So, my oldest daughter and I went to see "Up In Smoke" when it was screened at our local Arclight theater. I normally would never have watched the movie, me not being a stoner kind of gal, or even a stoner movie kind of gal. But Cheech and Chong were supposed to be there together for the first time in I don't know how long to do an after-show Q and A, and I like Cheech a lot and it seemed a one of a kind experience to have with one's oldest daughter, so I went.

I guess a lot of people are stoner kind of people, because they had to add a second show, the one we caught. Unfortunately, Cheech couldn't stay for that one and Chong couldn't stay much longer than that, but he did give us a little something at the beginning. I caught almost all of it before the theater nazis, who didn't mind the people next to me blazing up, told me to stop taping. I wouldn't mind one of my kids bringing home a Chong kind of person. And to be honest, the movie had some very funny bits. We sat there with our drinks, breathing in the smoke from the people next to us and laughed - and I wondered when it happened that I went from shrieking "just say no!" at her to this.

Roosters. At the lake. As promised. Stop bitching.

I think I am going to opt for surgery to cure my sleep apnea. I've had it since I was a baby, so it isn't weight related. Still, because I have sleep apnea, I could get the stomach surgery without waiting if I wanted it. I don't. I want to do the nasal kind - or whatever they do in the nose or throat that makes sleep apnea stop.

I don't know what they're doing here at first. I think calling out to friends. I know what they were up to at the end, though. That goose wanted to kill me. Don't be fooled by their adorable, fluffy facades - geese have serrated beaks and are extremely territorial. I guess if I want to be friends with them I'll have to be there when they're born, then raise them with our kids and cats and bunnies and birds. In our apartment.

Not that there is all that much raising left to do here. My youngest is going to be eighteen very soon. He was only nine when I started this blog and he hadn't yet been diagnosed with Aspergers. He's earning his own money now through his school's workability program. It's not much, but it's his and is motivating him to go to school every day better than the other rewards he's earned for attendance. Nonetheless, my husband and I are seriously considering setting up a conservatorship of him, so no one can trick my beautiful, naive son into signing anything like, oh say, a military contract. Does the military take autistic kids? They don't, do they?

Right?

Cinny found a bunny in the glass. She and Ichabod get along fine, by the way. For a while there, before Cinny was spayed, she was pretty aggressive in her desire to have baby buns and poor Icky, having been neutered, had no idea what she wanted. She wanted babies so bad she convinced herself she was pregnant anyways, and started pulling out her hair to make a nest. Help me. But now all is well and a whole bunch of yucky bunny behaviors disappeared with her utuerus and my four hundred and fifty dollars.

Murmur, drinking my daughter's milk.

I know it's bad, but it's also dead-on.

An ostrich at a nearby farm. He was pecking at the fence a few minutes before, so I told my daughter to offer him her sunglasses to peck at, assuming he would taste the ear pieces and move on. Without the glasses. Weirdo Jurassic bird.

I watched this little sandpiper for an hour and a half. I must have taken 200 shots of him, trying to get one of him flying.



With a baby sandpiper . . .



And what do you make of these?

Katy Towell's latest is up. May have been for some time, which just goes to show how out of the loop I am these days.



30 Second Bunny Theater does Borat.



Foamy has a bunch of new stuff up. If you haven't been there before, watch Kevorkian Scarf and Squirrel Songs 1 first.

Me with Sully at California Adventure. Now, I don't normally do the gushy kind of thing and wouldn't have thought it likely with anyone less than Stitch, but something just came over me when I saw Sully. I still sleep holding a stuffed animal (oh shut up) and Sully is the ultimate stuffed animal.

Anyway.

So we went last week, and had park hopper tickets and this is the first time we went to California Adventure. It was actually kind of neat and hands down, my favorite ride of the two parks was Soarin' Over California, a ride that simulates hang gliding over California and it was breathtakingly beautiful. If you go, do that first.

We finally got to ride Monster's Inc., and it was really cute. I got the whole ride on video, but the file is much larger than photobucket lets me upload. Ditto all of Small World.

Both parks were done up for the holidays and I do have snippets of things for you.



This is Small World if you're on the train riding through the park. They had Christmas lights on everything. They also do snow, but we were inside the Haunted Mansion when it happened, oh bummer. Still, my son was really scared of that ride and decided to do it in order to beat his fears. Yea, kid!



The tail end of Small World.



A teeny piece of the Main Street Electrical Parade, which we missed because we were on something else. Snow White, the slutty bitch, did not wave back at my daughter.



And the last bit of the new Pirates of the Caribbean. The Jack Sparrow part. This is the ride my oldest girl was scared of (the drops) but she did it to set a good example for her brother. Yea, kid!

