Filed under: Misc. Humor, Posts | Tags: adulthood, Christmas, decorating, family, holiday, Holidays, humor, kids, Middle-Age, south, southern, subourbonmom, tradition, trees, Virginia, winter
This year I made it my mission to convince our office manager Lacy that she should get a real Christmas tree instead of using the same old plastic one she’s been using for the last few years. After an hour of nagging and convincing her that a real tree smelled better and was a better way to enjoy Christmas, Lacy gave in and got one. When she explained to the folks at Lowes (she went to a store, not even a place outside – mistake #1) that she had never picked a live tree before, and asked who had the most experience with picking out live trees, a German man said “I don’t” and immediately walked away. I don’t think he got the irony that the live Christmas-Tree-in-the-House tradition comes from Germany.
What I didn’t realize was the amount of basic Christmas Tree Knowledge I have accumulated over the years, and that I probably should have passed on:
PICKING OUT A TREE:
Size Matters: Decide what room you’re going to put it in BEFORE you go shopping. A fat tree in a little room is like Donald Trump’s ego in an election – there isn’t room for anything else.
Trees are not naturally symmetrical. Even the trees trimmed to look like perfect cones will never be perfect. The fun part is finding the most perfect one you can. This can be difficult at the places where the trees are wrapped and leaning against the wall, like, say, your local grocery store. To get the full experience of arguing for 30 minutes in the cold over which tree to get, you must suck up the cost and go to a place where the trees are set up on stands, as if they are ready to decorate, or better yet, in the field where you must cut them down.
Trees Get Bad Haircuts Too – Sadly, the two-week rule doesn’t apply. Most live trees come with a bad side – that side where the branches don’t fall right and there’s a hole.
This is the side you turn toward the wall when you put it up, or if it isn’t going against the wall, you find your fattest, heaviest ornaments to make the branches dangle over the hole. (These ornaments, along with the most fragile ones, will be the ones the cat goes after.)
What About Bugs? Some tree vendors will do the Tree Shake, which entails putting the tree on a spike attached to a generator that shakes the tree so hard that it looks like Beyonce twerking, until all the loose needles and bugs fall out – of the tree, not Beyonce. If your vendor doesn’t do that, you can console yourself with the fact that the fallen needles will make your vacuum cleaner smell good for months.
Net or No Net? I recommend getting one, even though it might ruin your Norman Rockwell vision of a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of your car. The net is crucial to getting the tree through the door and easily sitting in its stand. Trying to get a tree through the door without the net is like trying to thread a needle with a sausage.
SETTING UP YOUR TREE
Size matters – again. Tree trunks come in varying sizes and diameters, and they often come with branches sticking out of the bottom. Trim the branches at the bottom – you’ve heard the adage, “trim the bushes to make the deck look bigger“ – well, we don’t need the stand to look bigger, but we do need the tree to glide into the hole smoothly.
Getting the tree to stand up straight in the stand is usually a deal breaker – worse than hanging pictures on a wall. This task is for the patient and determined. If you’re like me and not allowed to go into the car dealership because you get too impatient to sit through the deal-making process, sighing and rolling your eyes for the entire three hours, this may not be the task for you. Some tips:
Wear gloves! Christmas trees look and smell great, but their trunks are covered in sap that is harder to remove from your hands than the image of Miley Cyrus twerking from your memory.
When you’ve given up and decided that tree that leans is now “charming,” make sure the tree doesn’t fall by tying some part of it to the wall. If you have cats or dogs, this is a must – they will find a way to bring that big green monster to the ground, and then skitter your breakable ornaments over the floor for the next two days.
FEEDING YOUR TREE
To determine if the tree needs water, you have to see how much water is left in the stand each morning and evening. Checking the water level for a live tree requires freakishly long arms and a relationship with your tree. As Lacy said, “I feel like I’m feeling up my tree.” Would that be second base? 
Watering the tree requires the ability to slither along the floor and pour a pitcher of water into the stand without spilling any. I recommend placing a piece of plastic under the stand, hidden by your tree skirt to prevent any stains on the carpet from water spills. 
I also recommend getting one of the tree watering tubes that blend in with the branches, the top of which sticks out for easy access.
