Great(ish) Things About 2024

 

This definitely has the potential to be a very short post.

A lot of not-great things happened this year. Some of them had global ramifications, others only Baudelaireian. (My spellcheck doesn't know what to do with the word "Baudelaireian." But I like it, and I'm going to keep it.)

We lost a lot of fine, well-known people in 2024. Like, a lot. Maybe not as many as in 2016, which was a bumper crop of sadness as far as losing beloved figures goes, but still a lot. The New York Times has a lengthy, if USA-centric, list on its website, while Wikipedia's is more exhaustive and spans the globe. Obviously former President Jimmy Carter is front of mind today, but I only just found out from the NYT that in September we lost author Nelson DeMille, whose books accompanied me on many a business trip when I just wanted to immerse myself in something with a lot of action, humor, and few life lessons. I enjoyed his writing a lot.

These were not people I knew personally, but they touched my life, and I'm sad they're gone.

On the other hand, good things happened this year, as well. That's where this post might become a little brief, but the fact is there are always flowers among the garbage. Some things were good only in the sense that I choose to accentuate the positive, others were actually fond memories that I'll carry with me for a long while.

I recommend you make yourself a list like this, even if it's difficult. Especially if it's difficult. That's the best reason to do it. Here's mine (in no particular order):

• I saw Precocious Daughter walk the stage to receive her Master's degree. I've always said I can't take much credit for what an awesome person she is, but I fully claim the status of proud mama.
• I saw Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway, just before they both won Tony awards for Merrily We Roll Along. (A bucket list item I didn't even know I had until I checked it off.)
• I watched the total solar eclipse with a crowd of people on top of a parking garage. The moment of totality, along with the awed response of the assembled as daylight disappeared in the middle of the afternoon, made me feel simultaneously part of something huge, and very small and insignificant.
• Two people I know kicked breast cancer's ass, while a third continues to fight the good fight. They're all inspiring, and stronger women than I will ever be. 
• I allowed myself to be re-acquired by a cat, a year after losing two beloved felines two months apart. The lovely Tacocat is sweet and feisty, and a pain in the ass. He gives me somewhere to put my love, because love doesn't do you much good unless you can give it away.
• I drove in a snowstorm. It wasn't fun, and it's not a positive thing per se (except that I survived it). But it gave me a story to tell. Since I'm not particularly good at making up stories, I'm always glad to add a new real-life one to my repertoire.

When all is said and done, we're the sum of our stories. For me, 2024 wasn't exactly an anthology of great literary works. More like a pamphlet with a few interesting pages. Maybe 2025 will be better. Maybe we'll live in interesting times, as the curse goes. But for better or for worse, I plan to stick around and see what happens.

To everyone who has paid me the great compliment of reading this little blog (even if you don't like it, you came by to see me), thank you so much. Have a happy and safe New Year.

P.S. I don't generally make resolutions, because I suck at keeping them and why do that to myself every year? But I do promise my readers monkeys wearing clothes in 2025.

Another Jam-Packed, Fun-Filled Friday

 It's the last Friday of 2024, you guys.

Imma probably going to do a year-end wrap-up between now and New Year's. Don't get excited: It's been a pretty mediocre year.

If this year were a .gif.

But hey, there's only one final Friday each year. This one finishes off a pretty easy week at work. When Christmas falls on a Wednesday, you get a lot of people who just blow off the rest of the week. That means an easy commute, plenty of parking spaces, and almost nobody expecting me to do crazy things like my job.

All day I've gotten exactly two emails that required me to actually respond/take action, and they were literally "Please send me a copy of this thing" and "Oh, also please send me a copy of this other thing." Then there was a calendar invite for something that's happening three weeks from now. Even I can't spin mashing the "Accept" button on a calendar invite into something approaching work.

James probably could. But I'm no 
Godfather of Soul.

So, having rolled in early and skipped lunch, I'm going to take off just as soon as I've hit my eight hours. And I have a spectacular Final Friday planned when I get home. No, I do! I really, really do!

Yeah, no, I totally don't. 

Aw man, remember Philosoraptor?
We were killing it in the 2010s, kids.

