The context: my father has been told that he needs to replace his phone by January 1, because it is not 5G capable and T-Mobile is phasing out all of their 3G towers.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine they’re that busy at 2:30 the day before Thanksgiving. Let’s just go get it taken care of.”
Pfah.
(I’m not griping, especially since I’m fully aware my dad will read this. But it was completely stupid of me to not realize these places are crazy-busy all the time, and “the day before Thanksgiving” is not a salient concept to people who need phones, because that is a thing that is not always something you can put off.)
And I came home and stuffed my face with Chicago deep-dish pizza, so all in all I am full of cheese and it was a good day.
In lieu of a View From My Hotel Window post, since it’s ludicrously dark: my family has never been a Traditions Family, and neither has my wife’s. My brother, on the other hand, very much married into a Traditions Family, and one of those traditions is fresh pasta on Thanksgiving.
I am officially twenty percent more of a capitalist than I was two days ago, apparently. Wal-Mart is clearly the way to go lately if you want to land a PS5, if only because they’re advertising when each batch of systems is going to go live so that you can be in front of your computer to hit reload and hope you get lucky.
And, well, I got lucky, and I hit reload at the right time, and I don’t actually physically have my PS5 yet but I can pick it up at the store (by which I mean “have them bring it to my car”) sometime between two and six days from now, and honestly I suspect it’ll be on the earlier range of that.
That’s not what increased my capitalist rating, though. What increased my capitalist rating is that I went and fucked around and now I’m picking up (by which I mean “have them bring it to my car”) a new fucking TV tomorrow to go with my new PS5. We didn’t need a new TV by any reasonable definition of that term, but the PS5 can output 4K graphics and our current, several-years-old TV cannot receive them. So.
Now, before ordering this TV, I tried to dig into TV reviews for a while to figure out what sort of TV I was interested in and what price ranges were like (and, honestly, 43″ 4K TVs are so much cheaper than I thought they would be that this is not really a major financial hit) and after a bit of reading and a bit of comparing I realized that TV reviews and car reviews are the exact same thing and I needed to stop reading them.
What do I mean by that?
I drive a Kia Soul. Two cars before my current Kia Soul was a two-door Toyota Yaris, and I need you to understand that I loved my Yaris (I traded it in when I moved out of Chicago and had a child, at which point a two-door car was not nearly as practical an idea as it had been) and I love my Kia. I plan to keep my current car until my son is old enough to drive, give it to him, and whatever car I purchase to replace it very well might be another Kia.
If you read car-people reviews of the Kia Soul, you will come away thinking that it is a garbage car, barely fit to convey one to work, because car people review cars for a living and they have standards that simply push them out of the realm of relevance to the regular car owner, who may well go decades in between cars and for whom anything that is new and up-to-date is going to feel like an enormous improvement.
And TVs are the same thing. Most people do not replace their television sets all that often, and there is simply no way that a 43″ TV at a price range that I’m willing to consider (I ended up spending $279; I could have been convinced to go as high as $500 if I’d felt the advantages warranted it, and I’m not convinced) can compare with the type of wall-dominating, four-figure monstrosities that these guys are used to. I got all worried about viewing angles before I realized that my wife and I sit maybe fifteen degrees separated from each other when watching TV and if it’s an issue we can literally pivot the screen, and it’s not going to be an issue. 43″ is the biggest screen I can get without radically reconfiguring our living room, and it’s plenty big enough. I didn’t even consider a larger size.
(Why a Vizio? The other two TVs in the house are Vizios. I’ve been perfectly happy with both, the price was right, and good user reviews. Good enough.)
Because no matter what TV I get, my standards are going to be “make my PS5 graphics look as good as they can, and don’t feel like a downgrade in any way,” and it’s gonna, and it won’t, and even if it ends up being crappy compared to other 4K TVs I don’t have any others lying around to compare it to.
User reviews appear to be pretty damn solid, especially figuring in the “people are fucking idiots” factor– that guy who literally reviewed this TV at 3/5 stars because it didn’t fit on his console (I’m not joking) is not, in fact, entitled to his own opinion, because his opinion is dumb. Good user reviews are really all I need here. So long as I can avoid the soap opera effect, which drives me batshit insane, we’re all good.