Check your tree for tree food – some vendors provide it. The tree food is the little white thing on a random branch that you thought was the price tag.
If all of this seems like too much of a hassle, and you want to go back to taking your tree bits and pieces out of a box each year, and putting it together like a Tinker Toy that’s fine. I totally understand. Nothing says Christmas like a plastic tree with “Sensicles” hanging discreetly among the branches so that the whole house smells like fake Christmas.
Perhaps Lacy said it best when she was describing the experience of getting a live tree vs. setting up a plastic one: “It’s like trying to pick an animal out from the pound, but it’s such a pain in the ass I want to give it back.”
Well, I’ll take my temporary, evergreen mutt with its holes, dropping needles and intimate watering/groping sessions. Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. Your plastic tree may make your house look like it was decorated by Southern Living, but my tree reminds me that life goes on, even in winter.
Filed under: Middle Age, Misc. Humor, Posts | Tags: adulthood, Build-A-Bear, decorating, family, home decor, home decorating, humor, Middle-Age, mom, moving, packing, real estate, realtors, south, southern, stagers, stress, subourbonmom
There comes a time when every suburbanite needs a change, so they turn their lives upside down, become instant HGTV experts and get the overwhelming urge to purge.
Since there’s no good time to have kids and there’s no good time to move, we decided to add the challenge of doing it in the fall of Daughter #1’s senior year. I mean, really, there isn’t much going on except SAT Tests, college visits every weekend, college applications and Senioritis.
Once the decision was made, we realized we had to get our stuff out of the house (all 15 years and two children of it), and try to make it look like no one ever lived there except June Cleaver and a decorator from Crate & Barrel.
It quickly became clear that we needed a Stager. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a Stager is someone you pay to come to your house and tell you what you need to get rid of or change so your house will sell. What no one tells you is that having a Stager come into your house is a lesson in humiliation.
Oh, don’t get me wrong – our Stager is a seriously nice lady with good decorating sense who was trying really hard not to be too critical when she was talking about my decorating.
Apparently, there are decorating rules.
I decorate by seeing a picture in Southern Living or Coastal Living, buying one piece of furniture to start the look, then covering that piece of furniture with stuff until you can’t see it anymore. Then I start the process all over again. After walking around the house with my Stager, she said in an exasperated but kind voice, “Are these also the same curtains that were here when you moved in?” When I nodded, chewed her lip and asked hesitantly, “So, do you like shopping?”
I looked around and said, “Um, does it look like I like shopping?”
She just nodded to herself, like a therapist would after hearing some whackadoo story that confirmed their theory that the client is definitely…skewed.
After realizing my serious decorating deficiency, I decided I would channel all of my pent up anxiety at having my world (voluntarily) turned upside down onto the Stager.
And Build-A-Bear.
I now despise Build-A-Bear. Not only did they raise the stuffed animal bar so high you spend half a paycheck picking out fake roller skates and a tutu for a leopard, but they did something even worse – they created memories for the children.
Oh, it was great when my sweet baby girls’ faces lit up on a Build-A-Bear day. I loved watching them pick out the outfits and “adopt” their animal at the kid-friendly computers. Fast forward 10 years when we are trying to fit everything into a pod and there are two more trash bags filled with stuffed Build-A-Bear creatures that just won’t go in. Can I give them away? Of course not – each bear is a memory. They say you can’t put a price tag on memories – well I call bulls#*&t. The price tag is $25-$35 dollars, if you’re lucky and get the basic model without the fancy clothes.
So in went the Build-A-Bear bags (yes, I kept them, damn you, Build-A-Bear) and all of the syrupy memories, and out went two trailer loads of junk to the dump. In went boxes of schoolwork from kindergarten on, and out went my jean skirt from 1989. The closer we got to the show date, in went a lot of bourbon, and out went sentimentality.
Now that the Stager is no longer in our lives and the Build-A-Bears are packed away, I’ll have to find something new to channel all of this self-inflicted anxiety onto.
I’m thinking it will be the person who decided the NFL should play football on Thursdays. I’ve already missed my picks for Week 1 – maybe I’ll go get a football bear.
