Merry Christmas! Wait...you do Christmas, right?

While Lawyer Boy continues to paint our dining room, I have been charged with ordering our annual Christmas card to send to those we love and/or feel badly about having not seen all year. I love picking out a photo for the card for the inherent narcissism it involves: "Here, you can put me on your fridge!" Picking the photo was easy, since there aren't too many pictures of us both looking sporty this year. And as much as I always want to include the cat in the picture, I feel that's one step closer to taking pictures of us in matching reindeer sweaters, and that's a road I just can't travel down. Also, we have a friend who is afraid of cats like the cast of the new "90210" is afraid of eating, so I'd feel bad sending her a card that would make her shriek (wrong holiday). So here's the photo I picked, from a friend's wedding:

Please note that if it weren't for that little blue snippet of dress showing at the top, I'd look completely nude in this picture. Now there's a holiday greeting we could all get behind! "Check out THESE tidings! Love, The Thoreaus."

Now, on to the hard part: the message. I could always put individual thought and heartfelt sentiment into each card, and order them with just the photo, but when I can send everyone the same message and hope it strikes the right note of Christmas joy in each of them...why? We realized we only have one friend who's only Jewish on our list--we have several who light the menorah next to the Tannenbaum--so we decided we would stick to "Merry Christmas." And that's as far as I've gotten with the message.

Some discarded options include:
May the misteltoe be good to you this year. Get it! Get it! Love, The Thoreaus.
Wishing you the warmest of Christmas greetings, and the smallest of tree fires. Love, The Thoreaus.
Merry Christmas! Please turn your house off so we can sleep. Love, The Thoreaus.
Hoping you have a merry Christmas, and enjoy the enclosed Chia-Tree. Love, The Thoreaus
Merry Christmas from the Thoreaus. No, we aren't having kids yet.

Lawyer Boy has taken over this project.

Happy Holidays! Love, Brasso

After the Pigfest 2008 that yesterday was (I'll write more about Thanksgiving later--a full-length entry about my family will take more time, and wine, than I can pour into it right now), Lawyer Boy and I kicked off the holiday season today the way many people do: we started our holiday cooking. By cooking the hardware for all the doors in our bedroom.

By way of quick and dirty background, Lawyer Boy and I recently bought a great house that was built in 1930. The house has been entirely untouched since the glory days of Prohibition, and so a lot of people who've come by have called it "a diamond in the rough." I just call it "effin' ugly." The entire interior of the house was painted institutional mint green, which has driven us crazier than Miley Cyrus ever could hope to. Mint green. I can’t wait to (never ever ever so help me Baby Jesus in the manger) see you again.* It’s an awesome house, but it needs help, as did the original owners when they lacked all sense and reason and painted over every single doorknob, hinge, outlet, and light switch cover in the entire house. Sparkly glass doorknobs? Lovingly glazed with mint green. Solid brass hinges? Beautifully highlighted with EFFING MINT GREEN. So in trying to rid the house of the Great Depression, we had to take apart all the working parts of the doors and get the nasty lead paint off all of them.

And when I say “we,” I mean Lawyer Boy. So far we’ve only made it through the doors in our bedroom, but since he can actually tell a screw from a hinge**, he was charged with taking them apart, after which he laid at my feet a billion sticky, gunky pieces of brass, like so many preschoolers’ fingers.*** We had been told that the best way to strip off old paint from metal was to boil the pieces with a little detergent, so we sacrificed one of our soup pots and set that bitch to roast.

Word to the wise: NEVER BOIL SOAP IN YOUR HOUSE ON PURPOSE, no matter how tempted you may be by the delicious scents they put in the dish soap. (I get that—I too have been tempted by Dawn’s Country Apple.) It smells like death and bad breath and is DISGUSTING. Also I can’t imagine what kind of lethal chemicals I inhaled today. I keep waiting to grow a third eye out the side of my head, which is kind of exciting, except my hair is very thick, so it’s unlikely that I would be able to see out of it. Anyway, we boiled the paint off, and after two hours of scrubbing, rubbing, and emptying six bottles of Brasso****, we had shiny, original hardware, which meant we could move onto our next project: Kilz-ing the living room.

