melannen | (no subject)

Okay, I am leaving for family tomorrow, but thank to the joy of public library wifi hotspots, I should actually be on the internet the whole time for once! And I have mostly done all the things on the list from last entry, in that I am mostly better from the cold, mostly packed and ready for the holiday, mostly caught up on comments, and not at all ready for yuletide. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It doesn't help that I have a whole pile of Yuletide gifts waiting that I IN NO WAY deserve this year.

(Has anyone else noticed that as you've gotten older, you don't get different colds, you just get the same cold over and over again? When I was a kid it was always an exciting random lottery of which cold symptoms I'd get in which order when I was sick, but since I turned 30 it seems like it's always 1) exhaustion and brain-fog, 2) really bad sore throat + headache + earache, 3) uncontrollable but intermittent dry cough, 4) mucus. Always the same order, the only variation is how long each stage lasts and how much the different stages overlap. Either my immune system has finally figured out its most efficient plan of attack and just goes for it no matter what virus it is, or I'm now immune to all the cold germs except this one specific one that they just can't figure out.)

Anyway, we opened the presents from Santa (etc.) under the tree tonight so we don't have to haul them all the way out, and here is what I got, in lyrical form:

a 1000 piece puzzle
200 yards of Mylar book jacket protector
$25 in gift card money
8 pieces of Willamsburg stoneware pottery
7 blank sketchbooks
6 other things*
5 pairs of socks
4 empty boxes**
3 dish towels
2 toy playsets***
a-and a cock****

*a flowerpot, a wooden goblet, a pair of pants, some cat-print fabric and a pattern to turn the fabric into a cat lady skirt, an electric heating pad to keep my feet warm at night, and a travel-size lotion and bodywash set
**plus a bucket that I gave back to Santa because it was first order themed and I have a 'do not collect fascist propaganda' rule that applies even when it's Star Wars
***an uncut box set of my childhood magnetic Magic Mary Jane paper dolls and a magnetic building set, which I have just realized are both magnets, so I can therefore build ROBOT CYBORG PAPER DOLLS.
****Is it a hint that you need a boyfriend when your aunt and uncle, who you have all agreed buy each other animals from ELCA world hunger every year, get you the rooster? Asking for a friend.

And NO NEW BOOKS TO READ \o/

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Who needs a roster anyhow. They just wander around yelling. The hens do all the work.

Right? They sure don't lay any eggs!

...I guess they help if you want more hens later without having to do a lot of messing about, and you can always make soup if they get tiresome.

(I'm just, really glad that I didn't open that one with them there as usual, because I'm absolutely sure they did not even notice the double entendre, but I did not manage to keep a straight face while opening it, because I am terrible and 100% would have meant it if it was me gifting it.) (I got my little cousins bags full of BEES one year, because if I'd gotten a bag of BEES for Christmas as a kid it would have been the best story.)

Edited 2018-12-23 02:41 (UTC)

Shades of me and "My wife and I can't come up with anything to do when the powers out" at work this week, although I couldn't help reacting to that one....

I would have reacted to that one too.

That poor kid. Once in a while I make one of the guys turn funny colors.

A rooster will fight off predators. My brother had dwarf chickens for a while and local hawks kept snacking on them, but the rooster had some success in defending against hawk attacks and was even better against neighborhood cats. Eventually a hawk ate him, but he was quite fierce and useful. The neighbors hated him though, and my brother had to but him in a special sound proof coop overnight because otherwise he'd crow in the middle of the night (in particular in summer when dawn here is really early).

7(!) blank sketchbooks. That's a gracious plenty.

I am impressed at your haul, and at your fitting it all into lyric form.

They are small (moleskine-ish-sized) ones, which I asked for particularly - I use them for travel journals and that sort of thing, and go through a couple a year. Not full-sized ones! ~~Mom~~ Santa picks them up at thrift stores and such which often have a bin of blank books and diaries.

They sound great! I use blank books for (written) journaling, and I'm having a harder and harder time finding unlined ones, so I've shifted to sketchbooks as well. Perhaps unlined ones with artistic covers will come back into fashion someday. I hadn't thought of looking in thrift stores.

Unlined are a lot less common than lined ones even there (and also a lot of the unlined ones have fancy 'handmade' paper that's really hard to draw on) but maybe one in five or six at the thrift stores and used book sales around here is unlined and usable. I'm not super picky about the covers, though - they just have to be around the right size, have usable paper, and not be spiral-bound (because pencil sketches + spiral bound + pockets = smeary mess.) And my mom goes thrifting as a pastime, so she restocks me slightly faster than I use them up. :D

About half of these six have weird paper and one of 'ems spiral-bound, so they're going to the back of the line for only if I'm desperate.

Edited 2018-12-23 02:55 (UTC)

I've had great luck at garage sales for blank books lately--maybe my neighbors all mean to write more and then don't--they usually have one or two pages sliced out and the rest are fine.

I have a 'do not collect fascist propaganda' rule that applies even when it's Star Wars

Excellent. ^^

I'm glad you're getting over the cold!

It's a good rule! I make an exception for Darth Vader but only sometimes. Otherwise, no. (I had never been super into imperial stuff but the rule started with TFA when it seemed like 80% of the merch was First Order themed and just? No? Why would you do that? And most of it went unsold, so at least I got some schadenfreude out of it.)

I like the'do not collect fascist propaganda' rule that applies even when it's Star Wars :-)

Glad the cold is better. Hope you have a great holiday.

It's pretty much better! We've been staying the week in a house where thirty years of tobacco smoke is still slowly seeping out of the walls, so while i'm still a little scratchy/sniffly I think it's mostly that.

ooooooh that makes sense (about colds)

I have no idea if it's true but it feels like it is!