Filed under: Misc. Humor | Tags: blob, bubble, discovery, diving, egg, exploration, humor, news, ocean, oceans, pollution, Science, sports, squid, subourbonmom, travel
Divers recently discovered a translucent blob in the ocean http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2015/08/03/mysterious-giant-ocean-blob-squid-mass-orig.cnn-storyful/video/playlists/creatures-of-the-deep/ and scientists think it may be a giant squid egg sac. That’s scary all by itself. I saw 2000 Leagues Under the Sea. That one huge eyeball freaked me out for years. I don’t envy the divers down there shining their tiny little diver flashlights onto a giant bubble that no one thought would be there – kind of like the guy in the red shirt on Star Trek who always bit it whenever they went down to some weird planet.
(And about those flashlights: We can send spacecraft to take pictures of the Not-Planet Pluto – are we really unable to make flashlights stronger than the ones those divers were using? If I was down there next to the blob, I’d have a theater spotlight on that thing like it was Bono singing on a New York rooftop.)
I have a couple of different theories about what that blob is:
Some of you may know I can do a lot of gross things, but looking at snot on a little kid is not one of them. One time I was a timer at my kids’ swim meet, and gagged as the child in my lane got out because of the horror running out of his nose. Even my fellow preschool teachers knew to give me a warning and let me turn around whenever a green goblin appeared.
I think the blob is actually a conglomeration of all the snot that gets expelled in the ocean every summer. Like the Terminator’s liquid-metal T-100 enemy (if he got chopped up, the metal bits would seek each other out and stick back together), I think that blob is all the snot that has found its kind, and will soon:
a) explode into a giant snot spill reminiscent of the Valdez oil spill in Alaska, coating everything in its path – surfers, beaches and avian wildlife will be coated, and no amount of aloe-soaked tissues will be able to wipe it away;
b) explode like a sticky supernova underwater, spreading all of the germs and viruses it contains worldwide; or
c) seek me out like the worst Hitchcock-esque movie plot ever (think The Blob).
Or, it could be a giant glob of sunscreen, washed off into the ocean after another hot summer. Mother nature is very efficient, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she managed to corral all that greasy nastiness into one giant sphere, and is using it as a make-shift uterus for some new kind of underwater creature – maybe one that will be able to survive in acidic, pollution-clogged waters. Just think, there could be millions of eggs getting ready to hatch slithering creatures like the snake thing in the trash compactor Luke, Princess Leah and Hans Solo jumped into, in Star Wars.
Or it could be lots of squid eggs.
Filed under: Misc. Humor | Tags: adulthood, computers, humor, Karma, kharma, laptops, Middle-Age, office, office etiquette, subourbonmom, Surface Pro, T-Rex, technology
My kids should be so proud of me. In my new-ish job, I’ve learned lots of things, including how to design a marketing trade show banner, conference call, video chat, and edit a website. I also recently learned that there is such a thing as office Karma.
As our company has prospered and our technology needs have grown, our computers have gotten progressively smaller – so small in fact, that I commented to my boss (because I clearly have no filter) that he looks like a court stenographer when he’s sitting there, hunched over his laptop. He has to squeeze his arms together so his hands can fit onto the tiny keyboard.
My observation was politely ignored.
Naturally, I was due for some Karma after that comment. In fact, I’m probably due for heaps and heaps of steaming, putrescent office karma thanks to my verbal diarrhea and 12-year-old sense of humor (apparently not everyone thinks poop jokes are funny ALL of the time).
So my old computer finally started to die on me, first by thinking for really long periods of time about how to find a website (for the record it was actually work-related, and had nothing to do with the “Listen Linda” YouTube video). My boss was kind enough to approve the new Surface Pro laptop for me, too.
Don’t get me wrong – the Surface Pro is really cool, and has a lot going for it, especially after I lugged my old laptop around a tech conference for 4 days. This thing is like carrying a tiny, literary magazine around – it’s small but self-important. And I’m well aware of how cool it is that my work was deemed worthy enough to get one – so thank you, Workplace. But of course I can’t just let it go at that.
The Surface Pro, which is slightly larger than the iPhone 6 Plus (a.k.a. the “ear pad”), is incredibly portable and weighs as much as a People Magazine.
