Tag: christmas

That can’t be right

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Parenting1 Comment

Not that my immediate family is that large, but I’m done with all Christmas shopping for my immediate family, and everyone else is pretty much gift card people. My brother will send me a list for my niece and nephew, who are too young to get mad at me for buying the wrong thing anyway, and the basement goblin will likely get cash. The tree went up after Thanksgiving and I’ve been changing the lights every time I walk into the living room just because I can.

(Seriously, Govee lights are amazing. Ignore the price; order these. They’re absolutely worth every dime.)

Anyway, what this means is that everything’s going to show up broken, or not show up at all, or I’m suddenly going to realize four days before Christmas that my wife and son don’t actually like any of the things I got them for Christmas and I’ve somehow accidentally ordered a ton of stuff for me instead. This is actually a bit of a risk with the boy; he and I have enough tastes in common that I actually rejected a gift I was thinking about for him this year because I decided I wanted it and not him. He’d have liked it, I think, but it was a little too expensive for “he’d have liked it, I think.”

I have one thing left to do for my wife, which is going to involve Doing Art, and which will be a funny joke even if I completely fuck up Doing the Art. She looks at the blog kind of irregularly, so I could probably get away with telling y’all the plan, but … nah.

How’s your shopping going?

In which I suck and it’s a lot of fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn artLeave a comment

We finally, after a reschedule or two, had our much-anticipated wheel throwing class tonight– the final part of my Christmas present, four months later. My pot, such as it is, is the one on the left, and the second of my wife’s two is in the back right. My first attempt was too terrible to even make it to the drying room; I essentially just let it die and go back to the recycling pile, and while our instructor really thought MLW should save her first one too, she thought the second was better.

Throwing pottery is really hard, as it turns out. That doesn’t actually surprise me– I was fully expecting to suck at this– but it was still a bit startling just how difficult things like “keep your fingers the same distance apart” can be. That doesn’t sound hard! But it is. You can see on my pot that there are a few places in the middle where it thins out abruptly, and that’s the same on the other side too, but one way or another it’s still a vast improvement over my first effort and I’m glad I ended up with something at least a little passable.

We want to take a whole bunch of other classes at this place, and I can easily see myself wanting to take the throwing class again just to have an expert on hand for when I inevitably screw up again. It’s super cheap just to go in there, buy some clay, and rent the wheel for a while, and we can do it any time they’re open, but I feel like it’d be wasted money until I can at least internalize the various hand positions for the different steps in the process. I need somebody around to tell me what I’m doing wrong and how to fix it if that’s possible.

(One random fun thing: the way you remove a piece of pottery, whether it’s good or complete failure, from the “bat”– that’s the disc it spins on– is by sliding a thin wire underneath it to slice it away from the bat. That has, for some reason, always looked like an intensely satisfying experience, and the best thing about my first attempt being a terrible piece of crap is I got to slice it off the bat. I am proud to report that that’s the thing I was best at, and it was exactly as pleasing as I thought it would be.)

We also have our mugs now, from our last attempt at this. We will glaze both items at once when the pots are done drying.

Merry Christmas

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

A lot of the time I reserve Christmas to post about something ridiculous, since no one is paying attention. I got nothing today, and since we did Christmas three times today I am also kind of collapsing from exhaustion. So I hope your day went well one way or another, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Go home, Fromsoft, you’re drunk

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

God pissed in my face last night, by allowing me to briefly believe that there was either a second DLC or an actual by-God sequel to Elden Ring coming in 2025. The phrase co-op multiplayer roguelite does not make me happy, God damn it, and while it might still be something I play it is absolutely not something I want, and when you start off by getting me all sloppy about the idea of a surprise reveal of a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, anything other than “this is a sequel or another big DLC” is going to be a letdown.

Par for the Goddamned course for 2024, of course, which just in the last 24 hours has also featured a so-far underwhelming Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre collaboration and The Cure deciding to release a second version of their latest album with an entire live album attached to it, when the original album has only been out for a few weeks. The whole world is making me stabbity, is what I’m saying here.

(The Cure’s album-plus-concert is only $9.99, so I bought it anyway, but … if you’re gonna sell it for just ten fucking bucks, why not release the concert separately? I don’t need another version of the original album even if they’re both digital and technically not taking up any space anywhere!)

Also while I’m bitching I refuse to accept Astro Bot as Game of The Year. Yes, I know I haven’t played it. I don’t care if that’s unreasonable. I say no and that’s the end of it.

I feel like I should end that with some good news, and the truth is I’m not even in that bad of a mood; other than Tuesday, which was genuinely awful, this wasn’t that bad of a week. I really need to finish up my Christmas shopping this weekend, because … I’m not going to go into a rant about shopping, but I don’t know how retail stores expect me to avoid Amazon if they don’t ever have anything I’m looking for. I went to Target earlier and couldn’t find tape. Or, at least, I could only find the kind that’s already on the little plastic shell and not refills for my tape dispenser on my desk at work, which is what I wanted.

Damn it that’s bitching again. Finishing Christmas shopping! That’s something I need to do. I need more/better stuff for my wife and my son and maybe something for my sister-in-law. Everybody else is done.

