Tag: gifts

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 the seal has been broken

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I’m in trouble.

I am moving inevitably into my Elder Nerddom, and while there have been perhaps more statues in my house for several years now than one might expect from a random sample of homes, I have, until now, managed to avoid purchasing anything from Hot Toys. There are a billion reasons for this, but perhaps one of the biggest is that the damn things can run anywhere from $250-500 if not more than that and I knew good and fucking well that there was no way I was ever going to stop with one. My recent disenchantment with the MCU has helped; a lot of the appeal of Hot Toys to their fans is their unearthly skill with facial capture, and as I’ve grown tired of the movies, I’ve grown less interested in the idea of having Chris Evans or Robert Downey, Jr. on my shelf as opposed to a more Platonic, comic-based Iron Man or Captain America.  

And today that beautiful bastard up there showed up under the Christmas tree, and I’m fucked now.  My wife actually stopped me after I unwrapped the box but before I opened it, telling me that she and the two owners of my local comic shop had gone through a process in trying to decide which one to get me, and that they’d warned her that if I actually opened the box, collectors being who they are, they’d be unable to take it back. She asked me if I wanted her to tell me who was in it (the outside box of a Hot Toys figure has all the brand information but does not actually name the figure inside for some reason) and I told her that if the three of them had managed to guess wrong— my wife has been married to me for nearly sixteen years and I have spent money at the comic shop on a weekly basis for slightly longer than that– I was going to get so much mileage out of making fun of them for it that it would be worth it. Truth be told, I was fully expecting one of the many Iron Mans available.

Moon Knight? Fuck yes, and made even better by the fact that even though that’s Moon Knight’s MCU/Disney+ costume, that costume isn’t really much of a departure from his traditional comic book look and, even better, it’s not Oscar Isaac, since there’s no headsculpt featuring his face. So, yeah, this is perfect and I love you but this is going to cost me so much money, because he’s gonna need a friend, and then they’re gonna need a third, because who are they gonna talk to if they get tired of each other, and by this time next year I expect to have a full glass-front cabinet in the house somewhere with $6000 of these things in it(*) and I plan on regularly reminding my wife that it’s her fault.

(*) I may or may not have just inquired about pre-ordering an Iron Man that didn’t actually ever appear in the films but looks like the Silver Centurion, my favorite Iron Man suit ever.

On what I want

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life2 Comments

My wife and I, married thirteen years come next February, typically do not buy each other gifts. My wife is impossible to buy for, as she does not like things, and I am exceptionally easy to buy for but tend to spend money indiscriminately, so buying things from my Amazon wish list, for example, can be kind of a fraught proposition.

I fucked around and got myself into trouble last week, as I came up with a perfectly good Christmas present for my wife and managed to acquire it in a fraction of the time I would have expected it to take and at a fraction of the cost. In other words, not only was I breaking the rules by buying something in the first place, she was going to take one look at it and assume that I had spent way more than I actually spent on it– even though what I did spend for it would generally count as a relatively large amount for us to spend on each other, even in a world where we buy things for each other, which we really don’t.

I hope to hell that sentence makes sense because I’m not rewording it.

Anyway, I went through this brief crisis where I was trying to figure out what my duties were in terms of whether I was going to disclose the gift before Christmas or not, and if I was merely going to disclose its existence or also disclose how much I spent. I ended up, after discussing the matter with my brother and sister-in-law, deciding to tell her what had happened and that I’d spent what I spent on it, so that if she wants to get me something in return (which she isn’t required to do) she has a chance of achieving some sort of parity.

(She won’t. I win this Christmas. She can try again next year if she wants, but I win this one.)

Anyway, the trick to buying me (and a lot of people, really) is to come up with something that I want but would never buy myself, which is kind of a tricky needle to thread, and thinking about it tonight all I’ve been able to come up with are two items that I really don’t need and would just add to the clutter around the house. Guitar Center is going out of business, and part of me really wants to go buy a guitar once I can get them at discount prices. Can I play the guitar? No. I can’t play the ukulele either. I’m not gonna learn. I’m 44 and it is too late to learn a musical instrument. There is, therefore, no reason for me to want one.