Here are some things I'll actually do to pass the hours until Final Friday becomes Swan Song Saturday:

• Look for a better alliterative word to go with Saturday (the above is the best I could do on short notice)
• Eat pasta (I'm looking forward to this one)
• Play fetch with Tacocat
• Adjust the color on my TV (backstory: On Christmas Eve, I wanted to watch my favorite movie adaptation of "A Christmas Carol," the 1951 one with Alistair Sim. All I could find was a [badly] colorized version, so I turned the color setting on my TV all the way down so I could watch it in gloomy b&w the way God intended. Only I didn't notice what the color was initially set to. And now it just seems...wrong. No matter how I adjust it, it's either "colors not appearing in nature" or "old Polaroids that have been sitting in a box since 1983." I will get the balance right, even if I have to risk my sanity by throwing the brightness and contrast settings into the mix.)
• Play with re-designing this page (it's looking as tired as I feel most days)
• Finish the Stephen King novel I started on the plane when I visited the frozen Midwest earlier this month (Holly, if you're interested)
• Demurely sip a cocktail in my typical refined fashion

Whew, that's quite a list, and I haven't even scratched the surface of discarding the refrigerator contents that have sat untouched since 2024 was just a lad in a diaper. 

However you plan to spend the last Friday of this blasted blessed year, have fun, be safe, and come back to find out if I actually did any of this crap or just watched clips from old 70s variety shows until I nodded off. No wagering, please.

Christmas Eve with a Middling Parody of Clement C. Moore

Christmas Eve with Chuck Baudelaire (and Tacocat)

 'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house

Tacocat was cavorting with his favorite stuffed mouse.

No stockings were hung by the chimney with care

Because in my apartment there's no fireplace there.

The children weren't nestled - I've only the one,

And she's flown the coop, her new life has begun.

And I in my jammies - but not the cat, bless him,

I'm not risking sharp claws in my flesh just to dress him.

Then out on the street, I heard sirens wail -

Another drunk driver being taken to jail.

As I looked out and saw flashing red and blue lights,

I hoped all would make it home safely that night.

And when it got quiet, with nothing to see,

I turned my attention to what was on TV.

The usual suspects - Rudolph and the Grinch.

They were fictional, but hey, they would do in a pinch.

I poured me a cocktail and drank it down quick.

I poured me another - that should do the trick.

Then I made a toast to the ones that weren't here

And I thought of their names, and I wished them good cheer.

On Mom & Dad, Sis & Bro, Precocious Daughter,

On dear Southside Shelly, living next to the water,

On Allie Cat, Christopher, Miss Othmar, and Smee,

On Chris and BekS (with her college degree!),

On Pablo, and of course, on Bestest Friend,

And Drummer Boy, too (though all good things must end).

I wish you all love and a nice Christmas Day -

Then the cat snagged my sleeve and insisted we play.

This year I'm alone in this holiday season

Yet I'm content, for no particular reason

Except that next year will be better, I think -

Merry Christmas to all,

Imma have another drink.

Fancy Feasts Come in All Sizes

 Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Guys, if you've made it this far, 
you're probably safe.

I'm not making turkey this year. Or stuffing. Or mashed potatoes. Or cranberry sauce. In short, not making a traditional turkey dinner at all.

It's just Precocious Daughter and me tomorrow. And we don't want to mess with all that just for the two of us. Well, there's Tacocat, but I don't think he's ever seen a Thanksgiving dinner before, so we'll just toss him a few extra treats and tell him that's it, that's the holiday. 

Don't anybody show him this, though.

Instead we're making a couple of family-favorite dishes together that are delicious, nostalgic, and hard to screw up. And don't create a lot of dirty dishes, which is just extra-thankful. 

But I have a co-worker...I'll call her Edith, because with all affection and kindness, she's kind of a dingbat.

Look it up, children.

Like me, Edith is also planning a quiet Thanksgiving with just her, her spouse, and a pet or two. Unlike me, Edith is going pilgrim-shit crazy over Thanksgiving dinner.

Candied whole cranberries. Roasted sweet potato medallions. Probably something made with phyllo dough. Hoo-boy, nothing jacks up your effort-to-results ratio like making shit out of phyllo dough.

Don't get me wrong, I love phyllo and phyllo-centric dishes. But if I'm going there, I need there to be a house full of people to congratulate me on the lighter-than-air delicacies I've created. PDaughter is totally worth the effort, but her GenZ default enthusiastic reaction of two head bobs and a "Yeah, nice" does not provide my USRDA of validation.

I slaved over sheets of premade frozen phyllo
and all I get is a goddamn thumbs up emoji?

Also on Edith's Thanksgiving Day menu: A salad that has more than three ingredients, rolls that didn't emerge from a cardboard tube that was smacked against the kitchen counter, and an appetizer involving foreign cheese and artisanal shaved prosciutto. And I'll bet her stuffing has sausage and hand-scraped thyme in it.