So, yeah. I spent money at Wal-Mart, and they’re the devil, and I spent money on Black Friday sales, which makes me an asshole, particularly this year, and I’m actually going to go to Best Buy tomorrow, even if I don’t plan on getting out of my car and I’m going to go in the afternoon when crowds should be minimal, so obviously I’m a failure as a person on a number of levels. But, man, is the remake of that game I’ve already played and beaten going to look great!
Finally, and in accordance with our most ancient traditions, Happy Thanksgiving.
I always feel like I need some sort of master plan any time I have a break in class lasting longer than a weekend. I have never actually been any good at relaxing as a thing unto itself; the good news is that I do consider a number of my leisure activities as doing something, so if I come out of the next four days having read three books that’s actually a Thanksgiving well-spent. We are not especially observing the holiday; there’s going to be ham and au gratin potatoes for the three of us tomorrow, and there will be additional food distributed to our (socially distanced, mask-wearing) dads this weekend, but nobody’s risking anything. I already feel like I’ve dodged enough bullets just with the covid that’s passed through my classroom; we’re not about to tempt fate by having even just family over.
So, yeah. I’m going to try to get something done over the next four days, if only so that I have an answer to “What did you do over your break?” next week, but right now other than a lot of video games I’m not sure what the hell that’s going to look like.
I need to have a word with you, Internet. I have joked several times on Twitter that anyone who wanted to hack into my student loans was welcome to, so long as they paid them.
When I said that, I meant with your own money, and I randomly glanced at my bank account earlier today to discover, rather unpleasantly, that I was overdrawn. Somehow my student loans had processed twice, which was … a problem. A quick balance transfer kept me from getting hit with any overdraft fees, but further investigation revealed that a third payment was pending and just hadn’t shown up on my bank account yet. I was able to straighten everything out with no more damage than an hour of my time, a fee from my bank for reversing the two charges, and I’ve changed all the relevant passwords, but … yeah, this one’s a mystery.
Seriously, though. It was supposed to be your money.
So it turns out that the iPhone’s Portrait mode works really well on cats, too, to the point where I’m figuring the people who coded it set it up that way on purpose. Dude still doesn’t have a name. Ten minutes ago I thought he had a name, and was ready to announce it, but he does not. Soon, though! He’s ours legally now, and we’ve got an appointment to get him fixed on Monday, so he really ought to have a name by then. Yesterday was the day the fifteen-day hold officially expired, though, so he’s ours.
Maybe that’ll be his name. We’ll just call him Ours. Sure.
I do not typically have Difficult Family Holidays, and do not actually have the crazy racist uncle that so many of us seem to have to tiptoe around on the holidays– or, if I do, he’s made certain to never be such in my presence or at my house. I wanted to make a joke here, the first was about my mother-in-law and the second was about my sister-in-law’s husband’s vague resemblance to Saddam Hussein, but both of them are landing rather poorly so just pretend I said something funny here.
So while we’re splitting Thanksgiving over two days this year– the Electric Boogaloo version is tomorrow– neither should be especially stressful, especially since I seem to be using my lingering illness as an excuse to go Full Metal Masculine and not be helpful in any real way at all.
I’m going to have to cook the whole goddamn meal next year to make up for this year, is what I’m saying.
But: while still ailing, I remain at least nominally alive, which is still an improvement over earlier this week, and I had mashed potatoes today and did not deliberately eat myself into a food coma, which may be a sign that I’m getting smarter as I get older but is probably just a sign that I remember I get two of them this year. So now I get to spend two days stressing about grading and a day actually grading, and then there’s a two-and-a-half week run to Winter Break, and then I can fall into a damn coma for all anyone cares.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t actually have a crazy racist uncle to avoid sitting next to at Thanksgiving. I have four uncles– or, at least, I have four blood uncles, not counting various men my aunts are married to, and of the four I have perhaps one and a half relationships with them. None of them to my knowledge are racist. “Crazy” is kind of ableist and well okay one of my uncles could very well be schizophrenic but I’m still not about to use that word to describe him.