Kilz is a nasty chemical that is somehow still the BOMB. It kilz stuff like mildew leftover from WWII and serves as primer, and makes you feel like maybe, one day, your whole house won’t be seafoam green like a bad bridesmaids’ dress. Putting Kilz on the walls is actually a very cleansing process, not unlike a baptism at church, after which they give you delicious wine. Except at my house/church, they don’t make you sit through the baptism, and only then give you the wine as a reward for sitting through it. Here at the Church of Lawyer Boy, we believe in drinking wine throughout the baptism, which would explain how the cat got...baptized.

Slowly but surely, we’re moving along. While everyone else is buying six big-screens on sale at Wal-Mart and making turkey con carne al dente a la francais out of yesterday’s leftovers, Lawyer Boy and I are proudly getting in the spirit by getting high off chemicals that you, too, can purchase at the grocery store! We’ve got brand names, if you’re interested. I'm just sayin.

So I leave you now with the warmest of holiday tidings, as I go forth to continue my holiday cooking. Tomorrow’s recipe: peanut butter cheesecake with chocolate-mint paint glaze.

*Why yes, that song IS on my ipod! Right between Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” and Kansas’ “Carry on Wayward Son.” Somewhere, the Gods of Music are sticking nails into the voodoo-me.

**I can tell a screw from a hinge, but only when presented to me in the context of a cocktail. Like I know there’s no such thing as a “hingedriver.”

***Have you ever held hands with a preschooler? So you know what I’m talking about with the gunk and slime and possibly ebola therein.

****I don’t normally give financial advice, but y’all, buy stock in Brasso. Based on our consumption alone, they’re gonna do some mad crazy business in the next quarter, and I recommend you get in while you can.

The Only Thing You Have to Fear Is Fear Yourself

I came home in the middle of the day today for lunch, and discovered that I'm an idiot. Twice over, actually. If that's not holiday magic, I don't know what is. In broad daylight, on a Monday, in a neighborhood where the most dramatic thing to happen is one neighbor's lab pooping on another neighbor's lawn/toddler, I pulled up to my house and attempted to park in front of it, except there was a small, shady-looking black Saturn right in front of my house (and by "shady looking," I mean "not mine"). I parked behind it and eyed it warily, like a bulemic at a buffet, sizing it up. I eventually determined that the only thing this could mean was that someone was in my house, waiting to take my stuff, my cat, or my sweet, sweet virtue. I walked up to the house, looking stealthily in all the windows, unlocked the front door, and went ahead and dialed 911--I didn't hit SEND. I just felt like, should a masked man jump out from my coat closet and grab me, it would be a wonderfully practical idea to be able to hit send and just like that! Police would swarm around and I would be saved!

Nevermind that in a situation as minorly stressful as a departmental meeting, I can forget such simple details as my own job title, objectives, and at times, name. Clearly, if I were attacked by a Midday Masked Man, I would possess the clear presence of mind to call the police.

I grabbed the cat as soon as I walked in, confident that my sharply-honed attack cat would alert me to any Midday Masked Men and vanquish them on the spot. What he was really interested in was tummy rubs and a refill of his food bowl, as if he couldn't live off his own personal fat reserves for at least six days. We prowled through the house, cat-man and I, acutely tuned to any and all disruptions in the normal state of the house (and one of us purring--but only when he rubbed me in just the right spot). We left no stone unturned, and SURPRISE! found nothing.

Relieved but disappointed, I fed the attack cat, ate some lunch, and went back to work. It was only on my way back to work that I realized what a doofus I was.

Really, if you were going to break into a house to lie in wait to do something nefarious or eat all the ice cream in the house, would you park in front of the house in the middle of the day?

Criminal mastermind I am not.

I Told The Butt Doctor I was In Love With You

After a great period of intense panic, yesterday I found the box containing all of my winter boots--not like snow boots, but you know, cute leather boots that you're not embarrassed to own or wear in public. A minor crisis had erupted at my house when I realized I couldn't find any of them after we moved. I knew they were all in the same box, and I took solace in the fact that wherever they were, they had each other, but that did not put them on my feet, and given the fact that my packing habits make as much sense as Bjork's fashion selections, I held out no hope of finding them before Easter. I decided to look anyway, and I started in the Hall of Unopened Boxes, or as it's better known, the basement. I plowed through hiking gear, boxes of books, and finally came upon my old footlocker from summer camp. In this most reasonable of places to pack winter footwear, I found my boots. I found all three pairs of boots, along with four scarves, a pair of pajama pants, two mortar-and-pestle sets (one for emergencies), and eight soup mugs. I can't WAIT to see where we packed the baby!

