Catchy Name Needed

wallpaper (Galleria at Christmas)
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is the wallpaper on my computer right now - it's an image that really says Christmas to me. It's the Galleria in Houston, all decked out for the holidays. Usually I go up there shopping once between Thanksgiving and Christmas, even if I don't really need anything. It just puts me in the holiday mood. (However, if you're a person who hates crowds, I don't recommend it. You'll just think it's a nightmare.)

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I guess this is supposed to say Christmas in somebody's mind, too, but it's just too damn weird for me:



(from here) (I got to see it in person. It's just as scary as you think.)

Who buys things like this? I seriously don't know. And it plays the Longhorn fight song???

Remember that I did go to Texas. I do consider myself a fan. But lemme tell you about the fight song. It's called "Texas Fight" - very imaginatively. It's sung, or shouted (often by less-than-sober undergraduates) with lots of waving of the Hook 'em Horns sign, and it has words like this:

Texas fight, Texas fight,
Oh, it's Texas that we love best,
Hail, hail, the gang's all here,
And it's goodbye to all the rest.

Only nobody says that "Hail, hail, the gang's all here" part -- or at least they didn't when I was in school. At the time, everybody yelled, "Give 'em hell! Give 'em hell! Make 'em eat shit!" over that part, and I mean, that was what I was taught at freshman orientation, so it was more or less official. (No, I am absolutely not kidding.) By the time I was in graduate school, though, somebody had decided that wasn't very polite, and they were trying to get people to say, "Give 'em hell! Give 'em hell! We're number one!" but I don't know how successful they were at that. (I haven't been to a UT football game since the 80s. I watch the games on TV sometimes but who can tell what they're saying?)

In any case, that's some funky Christmas carol that Santa is singing.

I have become something of an expert on cough drops in the last few weeks. Basically, I don't think I'd've been able to survive without them. It is amazingly hard to find the same cough drops at different stores; they seem to all have a little different selection. After three weeks of sucking on the damn things, I have a clear favorite: Halls Sugar Free Assorted Mint Flavors. (Which I have only been able to find at Walgreen's and Krogers.) My back-ups are Ricola Lemon-Mint, which you can find most places, or CVS's house-brand mint - which have the advantage of being extremely cheap (99 cents for a very large bag), and taste pretty similar to Halls. I find that I really, really prefer the sugar-free ones, though. When you've got one of the sugary ones in your mouth all day for days on end, eventually you start feeling like your teeth are going to fall out.

I am not a person who normally shops at drugstores, for some reason. They built a new competing-CVS-and-Walgreens duo on opposite corners of a main intersection here a year or two ago, and I had been in the Walgreen's exactly once and the CVS not at all, up until last week. But it is much easier to run in there after cough drops than to run into a grocery store or Wal-Mart. (For that matter, there is no "running in" to either of those places. There is just no getting in & out quickly whatsoever.)

Hmm, you know, I complain about the big stores, but I am also not a person who shops at convenience stores. I can't even tell you the last time I went in one. Probably the only time I ever go inside one, actually, is when I'm getting gas and can't pay outside for one reason or another. I seriously avoid going inside, I think, although it's not something I give much thought to. I dislike buying gas at all, for one thing, but since I have to do it I very much prefer to pay at the pump and get out of there. I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of pay-at-the-pump, actually; when it first surfaced and was only at a few places, I would go miles out of my way for it.

I'm trying to think why I got that way about it. Years and years ago, when I was first driving, nothing had gotten automated yet and you didn't have much choice about going inside - unless you were willing to pay a lot more to have somebody else pump your gas and bring your credit card slip outside to sign, you had to. But they used to let you pump before you paid, and I think part of my dislike of the whole thing comes from that two-part process they came up with for security reasons, where you had to go take your money or your credit card inside before you pumped, and then go in again if you had change, or to sign your receipt. (And I guess if you don't do pay-at-the-pump, you still have to do that, don't you?)

And then the other part of it is that I am basically and intrinsically cheap, and can't stand paying convenience store prices for things. I guess that comes from not ever having much money most of my life.

I can't decide if I think this is a good idea or a really, really bad one: Buildings of Disaster. C'mon, don't you want your own little Three Mile Island?

I had the day off today. Rob has been off for the last three days (for no particular reason, his boss just likes his employees to take some vacation periodically) so I took today off so we could go and do something. I didn't know what, just something. When we worked at Gaido's - a long time ago, now! - we used to go up to Houston every week or two and just mess around. We would go to the big Bookstop on Alabama or go to a mall or go to a movie, and we almost always went out to eat. So we wanted to have a day like that. We ended up going to the Galleria and eating at Cheesecake Factory and going to the big Half-Price Books on Kirby. (The Bookstop we used to go to is now a Barnes & Noble, and it's still a great bookstore because it's so huge - not to mention being in an old movie theater - but we were in more of a Half-Price mood today.)