The point is, whatever issues I might have with Thanksgiving, I don’t particularly have any family members I need to avoid, because it’s pretty much the same eight to twelve people at every Thanksgiving dinner and none of them are going to cause trouble. I snapped at my mother-in-law once during a family meal a couple of years ago but I don’t think it was Thanksgiving, and also she’s not alive any longer so it’s unlikely to repeat itself. Nah, any trouble I have with this holiday is found squarely within 1) my intense dislike of false piety (You Will Be Thankful For Stuff On This Specific Day kinda gets on my nerves) and 2) my general desire to, like, never do stuff. I love my family, y’all, but three people live in this house and any time that number goes up by much more than 100% I’m gonna get twitchy no matter how much I like them.
At any rate, wherever you are, I hope you didn’t have to fight with anyone today, and I hope if you did, at least the food was worth it. I’m gonna spend the rest of the night watching She-Ra on Netflix and playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
(Next year, I’m making macaroni and cheese, by the way.)
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.
(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)
Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.
The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.
Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.
(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)
Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.
If we were having coffee (and I feel like I need to point out that, unlike last time, I actually am having coffee while writing this) I would spend most of the conversation being interrupted by the kitten, who has decided that my feet are the tastiest thing in the universe, regardless of whether I’m barefoot, in socks, or wearing my shoes. This started off as cute and endearing and now I’m seriously trying to think of a way to bash together some shame cones to wear over my feet whenever I’m in a room that she can get into because the assaults are constant and she’s too small to kick.
I could probably get her halfway across the house if I tried, though.
(I’m not going to of course I’m not going to Jesus but Goddammit leave my feet alone.)
Anyway.
We had Thanksgiving yesterday. There have been persistent rumors that my wife’s family is planning some sort of extravagant event in Michigan for Actual Thanksgiving, and my brother and his wife just bought a new house, so we decided to kill a couple of birds with one stone and we all went up to his place north of Chicago for Very Early Thanksgiving yesterday. We are mostly German and Polish with a smattering of English and Welsh; he married into an Italian family and brought all of them over as well, so yesterday was Teach the Polacks How to Make Ravioli Day, because why wouldn’t it be? So we spent probably three or four hours making a couple hundred raviolis. I didn’t actually make the pasta itself– my mom was handling that– but my brother and my dad and I were responsible for filling the raviolis and then covering them and, in general, finishing everything up. It went pretty well:
The darker ones are sausage and spinach, the rest are a five-cheese mix.
It went very well– I’ve actually never made fresh pasta before, and while I sort of wanted to be in the kitchen for the actual pasta-making part at least once, being the last person in the process means you get to pretend the whole thing was your doing, which is still kinda fun. Dinner was delicious and I even managed to not pass out and die on the way home, which was also a plus.
We would probably start hinting around this election thing on Tuesday at some point and I would change the subject as fast as I possibly fucking could. I have Tuesday off; part of me feels like this was a very good decision (there will be violence at polling places this week) and part of me is mourning the idea that I’m going to be home all day by myself to go crazy. I’m going to spend the whole day playing Red Dead Redemption 2 just to keep from going insane.
The other thing on my mind: the Pegasus Author Expo coming up next Sunday in Lafayette:
I am super excited about this event; I’m doing a panel on book production at 12:00 and a reading/Q&A for half an hour or so at 11:30. I’m currently killing myself trying to figure out what to read (current theory: the prologue to Skylights and something funny from one of the Benevolence Archives books) and trying to mentally prepare for anything from a big crowd (a “big crowd,” in this context, means “any number of people that I cannot accurately count in less than a couple of seconds”) to my wife and my assistant (I have an assistant!) and no one else. This is the first time this group has done something like this and nobody really knows what to expect in terms of attendance so I’m deciding to look at it mostly as a networking event with a chance to practice some public-speaking skills. If I make some money and sell some books along the way, awesome. If not? That’s a whole lot of Indiana authors to touch base with. Which is absolutely a good thing regardless.
You should come. You should bring everyone you have ever met.
Okay, coffee’s cold so I’ve yapped enough. How’re you?
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
If we were having coffee (and I feel like I need to point out that, 
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 