The Most Bloggeriffic Time of the Year
Nothing to see here, but go check out Neil’s 7th Annual Christmahanukwanzaa Concert. I make an appearance, not singing (thank me for that), but reading the Christmas story. Enjoy.
Poinsettia Fun Facts
I posted this on my old blog a few years back, but I thought it would be fun to share again, since it is the season…
I know that you think this is a poinsettia:
But I live in The Poinsettia City, where we have poinsettias like this:
Close up, they look like this:
If you like the white kind, you can go over to my neighbor’s house:
Random Poinsettia Facts:
- Those big pointy colorful things on poinsettias are not the flower. Those are bracts.
- The flower is that weird little thing in the middle. If you want a long-lasting poinsettia, pick one where there is no yellow pollen showing on the flower.
- Poinsettias are from the genus Euphorbia. There are some very weird-looking Euphorbias.
- This may be why the Poinsettia’s botanic name is Euphoribia pulcherrima, pulcherrima having the same root as “pulchritude” or beauty.
- Many people think that Poinsettias are toxic, but you would probably have to eat a giant Poinsettia salad to make yourself sick. The sap of Euphorbias is known to be irritating to the skin, though, so wash thoroughly if you get the sap on yourself. And just to be safe, do not eat the leaves.
- The world’s biggest grower and breeder of Poinsettias is Paul Ecke Ranch in Encinitas, California. They are responsible for all those cool curly, spotty and multicolored Poinsettias that come out each year.
- Poinsettias are one of the most difficult holiday plants to grow. They need to be tricked into blooming precisely at Christmastime, which means providing them with exactly the right day length. Growers cover the little plants with blackout cloth or give them extra light at night to make them think the nights are just the right length for them to set flowers.
- I was a horticulture major in college. Does it show?
Enjoy your holiday season. And buy some Poinsettias.
Your correspondent from The Poinsettia City,
Suebob
She’s Standing RIGHT Behind You
One of the side effects of my funk/depression/grieving process/whatever is that I have been watching back episodes of Gossip Girl.
Shut up. Like all you ever watch is nature shows on PBS.
I haven’t had a TV for 7 years, and it’s not because I am so above it all. Nope. It is because if I had had a TV all this time, I would have been watching crap like Gossip Girl all this time.
No teevee show is crappy enough for me not to watch. Except maybe that Honey Boo Boo horror. That’s too much even in my most brain-dead moments.
When I was a kid, I watched the soaps with my mom, but it has been about 25 years since I followed one with any regularity. Things have changed a bit – cell phones and text messages add new twists, and the characters change a LOT faster.
The type of characters who hung around for decades on All My Children are dispatched after three or four Gossip Girl episodes. Is this progress or due to shorter attention spans? I dunno.
Anyway, all of this has made me consider the conventions that make every soap opera possible. Things that rarely happen in real life, but which are necessary to keep story lines cranking along in the soaps. For instance:
- No one ever hears someone walk into a room behind them
- Everyone can clearly hear every word of a conversation at a table near them in a restaurant
- There is only one restaurant in town
- There is only one doctor in town
- No one ever says goodbye before they hang up the phone
- No one has a job that requires them to be there or stay there during regular business hours
- Every cell phone photo or video is sharp, well-framed and with perfect audio.
- People walk out of their homes, leaving others (who don’t live there) just standing there
- Secret documents ALWAYS fall out of the handbag/briefcase
- People ALWAYS walk into the room just in time to hear the incriminating end of the conversation
- The whole town goes to the same social event. The teens are eager to go to a Chamber of Commerce dinner.
- Empires rise and fall because someone doesn’t let another person finish a sentence, creating a huge misunderstanding
- People switch personalities like normal people change sweaters
- No one ever recognizes a close friend in disguise, even if the disguise is just putting on some glasses and changing hair color.
- The most common disease is amnesia.
- Pregnancies either last one month or four years.
- No one is ever really dead.
What else?
Notice Anything Different?
Photo by Heather Wizell. Used under a creative commons license.
