Category: etc.

Happy New Year, everyone! 🙂

I am waaay behind on my From the Stacks challenge books. AND I just realized that one of the books I thought I was reading for the challenge was not actually on my list. The list that I came up with, you know, myself. The list of 5 books. 5 whole books to remember. Couldn’t do it. Sad. And dumb.

So … I’m totally cheating and replacing The Eyre Affair with Geek Love, because I’m reading Geek Love and I can’t find The Eyre Affair anyway.

Plus, if you knew just how my head is about to explode from simultaneously trying to read the total opposites of Geek Love and Anne of Avonlea, you’d cut me some serious slack.

Neighbor dude to me after I gave him a lovely gift-boxed bag of Beanhouse coffee — which I DO have to pay for — I don’t get it for free:

“Well … it’s about TIME.”

I have proof of The Tortoise in the Drawer coming as soon as I get my sure-to-be-subpar photos developed.

So I have resorted to tortoise blogging.

Oh, so much to tell … but it’s 11 p.m. here and we just got home after 7 1/2 hours on the !?#@?!! road.

But stay tuned.

So …. while I gather my thoughts here, a question:

What’s the most unfortunate thing you got for Christmas and what did you say when you opened it? Kindly include all facial expressions and physical gestures. I want details, peeps! 😉

A very blessed merry Christmas!

To the dark dark middle of nowhere ….

Brother-in-law and his wife get the Clawing Tortoise Room.

WE get the, um, motor home in the driveway.

Let’s not speak about it now.

A lady rushed into The Beanhouse yesterday, all flustered and furrowed.

“This is one of those things that’s gonna seem funny in about an hour, but right now … oh, I’m so embarrassed.” She held up her hand. Her two middle fingers were STUCK inside one of these:

It came off just seconds later but, uhm, what I want to know is: What is the thought process here?

“My fingers are wedged in a spool of curling ribbon! To the coffeehouse — IMMEDIATELY!!” ???

On one of our first married visits to my in-laws’ home in a little mountain town called “Privacy-What’s Dat?” my mother-in-law set us up in the guest /sewing/random piles of junk room. She asked us to keep the door open. (Excuse me? Yeah. We didn’t do that. MB laughed and closed the door.) The bed was frou-frouey and small — a double, I think. At home we have a king-sized bed because MB is so tall.

So, our first night there, I’m lying on my six inches of frouf, dozing fitfully because I’m afraid of falling out of the bed. I need to pee, but I’m also afraid of getting up because the bathroom door is just a sliding door and right across from the in-laws’ bedroom and what if they hear it sliding and know I’m peeing? Or worse, what if they hear me peeing? I need a door that closes, all solid and quiet. I have issues, people.

I just lie there, teetering on the mattress, talking myself out of peeing.

Suddenly, there are random scratching noises in the room. Kinda loud. Now, we are in the mountains where night is dark, very dark. Like “I’m sorta afraid how dark it is here” dark. So, great. I’m lying in a room full of childhood dark complete with creepy scratching noises. I’m now wide awake. Like anyone would, I just assume it’s that urban legend dude with the hook hand come to kill me in the deep dark middle of nowhere. My heart is racing. MB is snoring softly beside me dreamily unaware of our imminent, pointy demise.

The scratching continues, even louder now. Hook man is serious about this. That’s it. MB has to save me.

Shove — shove — shove.

Groggy. “Whaaa?”

“Do you hear that scratching? Do you HEAR it?”

Scratching.

“Yeah.” He turns his head towards me, groaning.

“It’s totally freaking me out. What IS it?”

“Honey …. it’s just the tortoise in the drawer ….” He yawns and rolls away from me. Nothing could possibly be more boring to him.

“WHAT????”

“The tortoise in the drawer …” he slurs again, a twinge of irritation.

“What are you talking about??”

“It’s the tortoise. He’s hibernating. In the drawer of that dresser.”

Silence as I take in that there is a slow leathery creature trapped in a dresser drawer a few feet away from where I’m trying to sleep and trying not to pee. I am deeply freaked out in a way that hook man could not even begin to touch.

“He’s hibernating??”

“Yes.”

“But …. obviously, he’s not! He’s trapped in there, clawing away for his very life!” For emphasis, I claw the air frantically, much like a tortoise would. In the deep dark nowhere, I am instantly an expert on the needs of tortoises in general.

“Honey …. he’s probably moving around in his sleep …. just leave him alone. Go back to sleep …” He abandons me to my slice of the mattress, falls back asleep instantly.

Finally, much later, I drift restlessly off in the deep dark middle of nowhere to the soothing sounds of a claustrophobic hibernating tortoise clawing away for his very life.

I never did get to pee that night.

Spontaneous song description of homeless fellow in the Santa hat panhandling at the intersection across from our car:

Santa beggar
You’re smellin’ pretty rummy; it’s true
You do
Had too many glasses of brew
Please, don’t come down my chimney tonight

Santa beggar
I see those gin blossoms from here
(spoken) Oh, dear
And that big wet stain on your rear
Just don’t come down my chimney tonight

Later that same day, as MB and I were rearranging some stuff around the house, we debated from different rooms about where something should go. We were getting nowhere. Finally … I was overcome by a seasonal ditty once AGAIN and managed to end the discussion with:

“Uhm, honey? ‘Let it go, let it go, let it GO-O-OOHHHH!!!'”

Okay. Something’s really wrong with me ….