No hate to any of this food. It all sounds pretty delicious to me. (Except for stuffing with sausage in it - why does that mess seem to have gone viral this year and how can we stop it in 2025 and/or perpetuity?) Yet in almost exactly the same way that I wouldn't hire Timothée Chalamet to scour my bathtub in a g-string and not livestream it to all my friends, I can't be arsed to put all this work into a feast that only two people will ever see.  Never mind the fact that my refrigerator wouldn't hold a fraction of the leftovers generated by this meal. If I can't shovel it into Rubbermaid containers and send it home with six different people, it's going to get fed to the neighborhood raccoons. 

And I don't even mean throwing it in the dumpster for the trash pandas to raid - I'm talking about heaping paper plates with food and sailing them, Frisbee-style, off my balcony to their little waiting paws.

Ermahgerd, charcooteries!

So, while I wish Edith all the best and an enjoyable high-end Thanksgiving meal, PDaughter and I will be happily eating peasant food and treating Tacocat to a can of Fancy Feast turkey-flavored slop in gravy. I think we'll all be happy.

And to all my Drunkards I wish a happy, healthy Thanksgiving that is just the right size and shape to hold your gratitude. Internet hugs and sweet little raccoon kisses.

Easter Candies I Wouldn't Eat Even If I Did (Which I Don't)

 Yesterday on "Good Mythical Morning," Rhett and Link did a bracket to determine the worst kind of Easter candy.

Here's the episode:

I'm a huge fan of "GMM," especially the earlier shows when Link looked like his mom still gave him money to get a haircut once a month and he spent $10 to go to Fantastic Sam's and spent the rest on White Claw. Mostly whenever I need to remind myself that all Millennials aren't wannabe hipsters who drink Starbucks six times a week bur can't save up the down payment on a house, I watch these two 40-something dorks who make six figures annually by filming themselves putting Transformers in battery acid to see what happens.

Seriously, though, I love these guys. GMM marathons helped me get through the loneliest days of pandemic lockdown with my sanity battered but intact

Anyway, the topic at hand yesterday was Easter candy, and the boys determined that these are the absolutely worst things you can inflict on an Easter basket.

Nowadays these apparently are known as "Brach's Easter Hunt Eggs" or "Hiding Eggs." They're also described as a "candy-coated marshmallow." These monikers are total nonsense. When I was a kid, these things didn't even have a name. And they are not now, nor have they ever been, marshmallows. 

Basically, these "eggs" are pure sugar, compressed to a consistency that, whatever the candymaker's intention, come off as having gone stale about 12 hours before you put them in your mouth. They're coated in sugar of an even harder texture - if you squeeze one lightly, the coating will crack into jagged shards of incipient tooth decay. And the different colors (all the colors of the rainbow, if the rainbow developed a drug habit) supposedly had different flavors...? More nonsense. Purple sugar tastes like pink sugar tastes like fluorescent green sugar.

In a nutshell, "Hiding Eggs" are the Easter candy you eat after you decide that Pixy Stix aren't an efficient enough vehicle for delivering uncut sucrose into your system.

Now, I don't necessarily disagree with their being crowned the worst Easter candy. But I will say that Rhett and Link's bad-candy bracket was flawed from the outset. I think they said that GMM viewers voted on the candies to be included.  I'm usually three or four minutes deep into an episode before I actually start paying attention, mostly because I'm focusing on whether I love or hate what they're wearing that day. Anyway, whoever voted for some of the contenders were bad actors and definitely should not be given water the next time they line up to cast their ballot.

Aside: Seriously, Georgia, WTF is wrong with you?

One of the most problematic inclusions in the bad-candy bracket is the Cadbury Creme Egg. Look, I am a reformed sugar fiend (and as an aside, I can't believe that it's been more than seven years and my sweet tooth NEVER returned), so it's been a few years since I routinely sampled new releases of candy and other sweet treats. But the Cadbury Creme Egg is a Hall of Fame candy, period. 

With an annual commercial right up there
with the jingling Hershey's Kisses at Christmas.

These first came out in America when I was a kid, and one egg cost as much as a whole candy bar, but biting off the tip and sticking your tongue in that sticky white creamy goodness was totally worth it. And until I wrote that sentence, I didn't realize how closely the experience bordered on sexual awakening, but that undoubtedly was part of the appeal even to an ignorant 10-year-old naif like myself.

Ahem.

