mellicious: Narnia witch in a carriage pulled by polar bears, captioned "OMGWTFPOLARBEAR!" (polar bear & witch - m15m)
(From Facebook, but I just thought it was funny. And, though it may not sound like it, basically completely correct.)

 Public service announcement for all you new Residents!
 
If you are new to South Texas, we are about to experience “Texas Winter”. This is 6 or 7 days of cold, maybe some ice and snow. Frank Billingsley (long-time local weather guy) will threaten snow. It may snow, it may not and if Frank says 2 inches it could be 10 or it could be 1/2”. It doesn’t matter how much snow it is, we’ll all freak out because we don’t see snow often.The threat of snow (or ice) from Frank is your prompt to head to the grocery store and buy milk, eggs and bread. It doesn’t matter if you need these items. It’s just what we do. Everyone in town will be there.
 
You’ll also need to make a mad dash for faucet covers and finding them and getting out of the store will be like an episode of the hunger games. You’re in the redneck district.
 
Don’t look for a sled. You won’t find one. In the rare chance we get enough ice or snow to sled grab some cardboard or a trash can lid and go find the nearest hill. Yes, we know it’s not a hill. You live in the flatland, just go with it. You’ll be alarmed by the fact that you’re “sledding” towards a bar ditch, fence or maybe into a farm to market road.
Just go with it.
You’ll be fine.
 
We don’t have equipment to handle the winter and weather. The roads will be a mess and even though the state has been telling you for a week they’re ready, they’re not and it won’t work. Just stay home if you can and if you can’t just come to terms with the fact that nobody here knows how to drive in snow and ice.
 
Whatever you do, DO NOT talk about snow tires.
 
If you happen to slide off the road or get stuck, turn your flashers on, take a deep breath and wait. Two guys in a four wheel drive truck will be along in no time to offer assistance. Don’t try to help them, they live for this stuff, and will do what they can to get you back on the road. If either one of them screams “hey y’all watch this” just get back and get your phone out and start recording, you’ll probably have a viral video.
Also of note, when they offer you beer and deer sticks, don’t be rude, take them and smile.
No matter what you do, don’t talk about how they did it back home in any of these scenarios.
Nobody cares.
You live in Texas now.
 
When we act like we’re going to die and start to complain about the 7 days of winter just shush, we’re serious and we don’t care how much you love it.
We don’t.
 
You’ll be back in shorts and flip flops in a week to ten days and it’ll be nice until right around Easter.
Texas “second winter” will be 2 or 3 days and will hit right around Easter, usually the week before or the week after. This will hit right around the time you plant flowers and a garden.
We know you’re not from around here when we see you’ve planted flowers before Easter and before the “second winter” has hit.
This is why all the people at the nursery don’t sound like us when you’re shopping for plants.
We know better.
During second winter it’ll go from 70 to 25 and you’ll experience all four seasons in one day.
This too shall pass, get used to it and when second winter is over you can enjoy the 3-4 weeks of “spring” before summer gets here and it’ll be melt your face off hot until sometime around Halloween.

.
.
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.
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Also note that the last time I went "sledding" was in Austin (a bit further north) and so there were hills and we used metal cafeteria trays and they worked great.

mellicious: Happy New Year! (new year gif)
Somebody was talking about New Year traditions, and the only one my family really had was black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, and I never remember in time. We went out to an early dinner at Cheddar's and they might have had them if I had thought to ask, but I didn't.

And I completely forgot about football until we got home. It's almost 8:00 (Central time) and Michigan just beat Alabama, we got to see the end of that, and so either Texas or Washington - whose game is just starting - will play them (in Houston!) next Monday. I had one smallish Longhorn sticker (I'm sure most people know vaguely what I mean, but like this) and I did remember to go put that on the new car. That's sort of a superstition, really, too, right? I feel like I would be being a bad Longhorn if I forgot that!

