Early-bird Christmas sales

I have already spent too much money on Christmas stuff, and it's not even Thanksgiving yet. We bought the two little potted trees (fake) for the balcony, although since running a cord out there might be a pain, I am thinking that I might just put them inside, where you can see them through the french doors. That would work just about as well. Then, since there isn't electricity out there, I bought two sets of solar-powered lights - I am unsure about those but I figured it was worth a try - and a wreath with battery-powered lights to go on the french doors that go out to the balcony. We'll see how that looks before I buy anything else to go out there - I've spent over $100 on that already. Then we're still contemplating a new tree for the living room, too - we don't want anything too big or too small, though, we're being picky about it. There's not all that much room in the living room. Oh, also I bought a wreath made out of ribbons on Etsy, and that one is going on the front door, which is fairly well-protected from the elements. (She has raised her prices on those wreaths since I bought mine, so I can feel like I got a bargain!) (And don't worry, nothing that I bought will be put out before Thanksgiving. Personally, I believe that oughta be a law!)

I have been unpacking the forgotten boxes in the back bedroom. I was looking for a copy of my mother's Letters Testamentary, which I know I have somewhere. I may need to give up and get a copy from the lawyer. (Surely they know where theirs is!)


I don't think I remembered to say that my Amazon order last week came with a LOLcats book, for some reason. I'm not sure why, but I read it anyway. However, here's the thing that really made me laugh today:

Just as Al Gore must live with the shame of elevating Joe Lieberman to the national stage, no act of contrition John McCain can perform will be penance enough for foisting Sarah Palin on us, subjecting us to her supreme sense of entitlement.

Oh, and nothing convinces me that we are in a depression more than that K-Mart is pushing layaways. Layaways! I didn't know anybody did that any more! (I used to do it back when we were terribly broke, all the time. I always had a running set of layaways at Wal-Mart that I went and paid on every payday.)

One more note: I paid $1.76 for gas the other day.

The reason my grades weren't great in grad school

I found this poster rolled up and damp in wreckage of our apartment, and it wasn't in too bad a shape so I let it dry out and scanned it as best I could. (It's bigger than my scanner, so this isn't quite the whole thing.) This is the place I lived in grad school. I know some of you know what a "cooperative" means in this context, but in case you don't: it really is pretty much self-governed, mostly by committee, in the case of a big place like this one. There are elected committee chairs and director and treasurer and so forth. Each resident has at least one assigned job, like sweeping the hall or helping cook dinner or taking minutes at board meetings. I think everybody was supposed to do four hours of work a week. I loved living there and got really into all the governance stuff - I was on the board of directors and later was treasurer, and finally ran for director (somewhat against my better judgment) and ended up losing by one vote, which was probably for the best.

The Ark is still around, but nowadays it's called Pearl Street Co-op. (Scroll down and there's a lot of pictures. It looks like the common areas have been remodeled, but the rooms look about the same.) I heard, a couple of years after I had left, that things got really chaotic there and that it finally got so bad that they shut the place down for a semester. So it's not really surprising that when they re-opened it, they gave it a new name. I think "The Ark" went perfectly with its old hippy-dippy reputation - which believe me was well-deserved.

Oh, and before this place was the Ark, it was a girls' dormitory which catered to sorority-girl types. Farrah Fawcett is supposed to have lived there in the late 60s.


(I don't know if you guys have been enjoying these nostalgia-themed entries, but I've been enjoying writing them. As long as I keep scanning pictures and so forth, especially, you will probably keep seeing them!)