To me, the Cadbury Creme Egg has no place in any ranking of worst Easter candy, as it is clearly the second-best Easter candy of all time, right behind the Reese's Pieces Carrot.

Is there a Nobel Prize for 
candy packaging?

Items that would make my personal bracket for leave-it-in-the-basket-or-hope-your-siblings-are-willing-to-trade candy include the following.

Palmer Chocolate Eggs

Obviously, it's not an Easter basket without a pile of these shiny bits of extraordinarily cheap chocolate. I would go so far as to say that the R.M. Palmer Company gave me a permanently skewed opinion of what holiday chocolate should taste like. Who knew that in some parts of the world chocolate is actually supposed to be flavorful and even sophisticated? These things are truly terrible, and the crunchy version filled with semi-stale crisped rice may actually be a little bit worse.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg

These were the most tradable of all Easter basket candies. The Easter Bunny would poop out an assortment (or buy them at Walgreen's, whatever), and each kid in the house got a few different varieties, and you would wheel and deal like a Boomer at a swap meet to get your favorites while unloading the ones you hated. There are so many delightful flavors of Russell Stover Cream Eggs - vanilla, coconut, the coveted raspberry. But it seems I always ended up with maple - the "I got a rock" of Easter candy. 

One Chuck to another, I feel you.

Disclaimer: I hate most things that are maple-flavored, so this is purely subjective on my part. However, if you disagree, you're wrong and I hope you get nothing but Palmer chocolate in your Easter basket and Christmas stocking this year.

Black Jelly Beans

Who is the fiend who would eat even one of these, let alone buy an entire bag of them? For that matter, who is the utter psychopath at Brach's who decided the world needed a bag of isolated licorice-flavored jelly beans? GMM did include Brach's jelly beans - or jelly bird eggs, as literally no one in history has ever called them - in their bad-candy bracket. I support this entry. Jelly beans are wonderful, but Brach's jelly beans are the bottom of the barrel. Except for the white ones with pink speckles, which maybe weren't even Brach's but who knows? Again, these putatively have different flavors that go with their colors, but apart from the disgusting taste of black licorice, no one can tell. And God forbid some well-meaning relative added spiced jelly beans to the mix. Spiced candy was invented by Communists to turn Western youth into goose-stepping automatons, and you can't make me believe otherwise. But even they were preferable to black jelly beans, which were always, always the very last thing left at the bottom of my basket a week after Easter.

Reese's White Peanut Butter Egg

Chocolate and peanut butter is the finest, purest flavor combination in the world. Don't go replacing half of it with a gaggingly sweet coating that can legally only be called "white." These can go fuck right off. 

M&Ms

Don't get me wrong: M&Ms are great. They melt in your goddam mouth, after all. Nowadays they even come in Easter-ready pastels. But that's just a disguise to fool unsuspecting children into thinking that M&Ms are remotely an Easter candy. This is a con the brand began to perpetuate in the 1980s with its "Thank you, Easter Bunny" commercials.

Bawk bawk, my ass.

I have to tell you, as the parent of a young child even I was guilty of filling plastic eggs with a handful of M&Ms and hiding them around the house. You know, something to break the monotony of eggs filled with jelly beans or spare change. 

Aside: Do little kids still get excited to find a quarter in a plastic egg? Or are they just expecting the Easter Bunny to Venmo them funds these days?

In any event, M&Ms as an Easter candy are a cop-out. A pure canard, as Wilford Brimley said in The Natural. Easter candy should take the form of something justifiably spring-themed like a chick or an egg or a bunny, and ideally should be something you can't just walk into Target and buy in a five-pound bag every freaking day of the year. Them's the rules that I just now made up for this post.

 Those, then, are my choices for worst Easter candy. Your mileage may vary. But as always, a) you're entitled to your opinion and b) you must be out of your goddamn mind.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate the holiday in either the dead-savior or cheap-chocolate format. 

P.S. I now think the white-with-pink-speckles variety of jelly bean was definitely a brand other than Brach's, but I don't remember it and can't find it online. I'm pretty sure it also began with a B, though. Any ideas?

Black-Eyed Peas: A Comedy in Three Parts

There are a few things you should know about me.

I don't do TikTok challenges.

I don't vote Republican.

I don't eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day.

The first two are self-explanatory: I want to leave a better world for the children, which precludes voting to sustain a patriarchal, wealth-based oligarchy in the latter case and filming myself doing weird shit in yoga pants in the former.

The black-eyed peas are a bit more complicated.