I almost decided to do a meme, but nah, I'll stop here. See y'all next year, Holidailies!


mellicious: "I think the subtext here is rapidly becoming text." (subtext Buffy quote)
I figured out that I missed a movie on my list (the updated version of which is below, again), & that was Across the Spider-Verse. I thought of it when I was making the list, and then I went, "I dunno, maybe it came out in '22" and then forgot to check that. (And only remembered to fix it because somebody mentioned it in the comments!!)

Then there's TV. The fact is that I don't watch a whole lot of TV other than news and baseball (and lately football again), but we're watching Only Murders in the Building because we have Hulu again and everybody always says it's good - so far we agree. (We're two episodes in. Nobody tell me spoilers.) The other TV I watch most aside from the stuff above is Disney Channel, mostly meaning nearly anything Star Wars or Marvel. And I'm accustomed to keeping a really good list for movies but I don't keep up nearly as well with TV. What came out in 2023, other than Ahsoka and Loki s.2? (both of which I liked a lot). Oh, I did watch Young Jedi Adventures! which was cute. If there's anything else I'm blanking out. (The 3 Dr Who specials, almost forgot that! even though we watched the last one just a couple of hours ago.)

(It occurred to me that when I said I really liked The Marvels movie, in the last entry, that it probably made a difference that I watched Ms Marvel and all of Wandavision and that made understanding The Marvels much easier! Not everybody wants to watch all of every one of those shows, and maybe the people who make the movies should take that into consideration.)

Then football - I've talked about Longhorn football already. The other football I've gradually started watching again this season is the Houston Texans, which I have not paid attention to for quite a few years, but since they have that young quarterback and are actually managing to win games I'm reluctantly back. (I'm very torn about football, generally, but I've been watching it since I was a teenager, which is actually 50 years ago now - as I discussed one day previously -  and it's clearly not going to go away depending on whether I watch or not, so when "my" teams are playing decently I generally give in and watch.)




Movies we saw in a theater in 2023:
The Marvels
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Creator
A Haunting in Venice
Blue Beetle
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Little Mermaid
The Flash
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (twice)
Air
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Ant-Man & the Wasp
M3GAN


and Rob also saw:
Dream Scenario
Thanksgiving
Five Nights at Freddy's
Exorcist: Belliever
Saw X
It Lives Inside
The Nun 2
They Live (re-release)
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (twice)
Talk To Me
Insidious:The Red Door
The Blackening
Beau Is Afraid
Evil Dead Rise
The Pope's Exorcist
Scream VI
Creed 3
Knock at the Cabin (twice)
Infinity Pool
The Devil Conspiracy


mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
See part 1. I'm skipping around a bit.

(Note, again, that I made the font color gray because my Dreamwidth journal has a dark background and it was the only way I could get it to cooperate. If you have trouble reading, try highlighting the text.)

12. Would you ever go out in public wearing pajamas?

If I wore them, maybe, but I don’t.

13. Have you ever had a lemonade stand?.

Not on my own account - I’m really lacking in entrepreneurial spirit, generally. I think my sister may have had one and I helped out a bit.

14. Do you think you look older or younger than your real age?

Since I started going gray, I think I look my age. I used to get people telling me I looked much younger than my age, but this is another one of those things where I don’t think most people are really good judges, either. This may be because people in sort of the 30-50 year old range (i.e., not real young but not yet visibly aging much) are harder to sort out.

15. Where have you lived throughout your life?

I’ve only ever lived in Texas, mostly in the south & southeast Houston suburbs (and in Galveston, which is the same general area, just a little further out). When I was small we lived in West Texas for a couple of years. I was big enough to remember that - I remember prairie dogs, and the cotton field that was behind our house, among other things. And then a decade or so later, I went to UT, and hung around for a few years afterward - so I was in Austin from the late 70s to the mid-80s.Those are the only two times in my life when I've lived away from this general area I'm in now.

16. Do you want any piercings?

I have pierced ears and that’s plenty.