You know, Cheesecake Factory gets maligned a lot - and I've maligned it myself from time to time, I admit - but really their food is generally good. Especially given the options in the mall, even a mall as big as Galleria. I had the lunch-size pizza, which came with a salad, and it was just the right amount of food. (Well, the salad was really too big, because I never finished it, but I can live with that.) They also had the best iced tea I've had in ages, which is no small thing in my book. (Rob had what he always has, which is some kind of chicken - Chicken Romano, I think it is. I tasted it, it was pretty good.)

We didn't really spend a lot of money, except on the meal, and even that wasn't too bad. The only thing I bought at Galleria was another mascara, at Sephora. This time I bought a Stila waterproof one. (For some reason, Stila's mascara is very reasonably priced. It was $9.50, which isn't much more than L'Oreal's. That certainly doesn't seem to match their pricing strategy for the rest of their line. Not that I'm complaining about the mascara being too cheap, you understand.) Other than that, we mostly walked around the area where the expensive stores were and window-shopped. These shoes were in the window at Kate Spade - complete with dinosaur - and if I were the kind of person who wore things like that, not to mention the kind of person who bought $325 shoes, I would totally buy those. (They're cheaper than I thought, actually. I told Rob they were probably $500.) (And it's funny, because I am not really a person who's into shoes, normally, but I have found myself admiring shoes a lot lately. I don't know what's up with that, exactly. Maybe I'm shoe-deprived.)

Then we drove over to Rice Village and prowled around Half-Price Books for a long time. Rob bought a couple of books, I couldn't tell you what, and I bought Foucault's Pendulum and The English Patient, which I have been meaning to read ever since I finished Anil's Ghost a year or more ago. We spent a good while combing the History section but didn't end up buying anything. (I still have to buy my dad a birthday present, though, so I might be back there. But I'm not going to see him for a week or two so I decided to wait on that.) I also looked for Connie Willis books but didn't find anything, darnit.

(Which reminds me that I have been meaning to write about the Connie Willis kick I have been on. But it's getting late so that will have to wait.)

By that time it was getting to be rush hour and we decided we'd better head home. We took sort of a long way round to go around the traffic, and we ended up going through Alvin, my home town, which I hardly ever go to now that none of my family lives there. So I spent a lot of time going, "Oh look! they're building a high school in Manvel!" and so forth. (Manvel is where my dad grew up. It's about 10 miles outside of Alvin, and all these years everybody in Manvel has had to go into Alvin to go to high school. It's a measure of how much Manvel has grown that they've finally caved in on that point.) They also have apparently either torn my grandmother's house down, or built something in front of it so that you can't see it any more. I suspect the former, but I'm not sure because the landmarks have all changed, and I wasn't about to try to do a left turn on that busy highway to find out for sure.

I was going to write an entry but if I do it'll be all about Dofus, and really, does anybody truly want to read that? Even Col? (I might write it anyway, whether you guys are interested or not. Just not right now.)

Or else I could write about my money troubles - we are actually relatively close to being out of debt but it sure doesn't feel like it right now - but that would be depressing. At least it's depressing to me. It's nothing major and we'll get through it, it's just annoying.

(So instead, you get an entry about what I'm not going to write about! Oh, well.)

(Oh, and the Firefly icon is because I just pre-ordered a Serenity ornament. (Thanks to takaal for the link.) Squee! That place charges you 10% of the price at the time of the order on pre-orders, which is a whoppin' $1.69, which even in my current tightened financial straits I think I can manage.)

This got long so I'm going with a cut.

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I lost patience with the computer last night (after it refused to let me online for two hours) and reformatted the hard drive. I'm sure it needed it but I think I did it a little hastily. I did fill up three CDs with data first, but I'm pretty sure I missed a few things. Plus now I have to reinstall everything. And there are people in chat, and Java? takes for-freaking-ever to download.

I took my mom on the promised shopping trip today. She had $150 in gift cards she wanted to spend - as I said earlier in the week, I guess she's feeling better because all of a sudden she HAD to spend them - and I had practically forgotten that I had one too. That's what my dad gave me for Christmas. My mom bought a watch and a marcasite ring and... some more stuff, I forget. I bought a silver bracelet and a charm and a necklace with pink beads and TWO shirts - for $60 that was pretty good, don't you think? The bracelet was marked down to $9.99 but it rang up for three dollars and something. I never understand how Foley's prices things, but I'm not complaining.

It's Mardi Gras and I didn't want to try to get back on the island too early, so I made two quilt blocks while I was waiting. I have 5 Ohio Stars now (out of 12, so that is pretty good progress). Although I suppose I could have gone home earlier since the traffic wasn't bad at all, actually. That's not good news for the City of Galveston's budget, but it was nice not to have it take two hours to get home like it did last year.

I got an e-mail from my mother yesterday demanding to be taken shopping on Saturday, so I think that means she's feeling better, don't you?