Tag: holidays

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 accordance …

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… with our most ancient and cherished traditions:

Our Thanksgiving plans got cancelled by Michigan weather, so we’re having lasagna today. I was actually looking forward to seeing a couple of people, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had worse holidays.

In which I’m not complaining but I definitely am

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, life2 Comments

I am not big on the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing. I have been more strident in my dislike in the past, especially when I lived a life more likely to expose me to drunken idiots in green (ie, when I lived in Chicago) but I am not willing to even pretend to be remotely Irish, am definitely not remotely Catholic, and I don’t drink, and between those three things I don’t have any particular use for this holiday. This means that when my wife told me that we were getting together with her side of the family today, and that “brisket” would be involved, I was excited as hell– I never get brisket– and I did not even think to connect it to the holiday.

You can imagine my consternation when we got to the party and the “brisket” was corned beef, which yes, I understand is from the same part of the cow and is in fact a different preparation of the same meat, but Goddammit when I get to a party and I’m expecting brisket on a Sunday afternoon and instead I’m given a reuben I might start muttering under my breath and quietly sending pointed and slightly disrespectful text messages to my wife. Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good reuben, although my particular preference for brined meats on rye runs more to pastrami– but reubens don’t at all fit into the same headspace as “brisket,” dammit, and part of me still feels betrayed.(*)

The rest of me is stuffed full of corned beef, though, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

(*) I should have learned after seventeen years of marriage into this family that I should never assume I know what is going to happen when we go to her sister’s place for a meal, even when said sister isn’t responsible for the cooking, and most of the cooking for this particular event was done by her cousins. The last time we went there for Thanksgiving there were no mashed potatoes, which is a food sin of the highest order, and I absolutely left that particular gathering with my dis firmly gruntled. You can’t even call it Thanksgiving if there are no mashed potatoes. It may as well be Mashed Potato Day. There can be other potatoes too, I’m fond of au gratin and any form of sweet potato, but either way wrongs were committed against Thanksgiving in general and me in particular.

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.

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.

Go ‘way, I’m sleepin

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.

That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.

This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.

Happy Labor Day

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

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.