My in-laws gave us these wind chimes last year, and, being bored and channeling Spielberg, I took this video to show them how wonderful they sound. In a windstorm.

Actually, it seems that Photobucket changed the quality of the video. Not only is it all pixelated and out of sync, but they cut it off before Tom Hanks did his soliloquy.

I'm not Christian now, but the whole season of Christmas makes me happy. I like buying gifts and hiding them and knowing that I have stuff laying around that will make someone I love very happy. I like the annual trip through Candy Cane Lane, a nearby neighborhood of eight blocks where everyone sets up the most amazing, elaborate holiday light displays and ours is one of hundreds of cars that drive up and down the streets, gawking and shouting "Merry Christmas!" back at the other cars. I like baking cookies and reading Christmas cards. I like the drive to my dad's. I know some people hate this time of year, but I love it. Even with all the stress, I love it.

This one was a very, very good day right up until the last couple of hours when my middle girl started hurting bad, again. I shot more than three hundred pictures and video

AND YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT EVERY ONE OF THEM!

justkidding


But you do have to look at these ones.



Ok. This was the drive to my Dad's place. See that cloud ahead of us?



This is us driving (and my husband sneezing) in it.



This was our tree on Christmas Eve. I worked all night to get those little photo ornaments right. I had to sift through all our old pictures and it took forever. By the time I did that, got the stockings stuffed, cookies baked (pineapple drop cookies, a family recipe) and everything under the tree, it was after three in the morning. To stay in the mood, I kept a local radio station playing on our TV (cable), all holiday music, all night long. Everything was perfect when everyone woke up the next morning. Even had coffee brewing.



And after all that work, the kids reduced the packages to a gift-wrap rubble in a half hour.



This is my in-laws lava lamp. We gave it to them many years ago. I just like the shot.

Up until the end of the day, when my middle girl started hurting again, it was all smiles. There were no fights - even the ex and I didn't send one single cheerfully-contemptuous jab at each other. It's a little bittersweet, because it may not be like this next year. One very close, very important branch of the family is on the verge of separation and divorce, which will cause a great deal of turmoil. This may be the last one where all of us are together in one place at one time.

I was taking apart my son's bunk bed to move it from one room to the other and had sat the top half on its long end to save space and make dismantling it easier. My oldest daughter comes to me in the middle of the night, and she says "You have got to see this".

I go out there, but see nothing. She says "look up" and there is Cardiac at the top of the bed.



She's climbed each of the slats like a ladder and is now happy as a clam. My middle girl asked if she was scared, but no -



Clearly, she's in one of those moods cats get in. It's happening to her a lot lately. Since Mitzi died, she's been going through a second kittenhood. Both of the lady cats have been acting very differently since Mitz died, for that matter. In any case, not only wasn't she scared, she was happy and ready to play and it took forever and a step ladder to get her back down.

I swear this next pic is unaltered - it's just plain weird.



I will tell you this video is unaltered, but you won't believe me. We call her the Terminator, now.

My improbable honeysuckle. Avon makes a cologne that smells exactly like a honeysuckle blossom, but they only offer it at certain times of year and this is not one of them. I learned that when I went to my representative and begged her to get me some so my oldest girl would stop using mine. As things to borrow go, my cologne is a lot better than oh say my douche, but it would have made a great stocking stuffer, wouldn't it? Oh well, maybe for her birthday - she'll be twenty soon.

OK. Today I am moving furniture and making themes. Hanukkah comes first, so I will do something Jewish. I like the colors of Hanukkah better than the ones of Xmas, but being neither Christian nor Jewish I suppose my opinion on the matter of colors doesn't matter much. Maybe I'll go south of the border on you all and put a dreidel under a sombrero.

I had to spell 'dreidel' several times to get it right. I hope you Jewish people out there appreciate that.

Did I show you this yet?

A close-up of the marble my dad sent me.

Yeah, a marble. Well, a glorified marble. Really, a small paperweight. But there was this thing with his brother when they were kids and something happened with marbles and my dad saw marbles in a catalog recently and was reminded of days gone by and here is my new marble.

It's really lovely and I do love glass paperweights, though can't begin to afford the ones I love most. For instance:



This is called "Caribbean Reef". Isn't that lovely? or:



"Phantom of the Sea".



"Beauty and the Beast" can be had for a mere seven hundred dollars.




Etc., etc., etc. Those last few cost a couple thousand. You get the idea. But I do love the things so when he can, my dad sends me something round and shiny and beautiful.

