Tag Archives: christmas

Happy New Year!

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Let me just start off today by belting out a big ol’ southern girl “yahooooooo”!  I’ll bet a lot of you out there are yahooing right along with me and it’s all because Christmas, that most revered, beloved, mother of all holidays is finally behind us.  (And for many of us, I mean BEHIND us, right on our giant tee-hineys, straining the seams of our pants.)

As much as I whine about Christmas, I adore New Years.  I love it that the world is, collectively, as a whole, scaling back.  We are trying to be good, trying to eat right, exercise, give more and be nicer.  We are back at work, almost back at school and getting out of the pajamas that we’ve been wearing for the last week.  It’s as if the whole world is emerging from the flu. 

The past few rainy, lazy days I’ve watched more TV than I’ve watched all year.  Television causes me to worry for the plight of Earthlings everywhere.  We are truly a dumbed down group of individuals.  I can’t solve that problem.  I have few answers, but I do know that we would do well to remove TVs from our homes.  Maybe I’m coming into this discussion late, but I am gobsmacked to see the weird reality shows that have actually made it on the air.  There are shows about people who hunt Big Foot, make something to do with ducks, go through people’s storage units, make moonshine (which, I confess, has caused me to want to build a still) and, of course, that poor little redneck girl, whatsername. 

The show that speaks to me, though, is Doomsday Preppers.  I confess to having a little doom inside me.  For years, I’ve been buying the odd can of vegetables every time I go to the store and sequestering it away on a shelf in the basement.  Last night, the Goose and I decided to clean out the storage room and I was confronted with 412 cans of soup and canned spinach dating from 2002 “just in case”.  We don’t even eat soup.  

Thus, today I am following my own advice and continuing to clean and scrub out the basement, Lysol every nook and cranny and cart numerous loads of cans to the barn for  my hog, Orson, who will be delighted at the changes in his menu over the next few months.  

Friends, this is the time to shed our junk, both from our closets and our personal trunks.  Time, for the love of all things holy, to stop wearing red sweaters.  Take the bows and antlers off our cars, throw away those tins of cookies from the neighbors and, most of all, to retrieve the poor deflated snowmen and Santas from our yards.  Hold up our heads when we pass neighbors we partied with during the holidays, even if we don’t remember why we should be embarrassed in the first place.  Pull out our garden catalogues and dream of spring, start hinting early for Valentine’s day, stop coddling our children and tune up our nagging voices about their math grade.  Eat a salad, pass up a drink and give our livers a little vacation.  

My homies, this is the time to clean every closet, every drawer and scour every cabinet. There is something inside me that causes a little bird to leap in my heart when I see a stack of new drawer liners and sparkling cabinet organizers.  Don’t judge me, we all feel it whether we admit it or not. 

This is the place, where if I had the technology, I would insert a little link that would turn on the theme song to Poseidon Adventure (or maybe it was Towering Inferno?), about there being a morning after, and we would all take a deep collective breath, put on a light blue shirt and whip out our scrub brushes to sally forth into this brave new year.  Remember, we only have to be good until Super Bowl at which time we can fall off the crazy wagon again. Happy New Year, y’all!

10 Things that Confuse Me Today

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  1. Why a dog will stand and bark for 20 minutes at a napkin ring that has rolled under the table in the dining room until I come and tell him it’s okay, I see it.  Then it is, apparently, fine. 
  2. Why the Goose can drink six Mountain Dews a day, a sleeve of cookies and three giant meals and remain slim while I exist on two celery sticks, one saltine and one chardonnay.  Seems downright unchivalrous. 
  3. Why people are interested in celebrities.  I don’t get it.  When I have been forced to watch TMZ, I don’t know anyone except Donny Osmond and Cher.  How do people keep up with these HoneyJerseyHousewifyboo people and WHY? Isn’t life interesting enough right outside our doors, if not quite as trashy? 
  4. Why anyone enjoys Christmas at all.  It seems like a big ol’ mess to me.  
  5. Why a woman, with H1N1, a throbbing ovarian cyst and a mortal shaving injury can still do six loads of laundry, find tights that match her daughter’s outfit, mentally located her teen aged son anywhere in the cosmos at any given second, run five miles, uphill, and still keep her home smelling like lemons while a man can sneeze and take to the bed, moaning and crying for soup like he enjoyed, from a dented, discounted can, when he lived with his mother, and no one even questions it. 
  6. Why someone can’t find an earth changing use for those “silk” ficus trees from the eighties.  Everyone had one, some had two.  No one has them now.  There must be a giant “silk” ficus forest somewhere.  Could they be used in prisons?  I think this is a thought for our representatives. 
  7. Why do we continually allow everyone to think for us?  My car tells me when and how to back up, my appliances tell me what they’re thinking, 20/20 tells me how large my meal from McDonalds should be, my government tells me everything else.  My inner rebellious princess is getting pretty tired of it all.  Am I normal? Isn’t anyone else feeling like they want to be a little, I don’t know, deviant?  I may have to roll someone or something. Graffiti anyone? 
  8. Why do strangers sometimes call me “hon”.  Sounds snippy, I know, but it makes me really cranky.  The Goose gets nervous when a waitress directs a “hon” toward me.  My gentleman neighbor calls me “little princess” and I’m good with that.  “Hon”, however, makes me want to snap my gum and order chili and black coffee from a woman named Flo.  I just don’t like it. 
  9. Gravity.  I include this for my daughter, who worries about me and my Dekalb County education.  As evidenced in a conversation with her recently,  “gravity, it just don’t make sense”. 