17. What’s your mouse pad look like?

It’s this one, which I bought a few months ago. Disclaimer: the designer, “Ellie Monroe,” is actually my sister (that's not her real name, of course). But I really like this mouse-pad - I like the design, plus it’s really well-made - and I paid for it myself. I didn’t even tell her I bought it until a good while later. (Really, I feel like mouse-pads should be unnecessary, but the surface of my desk doesn’t seem to lend itself to doing without!)

22. Do you still use a radio or just use your phone/computer for music?

My car radio went out in, like, 2014, and I never bothered to get it fixed. I just use the phone. I listen to podcasts more than I actually listen to music, these days.

23. What kind of socks do you prefer to wear?

None. I hate wearing socks. Luckily I live where it’s not often really necessary.

24. Do you have any family heirlooms?

I have quite a bit of my mother’s stuff, and her parents' and some of my grandmother’s on the other side too. I don’t know that there’s anything really tremendously valuable but I have a lot of their stuff, for sure. I’m not sure that the things that they would have said are heirlooms are the ones I value most.  I am very partial to my (maternal) grandma’s very brightly-colored flowered china that my uncle brought back from Vietnam for her. Our dining room furniture came from the other grandma. And then I have a large number of my mother’s quilts, and I watched her make most of them, so I know exactly how much work went into them. And boy, family pictures out the wazoo. I have to force myself to part with that stuff gradually.


mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (fall leaves orange)
I'm not doing NaBloPoMo this year, and I'm not even sure if Holidailies is going to happen this year at all, but I find I can't start thinking about the holidays without wanting to write stuff down in a journal-ish format. That habit seems to have gotten ingrained with me. So I'm going to try to start writing, and we'll see how it goes. I'm not going to try to write any kind of a coherent catch-up post or this will never happen at all - I know how I am about that. Maybe later, but not to start with. The best you're going to get for now is random-ish stuff.
----------------------------
We had dinner with Art last weekend, which I guess is why I was thinking about him earlier. Some of you may remember hearing about Art back when - he was my mother's boyfriend, and he just turned 89 years old last week. He lives in the same apartment complex we do nowadays, but we really don't see him often, which is why we periodically call and ask him out to dinner. (Usually we go to one Italian place that we all like - Angelo's. We tried to vary this up and took him to our favorite Chinese place last summer, but this time we were back to Angelo's.) Art is getting very deaf. I'm not sure if he has a hearing aid - actually I'm pretty sure he does, but he doesn't wear it. Every time we see him it seems to be a little worse. On the other hand, if you're 89 and that's the worst problem you have, I guess you're doing pretty well. He has assorted other aches and pains, too, that's probably not the worst problem he has, really, but on the whole he's holding up remarkably well.
One reason we don't see too much of him, apparently, is because he spends all his time at the Senior Citizens Center a couple of blocks away. (We are not far from being old enough to hang out there if we wanted to - I think the lower limit is 55 - but we are not quite there yet. Darn.) He works out, and then he stays for lunch, he told us. He has lunch there every weekday, he said. It costs $1 for lunch. We spent some time wondering who subsizes these lunches, because somebody must. I wonder if it's a federal program - although I'm sure the city picks part of it up too. Friendswood is a very affluent place, but apparently similar programs exist in less affluent places, too. (And I seriously doubt that Rick Perry's Texas is picking up the bill.)
----------------------------
Like (apparently) half the women in the world, I continue to be obsessed with my nails. I've been informed by such luminaries as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that it's not just me (not to mention just by half the women I know, online and off). I have been trying to restrict the worst of my nail-related nattering to Google Plus, where I can keep it mostly to the circle of people I know are also similarly obsessed, plus a few crazy people who have at least expressed some degree of willingness to listen. But it will inevitably spill over here if I write here for any length of time, so be prepared! For example, at the moment I am involved in taking off what I had on - which was glittery and is rather involved just to get off - and deciding what to replace it with. Which may end up being something similar - it was coppery glitter over brown, and seems very seasonally appropriate to me. (What I do on G+ is usually a more involved explanation than that, delving into brand names and how many coats and such, but I will certainly refrain from going into that much detail here.)