I put the Red Stapler on hiatus and made a new header. I realized the stapler was a symbol of my oppression as an office worker, and I’m not feeling oppressed anymore, so – onward.
And anyway, I had to do SOMETHING. I’m in a funk, I’ll admit it. I have been dragging my sorry butt through the days, just getting through everything, none of it particularly enjoyable.
I hate to say it, because on the surface everything is ok and the same and fine. I’m so blessed in so many ways, and I remind myself of that all day long. But underneath…blah. I don’t feel like doing anything.
Still, the other day I felt something stirring way down deep, like a little tightened-up fern uncurling and reaching out in the spring time. Still fragile, still wrapped up, but a possibility of some growth and change.
I don’t know what it will be or where I’m going. But that little ferny feeling is what I’m hanging onto.
Trapped in a World I Did Not Make
(Warning: may be offensive to the very religious)
Sometimes I think God has a wicked sense of humor. It’s as if He (She/It/as you believe) is just waiting for us to start believing our own BS before He takes it upon His Most Holy Self to knock us down off of our own self-built pedestals.
Like the time I found out someone I knew was dating a married man. I said to myself, stomping the tiny little foot in my inner mind “That’s horrible! I will NEVER date a married man!”
Cut to two weeks later, where I found myself on a date with a guy who was later found not only to be NOT divorced, but not really so very completely separated from his wife, either.
Like that.
Everyone who knows me well (or who has read this blog for more than five or six posts) knows I am a bit of a germaphobe.
Not the kind of germaphobe where you could feel comfortable eating off any surface in my house. No, that would assume one could find an uncluttered surface to eat off of.
I’m the hand sanitizer, handrail-avoiding, holding-my-breath-while-around-sick-people kind of germaphobe. The germaphobe who is imagining every moment of her descent into cold and flu when she is stuck near someone who is visibly or audibly sick.
Yes, I know this is not one of my more attractive qualities. It’s right up there with my tendency to correct the spelling of strangers and my insistence that customer service people say “Thank you” instead of “No problem.”
But it is a PHOBIA, not something rational. I am as able to stop it as people with a fear of heights are able to stop from feeling spinny when they stand near a ledge.
I remember flying to Hawaii with a kid coughing behind me, all the while calculating if I would have time to enjoy any vacation before I caught whatever he had. I figured that, if I were lucky, I’d be just in time to infect everyone on the flight home if my math about the incubation period was correct. That was not a happy flight.
Never mind that for every 100 times I imagine getting sick, I might get a cold once or twice. And yet I persist.
God gives me plenty of situations to indulge my rich fantasy life, too. If someone is coughing and sneezing in a theater, I am ALWAYS sitting in front of them. The ONE time I sat in the front row of church was the day the pastor announced she had a cold. The other day at the swimming pool, a woman walked past me as I was getting out, turned her head and coughed RIGHT in my face.
In winter, I don’t go to church much, since so many people come to church sick and it is just misery for me to be trapped there, hardly the spiritual experience I’m seeking. Today was one of the days I didn’t go. I had other reasons, too, but the germ thing definitely factored in to my decision.
I could not, however, skip a rehearsal for this church Christmas eve pageant, in which I have a major role as a sound effects person, portraying both “branches rustling” and “wind.”
I went to rehearsal, in a small room at the church, with about seven other people. The woman directly to my right was – you guessed it – in the middle of a full-blown cold.
And not only did she have a cold, but she didn’t cover her mouth when she coughed. No, she just let it fly.
Photo by Vegard Haugland. Used under a Creative Commons license.
This is not the lady from church. It is a cute dog sneezing. But dog photos make everything better, no?
Occasionally she would give some nod toward sanitation, like when she would hold her tiny fist about six inches in front of her mouth, and then cough.
My favorite was when she would cover her mouth briefly, remove her hand, and THEN cough. AS IF TO TAUNT ME.
She’s a dear lady. We have had many nice conversations on other occasions. And I’m sure she felt she was being dutiful and not letting the Christmas show team down by missing rehearsal.
But as a germaphobe, I can’t help but seeing people who are coughing all over turn into Josef Stalin before my eyes.
