You Can Just Take Your Jingle And Shove It!

I'm just going to say it. I hate Christmas music.

The main reason is the obvious -- musically speaking, most Christmas music is complete and utter crap. The tunes are boring, the subject is repetitive, and the arrangements are probably the real reason for the rise in adult onset diabetes. Once you add in third rate singers trying to restart their floundering careers by releasing a holiday album, it's just a melange of crap. A veritable Musischescheissesuppen, to coin and mangle a German word at the same time. (No, I didn't bother to look any of it up, so I'm guessing that I managed to get all three parts of that word wrong, but what do you want after twenty-five years?)

The fact that I live on the street where the middle school relearns the same arrangement of tunes for the holiday parade every single year does not help. And hey, nothing says "peace, love, and joy to the world" like poorly performed Christmas tunes set to a martial drum.

It also does not help that every business feels obligated to play Christmas tunes the minute the Thanksgiving turkey is off the shelves. And that's if you're lucky. I heard Alvin and the Chipmunks doing Jingle Bell Rock in October. This year has been slightly better merely because I have achieved 80% of my goal of becoming a shut-in, so I've managed to avoid most of it.

Anyhow, my grass-roots campaign to have one day a week declared "Christmas-Music-Free" is off to a slow start (possibly owing to the 80% shut-in goal). I thought the problem might be that it needed a catchier name, so I asked around. Dale had the winning entry with "Anti-Christ Afternoon" which wasn't quite what I was aiming for, but does prove yet again that my friends are much funnier than I will ever be.

So there you have it. Bah humbug!

Great Bags Of Fire!

Well, tonight was supposed to be the neighborhood luminary night. Once a year we all get together and line the sidewalks with white paper bags with candles. It's very pretty, especially when the whole street participates, and people go out and stroll through the neighborhood. It raises some money for the local food pantry and brings us all together.

This evening was windy. Really windy. I'm going to assume that the wind strength was different at the house of the person who had the final word on whether to go ahead or hold off for another week, because otherwise that person is just a lunatic. In any case, word came down that it was a go.

My neighbors and I looked at each other and shrugged and then bent into the wind to put out the bags and light the candles. I know I was making "To Build A Fire" jokes the other day, but have you ever tried to light a candle in gusty winds? My neighbors lit theirs (in the bags) inside the house and carefully brought each one out. I have cats. I don't light flames inside my house.

In any case, they got half of theirs outside. I managed to get one candle lit, and while I was preparing the next one a gust of wind came and knocked the first bag over (extinguishing the candle) and lit the one next to it on fire.

Since it was supposed to be "Luminary Night" not "Flaming Bags of Terror Night" we gave up and went inside. During my run later in the evening it looked like some people managed to keep theirs lit and others gave up. Not really the moment of neighborhood togetherness we were hoping for. Oh well.

Where Should I Put This?

My brain sometimes does this thing... I have to admit right now neurology was not my favorite subject in vet school, so I have no idea what part of the brain is responsible or what this "feature" is called.

The math side of me wants to call it a lack of the transitive property, but that's not quite accurate.

The programmer in me describes it as a singly-linked list.

And the part of me that has spent way too much time accidentally memorizing lyrics calls it "You can't get there from here." Now that I think about it, that's from an REM song, and the name of the band has something to do with the brain so it all works.

Let me describe the phenomenon I'm referring to by giving an example. A few years ago I decided to make banana bread, and while I was buying ingredients in the store I was trying to remember if I had a loaf pan. I finally decided that I didn't, so I bought one. I made the banana bread, then washed the pan. When it came time to put it away, I thought "Where should I put this?" And then my brain responded "Why not put it in the same place as the other loaf pan?" Because yes, I already owned a loaf pan. And I knew this. Sort of.

Today I made chocolate almond cookies again. The last time I made them I searched all over for powdered sugar, and finally decided that I didn't have any so I just used regular granulated sugar for the meringue topping. (It turned out just fine -- it had little sparkles in it!) But today when I was grabbing something from the top of the refrigerator I realized there was an unopened box of powdered sugar. So I opened the box and used it. And then it came time to put it away and I thought "I should put it in the right lower side of the fridge next to the other box of powdered sugar."

It turns out sometimes I know things. I just have to ask the right questions...

Feeling A Little Tropical

The new furnace is in (yay!) which is good because even though it hasn't been that cold here, it's harder to get out of bed in the morning when it's less than sixty degrees in the house.

They showed up with the crane at 7:30 in the morning and of course there was no parking in front of the house, so they had to track down the owner of one of the cars and ask them to move it. A few hundred frantic barks from Ginger later I was the proud owner of a new furnace.

Then they had to pressure-test the ducts in the house which meant they had to have access to every room, so I couldn't have the cats all rounded up in one place before they came in. I had one of the guys do the cat room first so I could get them all in there and not have to worry about the front door being left open. Getting all four cats in their safe room when I'm the only one in the house takes about thirty seconds. When there are three other people with ladders dropping tools and calling out to each other around the house... it takes significantly longer. Crow, of course, showed up the minute I shook the bag of treats. Crow is a cat after my own heart.