It's been a very weird day. I spent a couple of hours with my in-laws going over old family photos for a project I'm hard at procrastination on. The photos came with stories I had never heard, filling in gaps here and there I had either barely felt or tried very hard not to notice. Funny how much of what a family is going through gets back to where they came from, even when we are all so long gone from there.

On the way home, I did something I almost never, ever do and NEVER with a man, not since my kids were born - I offered a ride to a stranger. A stranger and his very small child, who looked lost and cold near the lake. They didn't kill me, I am glad to report, but the father was very weird and I was very glad when he got out of my car. I don't know what I was thinking, except that the little boy looked cold and alone with his little fishing pole. I rather doubt that would have been much comfort if my family had needed to identify my body. I can be so monumentally dumb sometimes.

Speaking of "Scrubs" (it's all between the lines of the little boy/weird dad story):

Robin Williams on executions in Texas.
. . .


A new set of fishie themes and a couple matching desktops can be had here. Image quality is better on the themes and desktops - my animation program optimizes previews to save loading time. Considerate, huh? But it does it without asking me and I won't be too surprised if tomorrow it makes me coffee without asking and the next day fires all our missiles at Afghanistan without asking.

Hey - I saw Terminator, OK? . . . Well, except for a couple of stragglers whose addresses I have misplaced, the holiday card thing is done and over with. I had the kids sign a few, and now they are all packed up and waiting to go out next week.

My son spent yesterday trying to come up with a single viable set of lights from the many, many sets we found in the closet. I say he spent all day because he did. He started around noon and ended around nine last night and can you believe it? Not ONE single full set of working lights. You know those weird ivy vines that somehow root themselves to freeway overpasses and grow into the concrete? You pull them away from the concrete and they die? I think Xmas lights are like that - you pull them off the tree and stick them in a closet and they just wither and die during the year. That's the only conceivable explanation for twelve sets of broken lights in the closet.

We decided to pluck all the bulbs from them and throw away the wiring. That way, when we go out tomorrow to BUY a new set of lights (or two or three), we have extra bulbs if anything like a bulbing emergency should occur.

This is the guy who played the bully in the "Back To The Future" movies - he amused me.

Well, let's see. What did Transient do today? She mailed all her Thanksgiving cards and began the preparations for the annual Obsessive, Torturous, Holiday Card Fest. I used to really love doing my holiday cards but every year it gets more elaborate and less fun. What do you suppose would happen if I didn't (GASP) send out holiday cards this year? Would the world end? Would my children die? Would they reinstate the draft?

Almost slipped that one past you, didn't I? A Democratic congressman wants to reinstate the draft in, he claims, an effort to relieve the burden of serving on the poor. His thing is that if we have a draft, all the rich kids will have to serve, too.

Yeah, that's how it worked with Vietnam.

My husband hopes it's designed to outrage the middle class into the kind of protests we saw in the sixties, but I'm a little more cynical. Don't people know that the same rich boys whose daddies bought their ways out of Vietnam will now just buy their own sons out of Iraq? This won't equalize anything.

Gr. And this is a DEMOCRAT, folks, which gets back to what I have been saying for years: there is no longer a Good Guy party and a Bad Guy party, just a Not As Bad Guy party.

Let's see - middle girl is still on Cloud Nine after her visit with the stars. We bought her a new mattress. Eighteen or nineteen spinal taps sometimes makes it hard for her to walk, but the new mattress is helping (and it should, for what it cost). My son and older daughter are good - son beat the shit out of his knees when he fell while running in P.E. - in shorts. On blacktop.

Hubby is fine, but harried. Work stuff. I'm busy, busy, busy - making sets, taking pics, tending to family, pets and doing my part to fix the deficit by spending more money on postage stamps than the government spends on meth and call boys.

You gotta love the Worse Than Us Guys.

My husband thought these clouds looked like UFOs. That one on the right does, kind of. Then again, we often fall asleep listening to Coast to Coast. He turns it on, and some of it is interesting, but mostly I like the AM radio drone. It's soothing.

My middle girl sent me this link. It's big fun with teen bloggers. Ah, to be a teen blogger again. Of course, I was never a teen blogger. They didn't have blogs when I was a teenager and we still had to roll the big rocks out of the way to leave the cave.

I found this while reading another blog. "Queer Knitting and Crochet websites and blogs." I love the idea of legions of gay needleworkers out there, making the world safe for perls and popcorns.

My oldest girl found this and while I do feel a certain sympathy for the gentleman in question (who I remember from when he was a God), you can't help but be amused:

Ok, this was funny.

Piggy Bank Pinko, a Captain Capitalism flash. Too cute. Reminiscent of Powdered Toast Man from Ren and Stimpy.