They just transform, like one of those 3-D truckstop postcards that flips back and forth between Elvis and Jesus, except this time it was Nice Lady – Stalin. Nice Lady – Stalin. Blink blink. Blink blink.
I got to spend an hour trapped with Stalin the Sicky the Perfectly Nice Lady and my fellow sound effects folks in that tiny room. When it was over, I was ready to flee as soon as possible.
But no, God, that special fellow, had ONE more joke left in his bag. Because this is a church production, we had to end our meeting with prayer. Holding hands. With the people on either side of us.
Thank you, God. You outdid yourself today.
I wonder how many sick days I have saved up?
Virtues and Vices
It’s funny how moralistic we are, isn’t it? We’re always putting ourselves in the good or bad category.
I hear this about food a lot. “I was so bad this weekend – I had margaritas and nachos at that Mexican place!” “I was so good, I just had the salad with dressing on the side.”
How about considering that you’re not good or bad based on what you eat. You may be making choices that will lead you to a more or less healthy life, but is that a question of morality?
People even make their dogs a moral statement. “She’s a rescue!” we say, proving that we aren’t so callous as to get a dog from a breeder when dogs in need languish in shelters.
It’s funny that no one would ever dare to call their adopted child a “rescue,” but it is ok for dogs.
I was thinking about Goldie and how I had saved her from pretty much certain death after so long in the county shelter. I should give myself a big moral pat on the back.
But no, that’s not it. Getting a dog is about the most common and most profound thing on earth, which is love.
It’s one of the best and craziest things humans do, I think. Take some shaggy, messy animal into our homes to eat our food and lay around all day. We can have no expectation that they’ll do much for us, unless we want to spend days training them to fetch our slippers – and even then, it’s really easier to get your own slippers, trust me.
So here it is in a nutshell: we just loved each other. Isn’t that enough?
With sympathy for Senator Elizabeth Warren, who lost her golden retriever, Otis, today. Extra treats for everyone, as Kizz would say.
Adventures in Shopping feat: Mom
(Making a late Thanksgiving dinner)
Mom: Did you get rolls?
Suebob: Yes, I got rolls.
Mom: Did you get butter? All I have is that Smart Balance and no one wants that.
Suebob: I got a pound of butter.
Mom: We don’t need a pound of butter. There are only six people. We can’t eat a pound of butter.
Suebob: They sell it in pound boxes.
Mom: They sell it in half pound boxes, too.
Suebob: A pound is four dollars. A half pound is $3.50
Mom: But we don’t need a pound. We only need a quarter pound at most.
Suebob: HOLY CATS, MOM, I CAN USE THE BUTTER.
Mom: You don’t have to yell.
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We will resume normal operations when our Tech Team has resolved the problem. Or when a semblance of sanity returns.
All Growed Up
I usually hate hearing about people’s dreams, but this was perfect, so bear with me.
In my dream, I fell in love with a brilliant Mark Zuckerberg-esque CEO, who also offered me a job that came with housing.
When I got to the housing, I found out it was a dorm room with four young guys, where I had to sleep on the floor. I was like “Oh, my boyfriend is testing me and my dedication to him and the company!”
Then I thought “Hey, you’re a grown-ass woman. You can rent your own place.”
Then I thought “You’re a grown-ass woman. You don’t need a boyfriend who tests your dedication.”
So I left.
Weekend Photos
I’m still reeling from the time change, so I’ll share some photos instead of trying to put sentences together.
On Saturday, I visited some friends camping at the beach in Santa Barbara county. Too bad the weather in November is so chilly:
I also met a guy I wanted to bring home with me. But he said he was with someone. He was with a couple, actually. Don’t ask what goes on at these camping parties.
Yesterday, I went to Ojai Farmer’s Market in the morning:
And then to a class in walking in a structurally correct manner. No photos of that, because watching adults try to learn to walk is really not that interesting.
Onward to the Dia de los Muertos celebration at the Museum of Ventura County, where the kids were cute:
And the dancers were scary!
No, REALLY scary
But when the scary demons handed out candy, all was well:
That was my weekend. How was yours?
