So this is what the sky (reflected in my mom’s office building) looked like on the way home Wednesday night:
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Sunset
Trials, Tribulations & Escapades (mostly funny)
Southerners and Snow
It’s snowing here — big floofy flakes — and sticking, which is even more exiting! Yes, exciting! My sense of excitement (/wonder) about this (which has, at times, been compared to that of an perpetual 11-year old) is very confusing to Jeff, who is … a Northerner. (Actually, technically speaking he’s a MidWesterner, since he’s from Michigan; however, as far as my admittedly geographically impaired self is concerned anyone who hails from north of the Mason-Dixon is a Northerner, at least until you get to Washington or Oregon, which is West Coast.)
You see, for me snow means:
- the excitment of waking up, not being able to see the ground, but knowing, just from the color of the sky, that it had snowed
- listening to the school cancellations on my old alarm clock radio (the sort that had the big numbers that FLIPed over as the minutes changed and an alarm that sounded like a huge duck blowing its nose)
- a day off from school (“snow day” — yah! — the fact that we might have to make it up later in the year just didn’t factor into our joy)
- tomato soup (Campbell’s, always with milk instead of water… why would they even put water in the instructions printed on the can… ICK!) and cheese toast
- hot cocoa (yes, miniature marshmallows!)
- getting to stay in pajamas until it was time to go play in snow:
- pitiful (usually not much snow around here), yet proud, snow people (in fact, one year we made a snow dragon!). I still remember the apron we used to put on our snow woman, a light blue ties-around-the-waist sort with darker blue flowers.
- snowball fights with all the neighborhood kids (I was exceptionally lucky to grow up in a “real” neighborhood, with probably 25 kids who were within 5 years of me in age)
- sledding, though not on sleds with runners, as they’d certainly sink, but on either “flying saucers” or these sheets of rectangular plastic which would roll up when you weren’t sitting on them). We had a good (long and steep) hill growing up (the name of our street was Stonehill St.) so when it snowed the whole neighborhood would be out on the big hill.
- then coming inside to dry out by the fire (with more cocoa and soup -)And even though I can now work from home (so a “snow day” doesn’t mean a “no work day” ) and even though I haven’t got a sled (or a proper hill, for that matter), I still do have hot cocoa and tomato soup and cheese toast and a “snow day” is still a cause for celebration.
(And I didn’t even get into the strange southern ritual of filling the car with gas and buying every single loaf of bread, carton of eggs and gallon of milk in the grocery store in one crazed, mad rush…)
Getting old & squishy socks
So one of the problems of aging is that one becomes dessicated. So much so, in fact, in my case, that in the winter my poor little heels become wounded from it. This causes a small litany of problems, not the least of which is that they hurt! (They also snag my stockings, which is just plain uncool).
Enter Bath & Bodyworks. They have these moisture-releasing, gel-lined socks that (theoretically) work miracles for dry feet such as mine. In a buy-one-get-one-free frenzy (I also got the gloves) I bought them.
They are incredibly odd. First there’s the fact that they are tube socks. I haven’t worn tube socks since I was about 10 and put on one of my little brother’s by accident. They weird my feet out. No heels?! No arch?!? No shaping to take into consideration that my foot bends at the ankle?! Argh! This confuses my feet to no end, with the result that I normally just can’t stand the feel of them on my feet.
But this is for a worthy cause, so…
Thing two: the gel lining. Squishy and somewhat like you’ve got your foot inside a small creature’s innards. Slightly abnormal when you’re just lying in bed; incredibly odd when you’re walking around on them. Step. Squidge. Step. Squidge. Kinda cool. Kinda ewwwwwww!
Will let you know how they actually work (still TBD), but did want to report on early impressions of wearing the little beasts.
Customer Disservice 101
or “How to Lose My Business Permanently”
There are two bead supply stores in this area, Ornamentea, located in Raleigh, and The Original Ornament, located in Chapel Hill. In the past, I’ve shopped at whichever one was more convenient (given that neither of them are terribly convenient to start), based on other activites like going to Raleigh for dinner.
Both stores have a “Frequent Flyer” card… buy $X of beads and get $Y’s worth free. My first problem with The Original Ornament happened about a year ago when they changed their policies about the FF card midstream. When I signed up, it was buy $200 (or maybe $150?) get $20 free, I think. Well, one day I walked in and they had changed the program to Buy $250 and get $20 free. Though they were willing to apply my punches from my old card to the new one, this still really bothered me since (IMHO) they should have honored the program I’d signed up for — and upon which my previous purchases had been based. IOW, part of the reason I’d spent the money with them was due to the rewards program and to change it midsteam was, in effect, breaking a contract with me.
What they should’ve done is honored existing cards at the terms under which they were started, but created any new cards under the new system. This would have been fair to the customers, while respecting their needs to change their business model over time. (As an aside, I know that legally they can do anything they want, as I’m sure the fine print said something about program details changing at any time, etc. etc. However, this does not make it the right thing to do, nor a good one from a customer satisfaction POV.)