Part 1: The Tradition

Growing up in the Midwest, it was traditional to eat pickled herring for good luck on New Year's Day. Or maybe it was New Year's Eve. It doesn't matter, as there is no day in the calendar year on which I'm going to eat pickled goddamn herring. I never saw the correlation between good fortune and consuming half-liquefied fermented fish out of a jar. In fact, to everyone who did this on New Year's Day last year, I would just like to gesture expansively at literally the entirety of 2020.

I rest my case.

I've now been living in Texas for my entire adult life. For the most part I love Texas food. If I were a Lone Star-themed Statue of Liberty standing proudly on the shore of White Rock Lake (work with me here), the words engraved on my pedestal would include "Give me your chili (no beans), your brisket, your chicken-fried steak smothered in white gravy, your deep-friend corn dogs but with ketchup not mustard because I have my limits, people..."

Yet black-eyed peas are a Texas staple whose appeal has alluded me. My background in beans (because black-eyed peas are deceptively-named little bastards and are in fact beans) is in the baked or pork-and varieties. I like my beans tomatoey and/or molassessessey. I was always a little suspicious of a pot of watery spotted legumes cooked with a few hunks of salt pork and not much else. They just seemed so...naked to me.

More importantly, eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day wasn't a tradition I was brought up with (up with which I was not brought...forget it). I was never introduced to it by a Southern friend or by the Texan side of my ex-spouse's family. And because the alternative in my childhood was eating the aforementioned goddamned melted stinkfish, I didn't have any food-based good-luck rituals in my life at all.

Until this year.

Part 2: Spam

According to the good people at Hormel, the potted meat product SPAM should always be written in all-caps. This seems slightly pretentious to me, like the way Ted Allen on "Chopped" refers to Twinkies as "sponge cake snacks," and also my pinkies are going to get tired if I have to hold down the shift key that much. So for the purposes of this post, I'll risk the wrath of the purists by using Spam henceforth.

So. How did we go from black-eyed peas on New Year's Day to Spam? Actually, it was the other way around.

Until January 1st, 2021, I had never in my life eaten Spam. The reasons are similar to the reasons I had never eaten black-eyed peas, so I won't repeat them. If you've already forgotten or are in the habit of only skimming what I write, hoping something interesting will eventually catch your eye (did you think I didn't know what you were doing? pfffft), go back and re-read Part 1. Slacker.

OK, so I already knew that Spam was going to be on the menu at Casa Baudelaire this weekend. I knew that my darling Drummer Boy has been in the grip of a mild Spam mania recently and had purchased several cans of the stuff to "cook" at my place. 

I don't know exactly where his sudden interest in Spam came from. It's healthy to preserve some unplumbed depths in your partner's psyche, I guess? I also didn't know just how many varieties of the spicy, fatty, ostensibly meaty processed foodstuff are available.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam spam...

Yeah. That's a lot. 

So on New Year's Day, Drummer Boy brought over a can of this:

Because boy, if there's anything that a can of uber-processed, salty, fatty, nitrite-filled meat needs added to it, it's BACON.

But I was game. New year, new me. Same old colon, which clearly was about to be subjected to a workout it had never before experienced and wasn't asking for now. Still, nothing wrong with a little indulgence to kick off 2021. I haven't eaten a burger in nine months, my colon should be clean as a whistle and ready to cut loose. Slice it, fry it, eat it up, that's my motto. It works in a surprising number of situations. You should try it.

Anyway, then shit got real. From inside his cooler (the man travels with a cooler, he doesn't screw around), Drummer Boy pulled out this:

Not gonna lie, I felt ambushed.

Part 3: The Recipe

Once I decided not to unceremoniously kick the man I love to the curb for this blatant abuse of my trust, I threw up my hands and said, "Whatever, dude." It's that spirit of compromise that has carried us through the tough times. 

Actually, we basically broke up for several months during 2020, because fuck the pandemic, but we patched things up and emerged stronger than ever, also because fuck the pandemic. But that's a story for another time. I'm here to talk about goddamned black-eyed peas right now.

So Drummer Boy started doing things in my kitchen. He sliced up the Spam.

He fried it up.

And then, just as I was getting comfortable with the whole thing, he added...cocktail weiners.

If you're going to try to kill your girlfriend with unhealthy meat products, you should just go all the way. That apparently is his motto. I can't really recommend it.

Then he added chopped onion. Pro-tip: If you loathe the disgusting crunchy texture of onions, as I do, keep some on hand in the freezer. When they cook up, they turn quickly to undetectable mush while retaining their flavor-enhancing, um, flavor.

