Joy from your Fairy to You!

Pin It Now!

Thnaksgvign????!!!??

I’m sorry, thanksgiving is in how many days????? (4).

Last Monday, I worked, selling spices to people stocking up for the BIGGEST FOOD HOLIDAY OF THE YEAR, oblivious to the actual calendar.  The next day, my day off, I crack open my computer and see an IM from Jedi Jasmin:

“THANKSGIVING IS IN NINE DAYS!!!”

It’s ok, this is my Specialist Subject.  I majored in Holidays.

I looked ahead on the calendar and saw I worked the next day and then had off until the next Monday and Tuesday then had off the day before Turkey Exam Day.

Then I was called in to work on Thursday. 

J and I had worked out the guest list, somehow comprising 20 people, even though it was just family.  Twenty people???  This shindig will have to go down at my pad, so the Never Ending Redecorating Project will have to move on to the Tidy the F*&k Up phase fast this weekend.

Then we made up a menu, and decided what we were gonna tackle and what to delegate.  Not so bad, I’ve done much, much, much more on my own in tiny, inadequate kitchens.  Now the sticky part:  Since that’s the way I’ve always rolled, now I have to break my recipes down into actual ingredients with actual amounts and procedures.

Huh? You say.

This is rub for your Fairy, my friends.  I learned to cook on my own.  I buy by approximation, I fabricate by eyeball.  Every single recipe I have created here I have had to sit down and corral my unconscious lizard-brain to formalize. Whereas I just grabbed several boxes of chicken stock because I had on my list “Stuffing and Gravy” and I know in my mind’s eye how much that requires, now I have to do it on military scale with standards and protocol.  Oik.

So this is a new experience.  One I am most thankful for, because on Thanksgiving Day 20 people I love very much will enter this house to plonk down and eat and talk and laugh and pass out from Stuffing Overdose.  A lot of people have been posting lately the things and people they’re thankful for, and quite a lot of people have been posting about dropping out of the holidays to avoid the stress and cliché and commercialism.  After two years of seasonal affective disorder, something just snapped in my head round about October and I am once again filled with absolute joyful abandon, and some stress, but mostly the enthusiasm of combined 5-, 12- and 20-year-olds.  I am childish in my love for presents got and given, just old enough to relish my freedom and time off, and suddenly aware of my ability to make this anything I want to.

The boys are once again grilling the meat, allowing them to (hopefully) sit outside, drink beer and not-quite-set-things-on-fire. Other people are bringing veggies and desserts.  I'm making a mountain of sourdough bread stuffing, enough mashed potatoes to feed the Pacific Fleet, some pie and a cake.  It almost feels like cheating.  But in a good way.

Thus, every day or so, as work permits, I will post a few snaps of everything I am thankful for this year.  As I sit here listening to oven-dried bread cubes crackle as they cool, I  begin with the most wonderful to happen to our crazy family: Our shiny, new, crazy little Danger Mouse:

A Knitter's a Knitter, No Matter How Small! Society Debut! (Jan '12)

Extra 'Tude with a Side of Sauce (Easter '12)

First Bookshop! (Summer '12)

Preparing for Launch--Antennae Raised, Speaking in Raspberry (Fall '12)

So this is me, Chillin', wherein I invite you to join me.  And most of all, I wish you Joy.

Pin It Now!

HOPPIN' THE HOLIDAY WAGON!

So, this week, on Monday, 12 November 2012, I arrived home from work to find my neighborhood had been invaded by Christmas.

This was by no means an isolated incident, as I had scooted out for the shop's afternoon coffee run and found, to my delight, that we have an entire Christmas boutique shop in Menlo Park.

And yes, I said delight.

I know, I know,  I should be on the bandwagon with all the other frustrated, temporally displaced refugees who despise twinkly lights bedecking bushes a full three weeks before Thanksgiving, but I canNOT get enough.  Don't get me wrong, the music has official sanction from Black Friday to Boxing Day.  The tree from Black Friday to Epiphany.