I am so happy to have a job where the color of my nails is a non-issue - nobody cares if they're glittery or black or bright orange (all of which they have been at one time or another lately, what with Halloween and everything). I'm also happy to have a job where I don't have to hang around for 8 hours every day whether or not there's anything to do. Seriously, you have no idea how happy that makes me. I am finding that I very much do not want to go back to the world of the 40-hour week. Of course, the other side of that coin is that I need to go do some work so I'll get paid enough to pay for all the nail polish and other goodies I keep buying. So I think I'll post this and talk more later.

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (brain leaking)
I have no results for the "How Texas are you?" quiz, because I am apparently not Texas enough to check a box that says "Forget driving a Porsche, you'd rather have a brand new truck." Aargh. I got annoyed by the stereotyping and didn't answer at all. (Not annoyed enough to refuse to link to it, though, you notice.) However, for some reason, the one about how the only spices you know are salt, pepper, ketchup, bbq sauce, and Ranch dressing amused me instead of annoying me, even though I've heard variations on it before. It's still very Texas. Nevermind that I loathe ranch dressing and am not really all that big on BBQ sauce, the stuff is inescapable around here. So are pickups, actually - although everybody that doesn't actually own a ranch or something is suddenly scrambling to get rid of theirs. Anyway, the silly quiz as a whole was mildly amusing, I just didn't think you could really get anything resembling meaningful results out of the thing. (Although I suppose expecting meaningful results out of a Blogthing is probably ridiculous, in any case!) (And besides, if you think about it too hard, the part about ranch dressing being a spice will break your brain.)

Well, anyway. What else? I have been shopping on Etsy again - this time I bought these lampwork earrings, which I have been eyeing for a couple of days. In semi-related news, you may have noticed that I have mostly stopped babbling about jewelry lately - I think there's a definite connection between the lack of bead-talk and the increase in WoW talk. If I spend all my time on the latter, there's no time to make jewelry. However, there are still beads and findings all over my dining room table and I have no doubt that I will pick it up again eventually. As a matter of fact, just yesterday I was thinking about the carmine glass beads I bought a while back and wishing I had a bracelet made of them to wear - unfortunately I didn't think about it early enough to be able to actually do anything about that. Mostly I have been staying away from the beads and the shopping online, which is probably a good thing, on the whole.

I had the afternoon off yesterday because I was supposed to do financial-type things because this afternoon I have my long-delayed appointment with Mom's accountant and I was supposed to be preparing. And I actually did do some financial-type things, and an awful lot of sorting through papers and things like that, but unfortunately I am still not prepared. I just decided that I am going to have to do that annoying thing that people do (annoying if you're an accountant, anyway) where you take all the papers and dump them on the accountant's desk and let him sort it out. Or let him help me sort it out, at least, or something like that. Because otherwise it's clearly never going to get done. I seem to only be able to deal with one piece of the estate business at a time - lately it's been the house, and everything else has been on hold. The good news, of course, is that with the house selling (knock on wood - I have this fear that something will still go horribly wrong with it), there is light at the end of the tunnel there, and we can look at getting everything all closed out and done before too too long.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (HP - Phoenix)
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Apparently Merck has been spreading its money around really wisely, because our ultraconservative governor just signed an order requiring girls to have the HPV vaccine before they can start 6th grade. Wonder how much of a shitstorm this is going to stir up.


There has been no further bad Mom news today, at least so far. Oh, I don't guess I told you guys yesterday's bad news, which was that she wasn't eating. The hospice nurse says unless she starts again, that means we have about 10 days. I probably should have gone up there this afternoon, because I have been having to restrain myself from calling to find out how she's doing. (Which would probably be fairly useless, because Art wouldn't be home and never keeps his cell phone on.) I am going tomorrow, anyway.