It is kind of hilarious to me that the second thing that I came up with was a combat-grade lightsaber, which is also something that someone else should not buy me, because they come with literally a billion available options and are also expensive as hell and the whole idea is completely ridiculous. I do not need a lightsaber, much less a $250 one, and the idea that I’m fixated on a combat-grade one, which has a blade tough enough that they’re supposed to be good for full-contact sparring against someone else, is even more ridiculous.

I’m curious to see if anyone can guess what color blade I’d pick, by the way.

(Oh, and also I’m still fighting off the occasional urge to buy a lathe.)

It’s best to just let me waste my own money, I think.

In which my wife destroyed my childhood– and you can too!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting9 Comments

Both my grandmothers were crafty people.  Not in the “sneaky” sense– although at least one of them probably qualified in that sense as well– but in the sense that they liked to make stuff.  I have all sorts of stuff around the house that my maternal grandmother made, and a couple of quilts that my paternal grandmother made.

One of them, due to overuse– I literally slept under the thing for fifteen years, and it’s gotten a bit gnarly– is permanently inside a duvet cover because there’s only so long a teenage boy can sleep under the same blanket without staining occurring, no matter how diligent you are about washing the thing.  One of them had Sesame Street characters on it, and while it’s gotten dragged out when we needed extra blankets for years, it’s mostly been on ice for a couple of decades or so.

My mom, who has had custody of it for a while, gave it back to us a couple of weeks ago, since she figured the boy was likely to appreciate it.  And it’s a cute blanket– Big Bird, Grover, Cookie Monster, and Bert are on it, all reading books, and the background is the alphabet.

Again: I have had this thing since I was a toddler.  And my grandmother made it.

The blanket, right now, is– rather ignominiously, I ought to point out– being used to cover up a couple of computers that I slaved over the other day so that they’re not immediately obvious from outside our front window.  My wife walked past it this morning– all three of us were in the dining room for some reason– and said “Wow, this thing is filthy.”

“Wash it, then,” I thought, but didn’t say.  “It’s been in a bloody box for like ten years, and it’s probably 35 years old.  It’s not gonna be pristine.”

Then she points at the titles of the books that Cookie Monster and Bert are reading.  (Big Bird is reading a seeds catalog, and the title of Grover’s book is not legible, as he’s lying down on top of it.)

And, wham, just like that, childhood destroyed:

photo-2You either get it or you don’t, I think, so allow me to provide two helpful Amazon links:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Joy-Sex-Revised-Completely/dp/1400046149

and

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Translated-French-Sabine-dEstree/dp/B001A80P4W/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1384612616&sr=1-2

Oh.  My.  Fucking.  God.

So, here’s the million dollar question, right?  It ain’t like Grandma designed the material from scratch.  She bought it by the yard from a bolt and then sewed the quilts together.  My mom and dad clearly never got the joke.  There’s no way; they’d have mentioned it by now.  They can’t have been waiting thirty damn years for their kid to figure it out.  And I know for damn sure neither of my parents have read The Story of O.

(I have.)

Did Grandma?

I have at least one funny story involving my grandmother buying something without checking it out completely, one I might tell later in another post, that has resulted in one of my most treasured, if inexplicable, possessions.  And she died while I was in college, so I never really got to know her as an adult.  But, y’know, I kinda remember her having a bit of a salty sense of humor.  And she was a nurse, so it’s not like she was squeamish.

(Oh god just noticed the looks on their faces)

I have moments where I intensely miss my grandparents; none of them are around any longer, and I lost my grandfather– her husband– when I was somewhere between four and six, so I never really knew him at all.  I miss my mom’s dad on interestingly regular occasions– Veteran’s Day, for example, and Christmas– his birthday.  I miss my mom’s mother whenever I pick up a book, or look at the Bunka dragon hanging over the fireplace in my family room.

My other grandma sneaks up on me.  Reliably, I miss her on my birthday– she used to always take my brother and I out for lunch and to go shopping, just the two of us, every year, until I idiotically decided I was too old for it, which probably happened sometime around high school.  But other times?  Wham.

This is a “wham” moment.  There’s literally nothing I want more right now than to be able to talk to her for five minutes to find out whether she knew what a filthy, filthy thing she had her grandsons sleeping under for years.

And I kinda hope the answer’s yes.  🙂

Gotta go.  Crying.