Can't have onion without garlic, so in it went.

I gotta admit, so far this pan full of fried meat was cooking up pretty damn tasty. But the Spam and Li'l Smokies concoction was not destined to remain on its own. It was time to add the namesake ingredient.

Am I the only one who heard Bernard Herrmann's score from Psycho just then? No? Skip it.

By the way, per Hillshire Farms, the correct nomenclature is "Lit'l Smokies Cocktail Links." I don't know what Ted Allen calls them. He never returns my calls, although he did like one of my tweets one time. 

I LOLed.

Moving on. In a big old pot, Drummer Boy simmered up some broth (Better Than Bouillon, half-chicken and half-vegetable) seasoned with a secret blend of herbs and spices. "Secret blend" sounds better than "I wasn't paying attention." There was definitely black pepper. And maybe, I don't know, nutmeg? Probably not nutmeg. If you make black-eyed peas you surely know how to season them. Knock yourself out.

So he let all that cook down for a while. And then - game changer - he removed some of the beans and liquid to a bowl and went to town with my immersion blender. OK, this is actually a super-common technique for thickening soups and other dishes, so not really a game changer. There's only so much dramatic tension I can create from a goddamn recipe. Play along.

Anyway, Drummer Boy poured the warm bean slurry (which is totally the name of my 00s alt-rock playlist on Spotify) back into the pot and stirred it all together. 

You guys. It was delicious. I mean, obviously a dish consisting mostly of salt, fat, prayers to the cholesterol gods and also tangentially black-eyed peas is going to be delicious. But damn.

Sloth-tested, sloth-approved.

I now feel lucky, punk. Seriously, I am going to look 2021 in the eye and punch it right in its stupid face while singing showtunes and dressing inappropriately for my age. That kind of lucky.

And it's all thanks to a pot of black-eyed peas that, honestly, I would have wanted no part of had it been brought to my attention ahead of time. Oh, and had it not been cooked by that guy who keeps coming around and telling me he loves me for reasons I can't entirely fathom.

The love of a good man and food ambushes. It's all I need this year.

Oh, and some of that dismantling the patriarchy and remembering the lives lost to Covid-19. 

Those beans have a lot of heavy lifting to do.

Good luck, Drunkards. Let's have a happy fucking New Year if we can.

A Tale of Two Trees

It's hard to believe, but this year marks the fifth Christmas that Precocious Daughter and I have spent in our little post-divorce apartment. It's been a pretty great home for us. We've seen some good times here, and some not-so-good times. And now, five Christmas seasons.

In 2015, our first Christmas here, we bought an artificial tree. We bought the best one we could afford. It wasn't great. But it was ours. We decorated it with the half of the lights and ornaments I'd taken from my marriage. The first year it seemed as if a lot of memories and cherished baubles were missing. But as the years went by, and we added a few new bits and pieces that were only ours, our little Christmas tree seemed more and more like a new tradition we had created ourselves.

I'm pretty sure that tree skirt came along later. Our first Christmas here, I think we used a very old skirt that my mom had made in the 70s, which was falling apart. I was very pleased when I could justify spending money on a new one, somewhere around our third Christmas.

But ever since that first year, I've been promising PDaughter and myself that one day we would buy a bigger and better tree. Every December, when we pull out the long skinny box it lived in the rest of the year, and PDaughter carefully arranges the wire "branches" on the plastic "trunk" (that's her job; stringing lights is my responsibility, and we hang the ornaments together), I watch her and promise her, "One of these years we're going to get a new tree." And every December, I watch my budget go to other, more important things. After each Christmas, the little tree gets disassembled and put back in its box, waiting to be called into service again.

This year, PDaughter is a sophomore in college, amazingly. Although she's not far away, she has an apartment on campus. I love that she's tasting independence, but I miss her like crazy during the semester. Last week, while she was taking her final exams, I pulled out all the Christmas stuff. I decorated the apartment so it would look nice when she came home for the winter break. Everything except the tree. That we would put up together. 

It went according to tradition at first. PDaughter fired up her Christmas playlist (because you can't trim the tree without Andy Williams, the Carpenters, and, uh, the Ramones). Then she began to assemble the little tree while I sighed, "One of these years we're going to get a nicer one." Tradition.

But then something happened.

Stay with me here.