But I do deeeeeeelight in the whole gorgeous spectacle.  Delight, revel, celebrate, carouse, roister, whoop this season up. I nearly knocked myownself right down to aboutface and get into that shop, my friends, because I saw this:

A Christmas GingerBird

It would be sweet to say this is the first ornament of the season, bought for GingerMan, as it is so difficult to find high-quality Robins.  The photographic record says otherwise:

Two from Buckingham Palace, the Royal Thistle from Edinburgh and a Christmas Robin from Harrods, London

And these don't include the mouse and silver teddy bear "Baby's First Christmas 2012" from Harrods for Danger Mouse.

What?  It's my contractual obligation.

OH! and Christmas cards!  For the first time in about 8 years:

And now I will leave you, my itchy little fingers know where the mesh lights are, and those bushes out front ain't gonna dress themselves, pal....

Pin It Now!

SUFFRAGETTE CITY

I have been considering, reconsidering, grappling, with how to cover this election. Here in the South Bay we have a bunch of tax/bond issues that are supposed to lock money into the local economy.  There are state measures which allow me, when I have hoped against hope to be able to, in my lifetime, repeal the death penalty and make the asininely-implimented Three Strikes law right. 

At the national level there are the greater issues about which, more and more, all I hear about on social media and in social gatherings is, to quote:  "Gaaaawd I'm just sooooo sick of this!!!"  

I'm sick of it too.

I'm sick of fighting for the civil and human rights of women and minorities 100 years after our struggle began in earnest in this country.

A young friend posted on Facebook that she could not understand how some idiots could trade a "stupid 'free' pill for our national security", with the assumption that the party espousing equal access to health care would throw open the borders to murdering, raping, pillaging pirates overnight simply because those darn contraceptive pills let us whore around.  Says the girl who lives independently and enjoys the benefits afforded by such a luxury.  

The problem seems to be that so very few people remember what women 100 years ago (yes, I WILL KEEP REPEATING THIS) were derided, demeaned, arrested, imprisoned without aid or bail and, while incarcerated, often humiliated, beaten and tortured.  These are historical facts.  These women suffered to give us the chance to vote.  To be counted as real human beings.  

One. Hundred. Years. Ago.

And yet, we are now fighting the same basic cause.  Measures passed in state assemblies bypass the Supreme Court's 1973 decision establishing that abortion, as part of a woman's entire right to equal health care without the consultation of a male authority is considered her right to privacy.  These unbelievably incomprehensible laws draw the boundaries of pregnancy to two weeks back into your last cycle, effective making your period a miscarriage.  Or they force women facing the loss of a later-term physically damaged baby to go to extraordinary, inhumane measures before terminating the pregnancy.  They want to limit or ban access to basic health services and contraception on the grounds that they are immoral under certain belief structures.

I'm not fighting any religious war.  We are fighting our war for human rights.  We cannot regress 100 years to being counted as 100% less than a man, unable to garner our meagre intellectual capacities to truly consider the weighty affairs of state. We cannot regress 50 years to the time when we were still tacitly considered the moral property of our male family members when obtaining reproductive health.  

We cannot allow ourselves to be crushed beneath the feet of those who merely use modern phrasing for the same old "Little Lady".  

I am the only person who ties my apron strings.  I am the only one who calls me to the stove in the evening, barefoot, socked or shod.  I am the only one who decides my best course for MY medical care, for my equal earning in the workplace,  if I would be allowed to marry no matter the gender of my partner, for my equal standing in the human race.

Vote.  Do anything you can to get to a polling station.  Your employer, BY LAW, must give you adequate time off to vote.  If you are at the polling station, waiting in line when the polling station closes, they cannot kick you out.  If you are in a disaster area, I know life is really, really tough for your right now, but if you are online, look for polling places, they are trying to put as many in place as possible.

100 Years of Suffragettes want YOUR vote.  They want you to count.  Some of them died for it, for you to be heard no matter your stance, no matter your beliefs.  You are a woman and you are valid in your humanity and your opinions, but please, remember above all, your humanity and that of all women and consider it when you tick those boxes.

Human Rights, Civil Rights, Women's Rights.  Make your vote count. Pin It Now!