Yeah. Christmas shopping and books and then five days until Winter Break. I can do this. Who else do you need to shop for?

We put the tree up

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:

They have a feature where you point your phone at the tree after you put the lights on, and then the app maps where the lights are, which allows you to pull off effects like this, which come from the center of the tree:

Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.

Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.

Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.

‘Twas the night before Christmas…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting3 Comments

And it has occurred to me that that entire poem is kinda bullshit, because it’s 8:30, all but two of the presents are wrapped and under the tree already, and whatever my wife and I are about to settle down to it is sure as shit not going to be a “long winter’s nap,” because we both know good and goddamn well the boy is going to wake both of us up before seven. There’s no way those children were all snug in their beds. They were waiting.

I, of course, in my role as Chief Troll of the household, have told the boy that he can’t open any of his presents until our small coterie of guests arrives at 4:00 tomorrow. We won’t hold him to that– and he knows it– but it’s still fun to say. I probably shouldn’t enjoy crushing my son’s soul as much as I do but at least he knows me well enough that he never believes a single thing I say any longer.

End-of-year posts will start soon; I usually do my Best Books post a couple of days after Christmas, but I feel like my book choice over the next few days is going to be really important to my timing. I know I just finished one today that might make the list, and there’s a couple that are high up in the rotation right now that have been really positively received. We’ll see what happens, I suppose. 

In which we did the thing

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, ReadingLeave a comment

Over the years we have really gotten into alternative tree toppers, and this year’s is some sort of Pokeymans, I don’t know which kind. But the tree is up. There have been years when we haven’t bothered; I don’t think we had one last year, and three cats in the house means that we’ve forgone ornaments for pretty much the entire time we’ve lived here. Also, yes, that’s an artificial tree, because people who bring real trees into their houses for Christmas are lunatics, and yes, I’ll die on that hill.

The lights are controlled by an app, and do all sorts of fun stuff, only some of which looks like it’ll trigger epileptic seizures if we leave it running for too long. They’re pretty though.

Anyway.

I had to give up on a John Irving book this weekend, which I find immensely frustrating. I’ve read nearly all of his work, excepting only his nonfiction and … maybe? a short story collection that I’m not sure actually exists? But I’ve read all of his novels, at least, or I had, up until The Last Chairlift came out. Irving has always been an author who really, really liked his repeating tropes over his body of work, but this book– his first in seven years– reads more like a parody of a John Irving book than it does an actual John Irving book– as if someone much less skilled than him read all his stuff and then tried to write a book in his voice. It took me a week to get through the first three hundred pages out of like 870 or something, I didn’t care at all about what was going on, and then I hit the part where the POV character (who is, of course, another writer) started including long segments of his screenplays in the text of the novel, and that was where I decided I had to be done. The worst thing is this may very well be Irving’s last novel; he’s 81 and if it took him seven years to write this one, I don’t see another coming out anytime soon.

On to a Kevin Hearne book, which isn’t much shorter and I’ll probably finish in three or four days. The Seven Kennings series has been great so far and I suspect he’ll stick the ending.

Important PSA for teachers– READ THIS

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I am going to make a big deal about making sure people know about this, because I feel like I went through some seriously life-changing shit in the last couple of hours, and at least at the moment I don’t feel like the Biden administration is doing nearly good enough of a job making people aware of this program.

I am, as many of you know, currently paying off a hefty amount of student loans. I was about to launch into details, but you don’t need them; suffice it to say that I left school for good in 2005 and since then I have sent $545 a month to some organization or another to pay off said loans. There have been various and sundry government programs that allowed teachers in certain districts or certain schools to pay off certain loans throughout that time, and I’ve used some of them (I was able to eliminate my Perkins loans entirely several years ago) but for certain others I didn’t qualify because I had consolidated my loans with a third-party student loan company and they were no longer directly serviced by the government.

I have made 146 payments at that amount while teaching for my current district. 146 is more than 120. That information, as it turns out, is critical, because:

If you have worked in public service since 2007, and I don’t know precisely how they’re defining it but working for public schools counts, and I think “public schools” means all of them, not just low-income, and work for them means any job, not just, say, math or science or ELA teachers or whatever, there has recently been a really important rule change that means that if you’ve made your 120 payments to anybody it will count toward your loan forgiveness.

In other words, because I was teaching while making 120 payments on my student loans, even though I wasn’t paying the Direct Loans program back, I am now eligible not only to have every remaining dime of principal and interest forgiven– tens of thousands of dollars, and sixteen more years of payments– but they will reimburse me for everything I’ve paid since that last qualifying payment.

The one tiny hitch is that you have to re-consolidate your loans back to the federal Direct Loans program first. Which I just did. The paperwork to have my district verify my employment is right here(*) and once I have that filled out and sent in and everything goes through …

…

Boom. No more student loans. Gone.

$545 a month back in my pocket, forever.

And then? A large check.

If you are a teacher go check this out right now.

Merry.

Motherfucking.

Christmas.

(*) Y’know, Federal government, you could just check with, like, the fucking IRS on that; they know where I’ve worked. I promise.(**)

(**) Yeah, there’s probably some sort of privacy law that prevents this. I waive it. Go.