If you've ever assembled an inexpensive fake tree, you know it's not brain surgery. You have a couple of lengths of pipe that fit together to make a tree-high pole. You have a base consisting of plastic or metal feet that you attach to the pole. And you have a bunch of metal arms covered with faux greenery, bent into a hook at one end to fit into the pole in an approximate tree-shaped pattern. You slide the hooks into a series of holes or notches or some such and voila - fake tree.

This was our fifth go-round with this particular specimen of pinus artificialis. PDaughter knew exactly what to do.

Except...she didn't. And I didn't. 

And damned if we didn't stare at that pole and those branches like a couple of Martians who had never so much heard of a Christmas tree, let alone tried to make one out of a box of parts.

I don't know how else to explain it, but we could not, for the life of us, figure out how the thing went together. Where were the holes, the notches, any little clue of how to insert Branch A into Trunk B? It was as if someone (the Grinch, perhaps) had snuck into the closet where our Christmas decorations live, removed our tree, and replaced it with something that sort of resembled our tree but wasn't. Like a box of Legos that's supposed to make a fire truck except none of the pieces inside are red or fire engine-shaped.

It made no sense. But that's what happened. And as we haplessly tried to figure out how two competent, educated women could suddenly forget how to put together a tree (or how said tree could suddenly become un-put-together-able), I said in frustration, "In about 30 seconds, I'm bundling us into the car to go look for a new tree."

PDaughter watched me uncertainly, not knowing if she should encourage this train of thought or not. We continued to puzzle over the pile of plastic and metal between us. Thirty seconds later, I said the same thing: "This is nuts. We're about to head to the store to get a new tree." 

And then, all at once, two thoughts hit me. The first was, You just got a Christmas bonus. You have a little extra money right now.

The second was: This is a sign.

I'm not one to ignore signs. They don't come around often, but when they do I pay attention. So we packed that sad, maddening little tree back into its box, and we went out and bought a new tree. 

As you can see, it's a touch larger than the old one. OK, it's a monster, relatively speaking. It's a big, beautiful tree. It fills our small living room in the most wonderful way. And it fills my heart, too. I feel as if PDaughter and I have earned this tree.

We kept the old tree. It's back in the closet, unassembled. PDaughter says she may put it up in her campus apartment next Christmas.

I have no doubt that she'll be able to assemble it without a hitch. It no longer needs to be difficult to put together, you see. Now it can go back to doing its job of being a small, modest Christmas decoration in someone's first apartment. A job it was - and will be - very good at doing.

It's hardly a miracle, even a Hallmark Channel-quality one. But it's a good Christmas story. Who doesn't need a good story to take from year to year?

Home Sweet Home

Precocious Daughter is home for Thanksgiving week.

We're having ham, friend. Truce?

She's never more than 30 minutes from me when she's "away" at school, and she visits at least once a week, so it's not as if this is a major homecoming. But it does mark roughly three months that I've been living mostly on my own. And it's nice to have a break from that.

It's nice to hear someone else moving around, you know? 

Other than the Siamese Kitten. At least PDaughter doesn't zoom back and forth in the middle of the night.

Is that why they do it?

It's nice to have a well-stocked fridge. She actually eats 2-3 meals a day - I've kind of gotten out of that habit, honestly.

It's nice to listen to her talk and laugh and make goofy sounds (she gets the random-goofy-sound gene from me, but I when I'm by myself, I mostly just stay silent).

It's just nice to have her around.

On Thursday we'll make Thanksgiving dinner - not a huge production, but all the basics. And after we've eaten, she'll pack up the leftovers and take them to her dad. Yes, I'm making Thanksgiving dinner for my ex. 

Not even the weirdest thing to happen since we split.

It's all good.

On Friday, PDaughter and I are going to see a performance of The Nutcracker. And Saturday is her birthday. She'll be 19 - the last of her teenage years, and probably the last year I can consider her in any way a child.

And on Sunday, she'll go back to her dorm to finish her first semester of college.

Time flies, doesn't it?

American Drunkards...what are your plans for Thanksgiving week?

Gratitudinal

Here in America,Thanksgiving is a week from today. You might not know that from all the freaking Christmas commercials on TV, but it's true.

Ugh.

As far as I'm concerned, Christmas can fuck off until at least December 1. So let's talk about giving thanks.

I'm thankful for:

Technology that lets me access both the internet and my favorite TV channels even though my laptop has a busted screen.

Wonderful people who have offered to buy me a new laptop (thanks, but see above).

An amazing daughter who is determined to be a self-sufficient, fiscally responsible college student.