Today's outfit was planned around my favorite camel boots, as an expression of the sheer joy that overcame me when I finally found them. The knee-high-boots-with-above-the-knee-skirt look is big at my office, which I guess beats out the striped-clown-pants-with-beaded-tunic look that was big at my old office, so I threw on a tan wool skirt and called it art. I feel like it's really easy to cross the line from "winter chic" to "winter sex for sale" with the boots-and-skirt look, but I maintain that it's impossible to look slutty in anything wool, unless they start making assless chaps out of wool (never say never, people). So I threw on my coat and walked out the door, feeling confident that I at least looked this side of colorblind today. I had forgotten about Roger.

Roger is an attorney at my office who has a strange and perplexing obsession with my clothes, which is strange and perplexing because my morning routine consists of trying to determine which of the pieces of clothing I've meticulously stored on the bedroom floor look least crumpled. He's always telling me how nice I look, but then continuing the dialogue with detailed questions about where I get my clothes, how I know what looks good together, and other questions to which the best answer is "magic." By the way, Roger is married--to a woman who is a colorectal surgeon, which is always the first thing he tells people about her, and which I find endlessly hilarious. I think if you're not going to just throw out "butt doctor," then a simple "she's a surgeon" would suffice. I knew that the first Running of the Boots of the season was going to spark a reaction of epic proportions in Roger, but I really wanted to wear them today, and if I'm not going to let a "firm Internet use policy" stop me from blogging, then I am certainly not going to let a "middle-aged voluntarily bald attorney" stop me from the glee of boots.

Roger noticed my boots first thing, natch, while I was in the kitchen making my first (of seven) cup of tea for the day, and his reaction was everything you'd expect in watching a five-year-old boy discover a BB rifle under the Christmas tree. "WOW, your boots are AWESOME!!!" he threw at me. "Thanks," I said. "These are my favorites." "I can see why!" he grinned back at me. This was starting to get weirder. Steep, my little tea bags, steep, and free me from the prison of the kitchen! "You know what look I really love?" he asked. I resisted the urge to say, "bondage?" and let myself be led down this path. "What?" I asked.

"Stiletto boots. I just go crazy for those!"

What, exactly, is the right answer to that? "That's awesome; thanks for letting me know! I'll be sure to wear those tomorrow."

Or maybe, "On you, or on me?"

Or, "I sooooo wanted a pair of those this season, but Whores For Less was out of my size."

Regardless of what would have been the best approach, my overwhelming tendency to fire off whatever pops into my head went into overdrive, and before I could even spellcheck it, what flew out of my mouth was, "Those make you look like you're selling sex for crack."

The most unexpected climax of the day? Roger looked at me, all but winked, and said, "Right," with a little half-grin, the grin that precedes lip-licking. At that point, I learned that it is, in fact, possible to run at rather great speeds in knee-high boots, as I careened back to the safety of my office.

I feel like now is maybe the point where I should set some kind of boundaries in our relationship. I'm just not sure if that boundary should be, "no, we are never going on a date," or, "no, you can't ever borrow my boots."

The "Real" Answer from the "Lawyer"

Lawyer Boy has informed me that there is an actual answer to the below-referenced mindfuck--one that does not involve goose slave labor OR vacuum-sealed Ziplocs. So naturally, I was skeptical. Here's the "real" answer: You put the goose in the boat and take it across the river and dump it on the bank. You go back and get the grain, and take that across the river, BUT THEN, when you drop the grain on the bank, you put the goose back in the boat, and take him across to where the fox is waiting. You chuck the goose on the bank, and put the fox in the boat, take him across and dump him with the grain, and then go back and get the goose, and go about your business and get them to help you find a date, which is the only reason I can find for why you'd travel with a couple of animal companions.
A few observations: 1) My way still takes less time, and builds muscle mass on that delicious goose, and 2) If you could take an animal BACKWARDS with you in the boat, they should have said that! Pardon me for trying to be honest and solving the problem as it was presented to me.

Twilight My Candle, Baby

Old goal for Friday night: Paint bedroom doors

New goal for Friday night: Drink a bottle of Pinot and then go watch "Twilight."