The next problem (and, as it turns out, final one, as I won’t be shopping with them again) came yesterday when I attempted to buy more beads (always, but always room for more beads!). I had my purchases picked out when I realized that I didn’t have the actual card with me. I didn’t figure this would be a problem as most places with FF programs will just start you a new card then combine them when you find the old one (just like airlinees will merge multiple FF accounts). I asked the fellow at the desk if that would be OK and he said that No, they wouldn’t do that.
At this point I figured I’d run into “Policy” and I didn’t blame him for giving whatever answer was in the employee handbook. So I asked the manager the same question, having explained the situation, and she said “No” too.
Ok, you obviously don’t need my business. And I put back all the beads and clasps and wire and left.
I’m considering sending them their card (which I’ve now located) in the mail along with a nice note. Would that be too mean?
Weekend in review
Highlight: Learning to breathe fire.
No really. I’m serious. Was at Jason & Laurie’s “Tween” party and Jules (who I know way back when from high school, but who it also turns out knows everyone else in the universe that I do) and her hubby, Brian (with an “i” I think?) showed a few of us (including Kim) how to breathe fire.
I never thought the ability to spray liquid effectively would be so useful (generally speaking, when I spray liquid in the aforementioned fashion it’s because someone has said something too funny when I had my mouth too full of Coke).
Other good bits: Brunch Sunday with my friend David Matusiak and dinner Friday night with my friends Allan & Inez. Much knitting, some card-making and a little bit of jewelry-making thrown in for good measure.
ANFDCS
The ANFDCS (Annual Norman Family Dysfucntional Christmas Shindig) was this past weekend, in Charlotte. It was pretty fun, actually, somewhat to my surprise (very confusing family history stuff here, which I’ll spare you, but suffice it to say that it’s been a long road to get here). Here are some pictures — I find it *hilarious* how similar my Dad and his brothers look. Jeff was a doll and (a) went with me (not easy for an introvert to deal with a passel of Norman-kin) and (b) helped in the kitchen (there was some sort of catering snafuu). The neat thing is that was probably the best of all possible worlds. *He* got to do something to keep busy and be productive (which is easier for him than straight-up solcializing) *and* super-huge double bonus points were awarded by my family for his all-around usefulness!
HOORAY!
Boys & Gifts
So Jeff has some “gift exchange” at his work today (one of the ones where everyone brings a gift and they’re exchanged randomly)… and of course he didn’t think about it until last night (not his fault, really, we’ve been busy). At the point he mentioned it to me, Jeff had decided he was going to contribute a router (!) to the exchange, but they’re all geeks, so that might actually have worked, but I was a little… .um… confsed, as that doesn’t (in my mind) fall into the realm of “gift” so much as “appliance”.
So we started running through other possiblilities….
Gina: Do you have spare gifts?”
Jeff: “No”
(I do, of course,but they’re at my house)
Gina: “How about a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates?”
Jeff: “OOOH! I have a nice box of chocolates that my housekeeper, Dave, left me for Christmas. And I have wine!”
Gina: “Hey, that’ll work!”
Jeff: “You think that’s ok?”
Gina: “Sure… the likelihood that Dave will intersect with any of these guys is so low that you’re out of the Re-Gifting Danger Zone*.”
Jeff: “oh.”
pause
Jeff:“He cleans two of their houses”
Gina: “JEFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!”
Gina: “Um, yeah, that would be *bad*. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that if he left *you* chocolates — as special as you are — he also left *them* chocolates….”
It *slays* me that he thought about the chocolates, but didn’t quite get to the point where he realized that at least two of the other guys would’ve gotten the same chocolates from the same source, thereby giving the gig away…
* ED NOTE: I actually almost never re-gift, unless it’s something like a White Elephant gift exchange… I’m just too nervous about the whole thing (and given the story above… understandably, I think! ;-)
I hate being a complete dork
I think the worst kind of Doing A Stupid Thing is the kind where you think about doing a Thing (in this case opening a padded mailer envelope by ripping into it with abandon), then thinking that perhaps that’s not such a good idea after all (what if it’s full of messy bits that will fall all over your kitchen floor?), then convincing yourself you’re being silly and paranoid (don’t be rediculous, Gina, it’s an *envelope*, not something messy like a mostly-full vacuum bag), doing the Thing (ripping the mailer open, with abandon, of course), only to discover your weird little paranoia was, in fact, some sort of prescient warning that you had, in great folly, ignored. And there are little grey fuzzy bits (not unlike, BTW, what you might find in a mostly-full vacuum bag) scattered all over your kitchen floor.
Drug usage
side note: apparently heavy drugs (of the cold medicine sort) affect one’s ability to correctly type/speak. So far today I’ve used a “to” in place of “too”, extraneously apostrphied three S’s, nearly confused “affect” and “effect”, and (worst yet) very nearly used you’re when I meant your.
If I start “quoting” things I will resign myself to grammatical incompetence and go straight to bed.
Sick :(
I have a cold. A miserable, feeling-sorry-for-myself, but-really-know-that-it’s-not-a-big-deal cold. I am soooo stoopped up… it feels like my head is full of cotton batting. The only reason I slept at all last night was because I took an Ambien and washed it down with Nyquil. Ok. Pity party over. Back to work.
Realm of the Lint Queen 