Clients who actually pay for my freelance writing services.

A cat who keeps me warm on chilly nights and purrs loudly when I offer chin scratches.

Friends who stick with me when I don't necessarily give them reason to want to.

Twitter, for making me laugh every damn day.

What are you guys grateful for? Share with me, please.

I Hope It's the Right Size

Merry Christmas Eve, Drunkards! I didn't get you anything.

LOL, jk. Actually, I got you a sackful of gifts. Because you deserve only the very best. But this is what I got you, anyway.

For meme makers:

Fucking use this.

For women in the workplace:

Credit: Wendy Sue Huff/Pantsuit Nation

For Christian couch potatoes:

The Bible says it's OK to watch a "Chopped" marathon instead.

For hard-to-buy-for foodies:

A passssssta holder.

For science geeks/Trekkers:

The shirt. Chris Pine and Karl Urban may be on back order.

For moms who feel like failures:

Your gift is the schadenfreude, not the dick pops.
Unless you're into that.

For anyone who hasn't yet discovered BuzzFeed Unsolved:

Set aside a couple of hours and watch.

And for everyone else:

Thank you.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or just have a nice day.

I hope we all get everything we want.

Homecoming for the Rest of Us. Please.

Precocious Daughter is a senior in high school.

She's is marching band. She is playing at her high school's Homecoming game for the last time.

For the last time.

I mean, obviously, whatever. BUT STILL.

Jeebus.

Everything PDaughter does this year is obviously in "OMG the last time she ever..." territory.

And she has expressed her utter disdain for it.

But I'm her mom, so...OMG OMG OMG.

Tonight PDaughter is playing lead clarinet in her marching band in support of her school's Homecoming game.

Which I expect they will lose pathetically because they're not very good.

UPDATE: They lost. Bad. Really bad.

Turns out spending $3400 on a clarinet doesn't guarantee a winning high school football season. Like, who knew?

OK, though.

They lost. Badly.

Yet the Homecoming Dance is tomorrow, nonetheless.

And PDaughter will attend, and she will look beautiful.

OH.

And she will go as the platonic friend of a boy she's known since childhood.

And if he does anything...

ANYTHING...

...less than respectful to my baby girl...

...he will answer to  me.

As will his parents.

And anyone else who claims to know us.

Just saying.

Mama Tiger is activated.

Just in case.

<3

Happy Homecoming, children.

Scene from a Mall

Precocious Daughter and I went shopping today.

Here we are. Really.

We drove to our local regional outlet mega-mall. The last time we were there, we were shopping for PDaughter's junior prom dress, which was a stress-filled nightmare.

But it all turned out fine. And hell yes,
I had this lunchbox in grade school.

Today, though, we were just looking for cute summer tops. I found three, she found four, and we spent seventy-five bucks for the lot. Outlet mall for the win.

Having successfully bagged our limit, we walked to the food court and bought a couple of slices from Sbarro. Pizza: Literally nature's perfect food.

Kale can go fuck itself, tbh.

So the food court was hopping. Most of the tables were occupied. We found a couple of spaces at a long table between two families. 

All we wanted to do was eat pizza, you guys.

But on one side of us was a family consisting of mom, dad, and two boys under the age of six. The younger boy was crying, apparently because he wanted to get a sample from one of the food vendors but was unable to do so.

His dad's reaction was (direct quotes here, you guys):

"Grow up."

"Be quiet."

"I've had enough of you."

"No Legoland for you."

"I'm tired of your shit."

Dad O' the Year eventually left the table, saying "I've got things to do" while plastering his phone to his ear.

On the other side was a large Asian-American family, who were mostly enjoying their food court fare. At one point, a young woman holding a fussy baby came by, and when her presumed husband said, "We should have brought in the car seat," she answered, "Well that's a fucking brilliant idea."

In a really loud voice, I might add.

PDaughter and I were like

Sure, yeah.

I was so basically glad to have had only one child.

PDaughter was glad to be only one child.

We've discussed this many times before.

I never meant to have only one kid. But that is how life turned out.

PDaughter for her her part enjoys being an only child and would have protested any other way of being.

So...no matter my intention, I have one love, and but one love, of my life.

I also have three really cute new tops.

Sometimes life lessons are hard, but sometimes they kick ass.

Happy Fathers Day to all my Dad Drunkards. You rock.

And all of my non-Dad Drunkards... you rock, too. Whether you have a day or not. You rock.

Let's kick ass this coming week, OK? I'll be doing it in new tops. But you do you.