Holiday memories

Today, a thread on LSG brought up some Christmas memories, some of which I shall share.


When I was in 5th grade, we were robbed blind the first week of December or so. Christmas was going to suck balls that year. Tristan really wanted a pair of Adidas shoes for christmas, but those motherfuckers are expensive as hell but she was a tad self-dentered back then, so that didn't matter. She still demanded that she have $100+ Adidases.

She got the knockoff brand with like 5 stripes on the side.

Guess who still has the video tape of her crying about it.

THIS GAL

The video also contains my happy ass getting a Seal cassette tape. That was all I wanted that year, and that was basically all I got. I was so fucking happy.

Another year, Tristan was going through her baby fat stage (5th-6th grade) and that was the only time our biological father saw us in person until she got married at 18. So, every year after the pre-teen visit, he would send her a really large men’s sweater from Alaska (where he lives) to her as a present.

Bastard.

Finally, my parents bought me and Tristan (2 years my senior) the same makeup palette for christmas when I was 10 or so. I am 27 now. I tossed that shit out when I was 17 or so.

Just last year, I spotted Tristan STILL USING THAT SAME GODDAMN MAKEUP PALETTE.

I threw it away for her. I didn't want her eyeballs to rot out.

Shit got busy.

With the start of the new semester, my life got very busy. Four courses at Radford, one at ITT, and a plethora of life obstacles in between made my day-to day plans change completely. This is a typical week in the life of Shaylin:

M: Wake up at 6, get ready for work. Get to RU by 10 am (for office hours). Teach from 11-1, an hour break, 2-3, get home. Grade, take care of the animals, work on the house, something to keep me busy until 10 or so when I go to sleep.
T: I don't have class until 5, and office hours at 4. However, I find it hard to do anything during the day when I know I have to be somewhere in the evening. I just... can't. So I sit around and kint and feel sorry for myself.
W: Same as M, but I have to get straight from RU to ITT (get done with RU at 3, take the bus back home which lasts until 4, drive to ITT and plan like hell before class starts at 6), and stay there until 9:30. 10:30- home, bed.
R: 10-12, clean Steven's house. Then the same as T.
F: Same as M without the office hours.
Sat: Work on the house or help Tristan with her homework
Sun: See Sat.

It's not as busy as it could be. However, it's busy for my lazy ass. I've been working on the Beekeeper's quilt along with about 1k others and have contracted the hexipuff disease. I ordered some Phat Fiber and have been spinning a lot lately, too.

For the most part, we are all okay. We lost Andy's granddaddy today. My Auntie Gail is failing on us, as well. At least mum will get to go out to see her next week (in Oregon!), though.

I've had a disgusting eye infection or something for like a week. I don't want to go to the Dr. I'm hoping it'll just... go away or something. I can't wear makeup or contacts because it irritates my eyes too much.  But at least my skin is better. I still have those not-quite-healed-but-not-quite-scarred marks all over my arms and legs. It's not an ideal situation.

School is going decently. 102 is... well... just not really clicking for me this semester. It just makes me angry for some reason. I love research and of course I love teaching, but something is off. I suspect that it's because my class and I have not yet connected properly and the students seem to think that it's a waste of their time because of how I conduct the class. There are things I could do differently, I suppose, but it's always worked for me in the Spring. Just something about the Fall...

We're making progress on the house. I painted half of my bathroom and Andy cut a cat door hole in the door to the basement. I've been trying to keep up with laundry and dishes and have basically given up on my garden for the year. That's all I've got for now.

It's not just me.

Right now, I've got Pandora coming from my phone, as opposed to my computer. Bijou keeps trying to shove her kitten nose all up in the speaker like she's going to find Ben Gibbard in there or something. She probably won't.

I didn't fall asleep last night until... okay this morning until 5 am. I slept until 11, which is kind of a miracle. Even more surprising, I've gotten some things done.

My first big watermelon split, so I had to pick it. :(

Is there something I can really even do about this? One watermelon succumbed to blossom rot, which I am now actively combating on each new fruit that comes up. But I've never really thought about the bastards splitting out there on their own. Was it heat? I think it might have been. I wiggled my other watermelons around a little (there's 4-5 out there now, getting to be bigger than softballs) in hopes that they wouldn't meet the same fate. In any case, this baby was chopped up and put in the fridge.

Sigh. My poor tomatoes.

I really wouldn't pick them until they were big and completely ripe and all, but the fuckers keep falling off the plants. No, I don't have cages or picks or anything. I'm a poor garden planner. The red ones were blanched to remove the skins, seeded, then chopped and put in the freezer so that when the time comes, I can make tomato sauce. We shall see.

My greens aren't as green as they should be.

Let's skip the leftmost thing right now. The green tomatoes are in a bag with a ripening banana in hopes that they can be salvaged and turned into decent sauce as well. Let me tell you about those cucumbers. They are about 4" in diameter and 6" long. However, the weeds have taken over the garden so much that they didn't really get a whole lot of green-making sun. :( I picked them in fear they would go to waste.

Let's talk about this.

That motherfucker was a cantaloupe. A CANTALOUPE. Yes, I planted cantaloupes, but none of them sprouted. I swear to you, this bastard, it's friend from a month ago, and another one that is still out there, were/are all growing on a cucumber vine. I SWEAR. Anyway, curiosity was getting the best of me, so I severed him from his mates and sliced him in half. Viola. I didn't really get much in the way of flesh from this nor the watermelon, because I'm impatient and in hindsight, the mutant cantaloupe should have been left on the vine until it turned tan. Of course I saved the seeds.

This might make Andy angry.

I was tired of looking at those goddamn turnips. You can't see it well here, but for the most part the tops were turning brown and dying off. They weren't going to grow any more than they already had. I sat outside on the phone with my sister, enjoying the satisfying feeling of ripping these little bastards out of the ground. The biggest one this year probably only got up to 2" in diameter. Sad. Most didn't grow past wimpy little roots, but Andy has been consuming them with good humor. For the record, I don't care for turnips.

My sister hasn't been feeling too well, either. I talked to he on the phone for about half an hour and tried to cheer her up. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. But it was nice to talk about just really nothing at all, without feeling like one of us needed to say something to the other, like I was calling her out of obligation or something. We didn't get along well when we were kids: two of the three fist fights I've been in in my life were with her. Two years apart, we were incredibly different. Funny how time changes things, right?

At any rate, I'm trying to focus more on the things and people around me. True, I goddamn near had a heat stroke outside weeding my garden (long sleeved shirt, not much water, overcast, wasn't thinking... at all) but now that I am back inside, my vegetation is all chopped, peeled, seeded, etc... I'm relaxing a little more. I used to be a compulsive planner. Not so much anymore. I think I need to reach another equilibrium point in which I can plan things but be flexible at the same time.

And laundry needs to get done. I shall do that.