So (deep breath) we are now dipping our toes into the wonderful world of funeral planning. We have gotten as far as deciding on the basics: cremation, memorial service at her church, etc. She has a plot next to my grandparents, if we decide to bury her ashes, but it seems like something of a waste to me. We are going to see what options the cemetery will give us. (Apparently my grandfather gave very generously to the cemetery association, so hopefully they'll be appropriately grateful to his family.) I was thinking that planting a rosebush or something by my grandparents' grave and putting her ashes under it would be rather nice. Also, the hospice nurse gave us a phone number for a guy who negotiates with the funeral home for you, and I haven't called him yet, but I think I'm going to on Monday, because I sure don't want to be dealing with those people by myself. I told my boss that I was going to try to work half-time next week, depending on how things develop. I don't think I can just sit at Mom's bedside all day, anyway.

I think I (unwittingly) was very mean to my sister earlier - I had called and left a message, because I wanted to make sure she wasn't going to pitch a fit about the cremation thing, and when she called back I said what was on my mind about the funeral planning, and I forgot that she didn't know anything about the 10-day business or that we had started talking about funeral arrangements at all. She took it fairly well, but I think she's kind of quietly going crazy up there by herself. (And she was fine with the cremation. She said the same thing I always say, which is that embalming is gross. It's funny, now that she's been away from her superconservative ex-husband for a while, she's changed her tune about all kinds of things. I was afraid she would have some sort of objection of religious grounds or something.)

Jetsam

Feb. 25th, 2006 11:16 pm
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (m15m - deus-ex-machina)
Somebody in my apartment complex has a bumper sticker that says "An Aggie's Girl" - which just makes me want to barf. (The same person also has a license plate with her first name on it; I think between those two things, I know all I need to know about her.) You used to see those "Aggie Mom" and "Aggie Dad" stickers a lot, but they're not as popular as they used to be. Of course, I suppose they're a concept that's at least a couple of decades old, because they started turning up when I was in college. (At one point after my sister started at A&M, my dad had "An Aggie's Dad" on his pickup and my mom had "I'm a Longhorn Mom" on her car. I know that's fairly barf-worthy, too, but we thought it was funny at the time, mostly because of the UT/A&M rivalry aspects of the thing.)

That reminds me that I added my high school to my user info page earlier this week, and for some reason the dates on that really make me blanch. (Pause while everybody runs to look.) I've had the college dates up there for a couple of months and it never bothered me a bit, but somehow the high school ones - jesus, the mid-seventies ?? That was an eternity ago.


Sign in the restaurant where we had dinner: "We believe you only get what you pay for, but at Kelley's you get more than you pay for." Does that make any sense at all?


We had planned to stay on the island - and on this end of the island, to boot - all day today, but there weren't any movies showing that we wanted to see, and it rained all afternoon so we decided it was probably safe to go to the mainland. Good Night and Good Luck was the movie we actually wanted to see, and it's apparently not showing anywhere on this side of Houston any more. We toyed with the idea of going to see Match Point instead but couldn't really work up any enthusiasm for it, either one of us. So we just went to Kelley's to eat - I had a truly enormous breakfast, even though it was the middle of the afternoon - and went to the big HEB in Dickinson to buy groceries. I like to go there once in a while because they carry a lot of things the other stores don't, especially Wal-Mart. (Yes, we buy most of our groceries at Wal-Mart. Yes, I know it's of the devil and all that, but it's cheaper. Not to mention being right across the street. If HEB would get off their collective asses and put a decent store in here, I would switch like a shot.)

Anyway, we were right about it being safe to go off the island. The issue was that the Momus parade was supposed to be tonight, and the traffic is normally horrendous. But it was nothing. It stopped raining, finally, so I'm assuming the parade went off as scheduled, but I don't think there was much of anybody there. Not many people are going to drive down from Houston to see a Mardi Gras parade when it's cold and raining.

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mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Default)
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