Right, srsly, am I the only one in the free world (and the prison one, too, from what I'm hearing) who was completely ignorant re: this whole Dracula-hottie craze till today? I vaguely remember hearing something about the books when they turned into a social force greater than Madonna's chesticles, and how they were inspiring mothers to have frank, real discussions with their teenage daughters about sex, but since I A) don't have teenage girls, and B) am pretty sure it would be considered odd if I started frank, real discussions about sex with random teenage girls, I moved along and forgot about it. THEN SUDDENLY BAM!!! The movie descended on the mortal world and I could no longer ignore it. I wish I could, because I try to steer clear of the emo-world at all costs, but much like the heroin-chic of the 90s, emo-chic is apparently where it's at.

In defense of the heroin chics, at least they shower.

Anyway, all I've gathered is that the movie is a hot-blooded fangsty romance centered around lusty glances and stolen kisses between an emo-girl and an emo-vampire, sprinkled generously with chalk dust and hair wax. Teen romances are always hilarious, and the hilarity can only multiply with the addition of -wait for it- FANGS. Really, people. High School Musical? Unintentionally hilarious. High School Musical with Zac Efron with fangs, as the world's first openly metrosexual vampire? I wouldn't even need wine to get through that one. Plus think of all the doors it would open for the *closeted* mextrosexual vamps. But I digress.

So far the best, and as far as I'm concerned, the most complete plot description ever that I've been able to find is this, from cleolinda.livejournal.com: “Yeah, it’s like, Bella wants to be a vampire but she doesn’t want to be a vampire before she’s had sex as a human, and Edward doesn’t want her to be a vampire but he wants to get married, but Bella doesn’t want to get married unless she can be a vampire, but Edward won’t have sex with her until they get married, and then you put the fox and the grain in the boat and you leave the goose back on the riverbank.” I really don't care what the plot is beyond that, although I know that by saying that, I open myself up to the emo-fans coming after me to slap me or Kill Me For Real.

What I really love is the reference to THE most effing awful mindfuck of a "brainteaser" (read: mindfuck) ever. Did you catch it? The part about the goose and the grain and the corn and the lass that loved a sailor. As I unfortunately recall from grade school AND law school prep, the real brainfart goes something like this (with minor editorialization): You have a goose, a fox, and a bag of grain on one side of the river. You have a lame, lame rowboat that can only hold you and one of the above-mentioned redneck travel accessories, and you have to get them all to the other side of the river. If you leave the goose with the grain and take the fox first, the goose will eat the grain. If you leave the fox with the goose, the goose will get sassy and the fox will eat it. How do you get them all across without one going all Neanderthal on another?

First off, let's be real. You're never going to get a date whether you get your amigos across the river or not, because no self-respecting chick dates a dude who drives a rowboat. But, given that you own both a fox AND a goose, your dating pool might look different than normal. So we'll spot you one for that. That's about as far as I ever got in solving this problem until today. This problem almost ATE MY SOUL until I figured out the answer. The real answer.

GEESE CAN SWIM, Y'ALL. Here's how you do it. You throw the fox in the boat and tell him that if he hits the goose one more time, you're turnin' this boat around. You put the grain in one of those vacuum-sealing bags that are so cool, just because they're cool (the ones that I maybe once tried to seal my hand into, just to see what it felt like). Then! You tie a rope to the goose, and make him pull your lame rowboat across as punishment for sassing the fox. BAM! Done! Problem solved, with enough time to go look for a date to bring home for dinner, when you cook the goose.

There. That problem may have stopped me from studying for the LSATs, but it's not stopping me from drinking a bottle of Pinot through a clear twisty straw, and going to make fun of randy albino fanged teenagers.

Off And Running...Finally!

Word to the wise: If you create a blog, and then because, say, you move, get a cold, have someone in your family die (not on purpose), and then also coincidentally forget to post an inital entry for a few days, Blogger locks you down like a candy bar at fat camp. NO POSTS FOR YOU until they review your blog and realize you're not spam, but are in fact just a very nice person trying to write a heartfelt blog about the enchanting wonders of this sun-dappled world. Or you're me, and have more words to say than you can fit into any seven conversations, and so turn to the internet looking for an innocent ear to accost. So, after 14 days of waiting for them to free me, I now spring forth like a beautiful butterfly! BIENVENIDOS!!