And it was clearly made by and for pubescent boys. Here’s why:
- You can make the font/text bigger on the screen, but only in a distorted way, and certainly not big enough to compensate for my CVS 2.0 reading glasses. No one over the age of 40 can see what they’re doing.
- It will fit in my purse (not that I would EVER be so careless as to do that, Office/Security Manager) – not a great place since my purse houses pharmaceuticals, lotions and liquid soap. But it’s tempting.
- The keyboard is tiny – you have to place it on a table with your hands so close together to type that you look like a T-Rex, or a raccoon washing its food. For men with broad shoulders it must be awkward. For women, it squishes the girls like you wouldn’t believe – and my girls are, shall we say…petite. My heart goes out to my more endowed co-workers. In fact, here’s my million dollar idea – the Surface Pro could double as a mammogram. It would be a daily check– how awesome is that? What a way to save on healthcare costs!
That said, I know in light of everything in the news this week these are clearly first-world problems. Every now and then I have to remind myself that I now live in a world where computers fit in your purse, and we have isolated cancer genes – I was still using a typewriter when I went to college, and nobody talked about cancer – EVER. Hopefully, smarter folks than me will use these magic devices for good, and overcome some of the obstacles we have in this world that keep us from being the excellent species we have the potential to be.
Bless our hearts.
Filed under: Misc. Humor, Posts, Travel | Tags: adulthood, air travel, airlines, airplanes, airport security, airports, Bathrooms, flying, humor, security, subourbonmom, travel
The day President Obama announced he was officially asking Congress for permission to actively combat ISIS, I was flying home from a work conference. The plane during the flight from Charlotte to home was one of those old, outsourced planes from Canada, or maybe some company called Metal-Tube-in-the-Sky Airline. There were two rows of seats (and those felt like the old plastic covered couches in Grandma’s house) with a very narrow aisle.
About halfway through the flight, the flight attendant came on the loud speaker and said, “Please do not form a line by the bathrooms. It is a security breach.”
A few of us glanced at each other and shrugged. There was some rustling, and I assumed people were returning to their seats. A couple of minutes later, the flight attendant spoke again, this time more urgently:
“It is a breach of security for passengers to congregate by the bathrooms. Please wait until there is no one in line before you come back to use the restrooms.”
Incredulous looks passed around the cabin. Security breach? At the bathrooms?
Here are a few of the thoughts that crossed my mind while I tried to decide how long I should wait before heading back there:
First of all, I’m pretty sure folks weren’t “congregating” around the airplane bathroom, just chatting each other up—after all, it’s not a bar.
Second, what happened to make someone think congregating by the plane’s bathroom could create a security situation so dire it must be forbidden? Have the FAA and Homeland Security folks ever used the bathroom on a modern plane? There’s barely room to get your pants down, much less withdraw a weapon; and, even if you did manage to extract some kind of weapon in the bathroom, having a line of people waiting outside would only hinder what you were trying to do.
If I were to have some kind of concealed weapon, I wouldn’t be getting it ready it at the back of the plane, far away from the two most important people on the plane, the pilot and co-pilot. There’s not much sense in drawing a gun, knife or explosive device and then having to charge down the aisle, tripping over someone’s feet the whole way.
If we follow the logic of the danger of congregating outside crowded bathroom areas to its logical conclusion, we would have to question every line at every sports and concert event ever. Good luck dispersing the six-pack-in throng around the port-a-pods at a Jimmy Buffet concert.
Perhaps someone at the FAA has gone back to the basics of physics—maybe they are worried that if you have enough people standing at the back of the plane, it could simply fall out of the sky. If you’ve ever flown on a tiny plane, you’ve been made aware of weight distribution. They put the luggage in the back, and people in the front and middle. Too much in any direction, and the plane is in danger of not taking off, or tumbling to the ground–like those GI Joe’s with the plastic parachutes we threw from 2nd-floor windows as a kid.
Really, a bathroom security breach sounds more like a blow-out after eating some highly-questionable tuna salad from the airport snack stand. So, to the FAA and Homeland Security, I salute your efforts to keep us safe in the skies—clearly there are dangers we haven’t even conceived of. Keep up the good work.
Subourbon Mom 