Santa brought me a pony after 25 years of asking for one. He brought 3 of them actually. I got a 3-pack of re-released original My Little Ponies, which are now safely set up on the bookshelf where the ferret can’t steal them. Chaucer got me a copy of Die Hard 2 to go with the original that Eddie had bought a couple of weeks ago, and I got The Pillars of the Earth from Pickle. Eddie got me some toys, the King’s Quest Collection, and a copy of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (terrifically funny from what I’ve read so far), some Hello Kitty notepaper, and I got a bunch of clothes from other folks.
Everyone liked the snowflakes and angels that I’d crocheted, and breakfast at Dad’s was painless. The animals enjoyed their toys; Pickle has already hidden one of the jingly balls Eddie got her, and Chaucer spent about 5 minutes licking the catnip mouse he was given.
After a lot of uploading and pretty much completely wiping out my allowance for my Flickr account, all of my pictures from the 221st Bristol parade are online. There was a major miracle while we were there - I didn’t get sunburnt. Well, I did, in two tiny spots where my bra straps were rubbing and a tiny spot in my hairline, but that was it. The $10/bottle sunscreen worked, even if it was nasty as hell to put on. As Eddie described it, it was like spreading peanut butter, it was just that thick. The rain held off until late yesterday, but the heat never let up and the humidity sucked ass. We were at our usual spot along the parade route, where the crowd is usually loud, obnoxious, and buzzed at 10am, so needless to say there was much yelling and cheering and clapping while we were there.
Working on Monday was just as insane as expected. Plenty of idiots, plenty of people wanting their pills, plenty of people not wanting to go ring out their things at the front of the store. Thankfully I’ve got today off to recover from two days of work craziness and one day of parade and sun, so I should be all ready to work tomorrow.
Proving once again that Comrade can go from normal to insane in a matter of hours…. yesterday afternoon I had Eddie put the a/c in his bedroom window, since at that point I thought we’d still be leaving Pickle home while we spent the night at Mom’s tonight. We’d have preferred it in the living room, since that’s where she is and where we spend a lot of our time, but the last time we had it in front we discovered Comrade had fashioned some sort of contraption to take the condensation from the a/c and drain it out onto the sidewalk rather than i nto the front garden. Figuring there’d be no reason for him to be worrying about the dripping this time around since it’s in the 4′ walkways between ours and the naighboring house, we set it up, turned it on, and ignored it. This morning, Eddie pointed out that at some point last night or this morning, Comrade put a bucket out there to catch the dripping water. The man is insane.
I’m off to work in a couple of minutes. I’m expecting it to be insane. We’re down one tech today, and I doubt it will be any fun at all.
And since I won’t be back until tomorrow, all you US folks have a safe holiday. Keep the fireworks out of your face and all that safety shit. I’ve seen how much damage they do when you stuff them into a fish, ok?
It was a pretty uneventful night here at Casa McBride. Neither of us got drunk or even got a good buzz off our Green Apple Cokes, we never did watch Young Guns, and we did end up watching the sparkly ball drop. Balls of the other sort were not to be seen, but I did get a good kiss at midnight and we hugged the ferret when she woke up, so there was plenty of love in the house.
We were sitting around doing nothing at about 11pm when a fight broke out across the street. From what I could tell, the guy who lives across the street had said something to his nephew along the lines of “if you do anything that hurts your mother [his sister] I’ll have you put in jail.” The nephew then proceeded to make one of those completely dumbass threats where you just reverse the first threat and proceeded to tell his uncle “if anything happens to my mother I’ll have you put in jail!” Much yelling ensued. Then the women got involved, and there was plenty of “We’s family and family’s all we got!” and “What good are you if you’re in jail and she’s in a shelter?” The cops drove down the street once and checked things out and told the nephew to calm down, and someone (I think his sister) told the cop everything was under control and it was just a family issue, nothing to worry about, and the cop drove off.
Needless to say, Comrade spent the better part of the midnight hour pacing across the living room floor to check things out. According to the guy across the street, Comrade is a bit scared of big black men, which would explain why he didn’t go out there and tell them off like he’d normally do.
When everything quieted down I almost expected Jerry Springer to pop out from behind a bush and offer a final thought.