Anyhow it's nice and toasty in here now, and there haven't been any moose swan songs so I think it's all good.

Day Had Dawned Cold And Gray...

Only twelve more hours until they start installing the new furnace and I have heat again. Actually less than that -- they're supposed to show up at the ungodly time of 8am. What is it about people who do physical labor that they feel the need to be up and about before it's light outside? They're trying to kill me.

Speaking of murderous intent, the cats knocked a open box of truffles onto the floor for the dog. Had the dog actually eaten the remainder of the box... eh, she probably still would have been okay. I only saw one dog on emergency that had eaten enough chocolate to really worry me, and that was a five pound chihuahua that had jumped on the table and scarfed down half its body weight in "death by chocolate" (oh, the irony!) cake. And even then I was never sure if the trembling was because of the chocolate or if it was one of those little dogs that constantly shivers. (I hospitalized it and treated it and it was fine in the morning. One of my patients lived!)

So, yeah, my dog took so long to decide whether she wanted to eat the strange things on the floor that I was able to keep her from eating any of them although I did have to throw them out because she'd slobbered on them. The cats are going to have to try harder to kill her off if they want to see results.

So, yes, I should have heat by this time tomorrow. Not that we're exactly in "To Build A Fire" territory right now anyhow. I mean, no, I probably couldn't build a fire, but not because I'm shivering, but because I've never been able to build a decent fire in my life. That's why I have central heating.

Four Cat Night

Well, yesterday's dying moose is actually dead. The repair guy said the gas valve isn't closing all the way, which means there's always something burning. He wasn't completely sure that was the entire problem, but my AC/heater is really old, they don't make the valves any more, and while he might be able to find a used one, that wouldn't fix all the other stuff wrong with it. Since everyone who has looked at the unit in the last five years has advised me to replace it as soon as possible, I decided to just get it over with. The new heater/AC is going to (maybe) be installed on Friday. He said they were even going to file a permit with the city, but that's only because they'll have to park a crane in front of the house so it's not like they can just sneak the whole thing in.

I told my neighbors about this and found out they had been trying to figure out where that sound was coming from. We had a good laugh. See -- my disintegrating house is bringing the neighborhood together!

Anyhow, because of the valve issue, the repair guy thought it wasn't safe to leave on, so now I have no heat.  If I lived somewhere it got really cold that might be a problem, but I think I can make it through the 53 degree low tonight without frostbite. I suspect it might be a four cat night.

The Home Ownership Blues (and Purples!)

Agility tonight with the new dog from the intermediate class -- I was expecting Ginger and Trinket to be horrible to the new dog and they didn't disappoint. Trinket's owner refers to them as the "mean girls". I guess that's better than going with the slightly more accurate "assholes". Oh well. At some point I'll be able to claim that Ginger's just a crotchety old dog. She's already ten -- maybe in a couple years that excuse will work?

But today's post is about home ownership. It definitely has its upsides because nobody in the entire world would rent a house to me and all my animals, plus I can paint my bedroom purple and there are no consequences other than my designer's smile getting a little tight around the edges.

However, it also means that when something goes wrong I have to deal with it, and that's always just a complete pain in the butt. Right now, for instance, the blower on my heater keeps coming on at random times when the thermostat says it shouldn't, just for a few seconds, and then cuts out again. Other than that, it's working just fine. It's probably some sensor connected to the blower that needs to be replaced, but the damn thing is on the roof and I don't do heights, so it doesn't really matter if it's something I could theoretically fix myself.

I could, of course, ignore the problem except that when it turns on like that it's sucking against a vacuum, so the whole furnace vibrates and it sounds like a dying moose. A loud dying moose. (No, I haven't ever actually heard a moose die before. We didn't treat them during my residency. But if we had seen them, it almost certainly would have died on me just like everything else...) Once a day I could deal with. Every five minutes when I'm trying to go to sleep, not so much. My neighbors probably aren't too thrilled about the sound either. The repair guy is supposed to come by... tomorrow? He was a little noncommittal.

Speaking of my designer -- for the most part she tries really hard to come up with things that I like and that look good. We were talking about getting some sort of art to put on the bathroom wall, and I pointed out that everything I have on my walls is something I or someone in my family has made. Some of it is, um, not so professional looking (eg, the oompa loompa portrait on the side of this website), but I like it all because it means something to me.

So she listened to me talk about this, and I showed her a few things, and then she finally suggested that I look for something on Etsy. I think I laughed for about ten minutes after she left. I mean, I really do feel sorry for her -- how do you handle a client like me with obviously deficient taste while still being polite?

Whatever. I've decided to make a mosaic for the bathroom wall. I mean, really, how hard can it be?