  10. How is it a house that looked sparkly and clean in the morning can look like a crack house by 6:30 in the evening?  In a direct link to number 9, is it possible there are small gravity deposits under the floor and on the bench in the mudroom, under the counters, under every surface within 30 feet of the door that would cause people to throw down their mail, books, scarves, jackets, cups still full of red colored drinks, shoes, bras (!?!) or anything they wanted out of their cars and LEAVE them there until   they are put away.  Bowls and plates of food, NEXT TO THE SINK!  Does anyone every wonder how they get put away?  People today are too soft, brought up with fairy tales and elves. I think family members need to be sat down and told the truth about the chore fairy, shown a picture of her haggard self, low on botox and hair color, pajamas held up by one remaining strand of elastic, swollen eyes from wine and salty food consumption.  Show them the real truth, the crime scene photos, the haggard mess the chore fairy has become, and maybe, just maybe, we can save the chore fairy.  Every time a cup is placed in the dishwasher, a chore fairy loses a wrinkle.  I do believe, I do. 

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Blahs

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I’m not a huge whiner.  I said whiner, not winer.  That’s a whole different issue.  I am a person who, usually, sees the glass as half full.  Again, not the wine glass, that’s a different issue.

I get sad in the winter, though.  I am NOT a Christmas lover.  I loathe it.  I hate the mess, the drama, the sugary foods, tacky sweaters and the color red in general.  It just makes me grouchy.  The gloomy weather, though, makes me downright sad.

I’ve always been this way.  My mother, the True Southern Lady, recognized this and used to take me out of school to ride through the country on a sunny day so I could absorb a sliver of vitamin D.  Today, I take more than 35,000 units of D and still can’t stay on top of the blahs.  A week like this last one leaves me clinging to the Goose as he leaves for work, begging him to stay in bed and watch sappy movies. It forces me to rest my head on my children and expect them to tell me I am the center of their world.  It prompts me and my dog, Matilda, to gaze balefully at each other and sigh.  She gets it.

I know that exercise is a great remedy for what ails me so, considering the rain today, I dragged myself to the gym and listened to inappropriate music designed to further damage my aged ears.  I felt better.  Much better!  Then I came home.

Home should be a clean and serene place.  An oasis.  Today I came home to two bored dogs and a pig loose in the house.  Babette has rounded a corner to become a friendly and sweet pig.  She’s a jumping pig and launches herself onto my white sofa several times a day.  I have an entire stack of snout cleaning towels in my laundry room.  She had rooted up most of the yard, removed all my pansies and decorative cabbages and turned over two garden statues. Still, I love that little swine.

The thing about pigs is, they are hungry, and they are smart.  They oink about it about once every three seconds, rhythmically, loudly and with a passion.  They hear the most covert opening of a Kit Kat bar in the kitchen, no matter how hard one hides.  In all the years my dogs have lived with me they have never entertained the notion that they could find food in the house and feed themselves. Today, Babette learned to open the cabinets and serve herself.  She then helped out her friends, the dogs, and together, they devoured some Apple Jacks, several Kit Kat bars, chips, drink mix, pet treats (which I am thinking were pork flavored and I shudder at the cannibalistic implications), some oatmeal pies, unpopped popcorn and some straws. She even gnawed through the prune container.  That’s dedication.  She was straining the elastic on her pink harness when I arrived home, fat and swollen, but is even now trying other cabinets to see what treasures they hold.  The dogs have named her their messiah and are in awe of her ingenuity.

So, I no longer have time to be sad and gloomy. This house looks like a set for a scary movie.  The Goose says I love any emergency in which something must be cleaned or repaired.  He once dropped a can of latex paint in the kitchen and just stood there and said “Go to it!  You know you love it.” and it’s true. I just need a mission, no matter how lame.  We all do.  So I’ll get to it now, turn on all the lights, turn up some of the kids loud music with lyrics that make me blush and clean up for when my family comes back in from the world and tracks mud right back across the floor. Days like today cause me to want to sniff my coconut oil furniture polish and dream of summer.  Image