The Falling Tree and Other Stories

I haven't had a chance to mention it until now, what with all the Christmasing and the JW entry and the trivia, but I did ultimately buy a real tree this year.  A friend and I were at Target picking out her tree, when this really nice, medium-sized, old fashioned, German-style, short-needled one introduced itself to me and demanded to be taken home.  The Target people weren't allowed to hold trees for customers, but one of them did anyway when I promised to be back in half an hour. I gave my friend and her tree the bum's rush home, dashed back, and got my tree put into my car by one of the Target guys just as the sun was going down.

John was a little annoyed about this, because a) I hadn't consulted him, b) the expense, and c) it meant getting a bunch more Christmas boxes down from the shelves in the laundry room.  I pointed out that I hadn't had a real tree in several years, and really really wanted one.  Besides, I was willing to clean up more of the junk in the front room to make room for it.

So we did that.  I cleaned up a bunch of Mom's old stuff, and John moved furniture and put the tree up.  I got to hang my favorite ornaments, all the Peanuts characters and Shrinky-Dink Beatles, Santas and scrimshaw reindeer, bunny in a bag, homemade ones from co-workers and relatives, the goldfinch and other birds and the cardboard Kliban cats. They were all in one box, so I skipped over everything else, the ugly Harry Potter ones and ordinary glass balls and so on.  I missed the wooden block and Quasimodo, but the other good ones all got up, along with two strings of bubble lights (one bubbler of which I broke by stepping on it) and a couple of  garlands.  It came out pretty well, not overdone or overloaded.  It even seemed worth staying up until 4 AM Christmas morning to get it done, along with the wrapping of John's presents.

That is, it all seemed worthwhile until the tree fell over on the 26th, causing much friction and consternation.  In the end we had to lean it against the curtains and leave the lights off. I only turned them on just long enough to take this picture.

****

No gifts of the Magi for us; we both got stuff we wanted and needed: a new office chair for me, a new DVD burner for John to replace the one that died after eight months of use. Under the terms of the Blocher Holiday Meal Agreement, we didn't mess with cooking, but went to Golden Corral.  It wasn't fancy, but it was better than Boston Market.

****

As I mentioned over on my LiveJournal blog, I recently signed up with a weird website called BlogShares. It's partly a way to link to and promote blogs, but mostly it's a game in which blogs are traded like shares of stock.  I haven't figured it out very well, but I bought shares in my blogs and the St. Michael's ones, and in Jeff's blog.  I'll probably "invest" in a couple of Shelly's blogs later.  The site doesn't seem to handle AOL-J well--Musings STILL hasn't been indexed--but it's still kinda neat, albeit bewildering.  Someone I don't know gave me shares of a library blog in some unknown language (Swedish? Dutch?) right after Christmas, ostensibly as a holiday gift. Today there was a leveraged buy-out by that same person, which left me $23,000 and change richer in BlogShares play money.  I assume that the blog's owner also made a killing from such machinations, but this accounting major has no idea how.  Still, it was rather exciting, and I blew a bunch of the B$ on more shares of my own blogs.

****

I talked to my dad at some length tonight.  It turns out that he's perfectly willing to answer all my questions about his WW II experiences, including his time as a POW.  He also mentioned that his generation wouldn't generally put their intimate details online as I do. (Dad, meet Chuck F!)  John, who also wouldn't post about himself if he had a blog, almost bought me a T-shirt for Christmas that says, "I'm blogging this."

Time to get on with the holiday trivia.  Only two questions tonight, I think.

Karen

Just posted on Mâvarin and Other Inspirations: "Did anybody order a college graduate?"