O Tannenbaum of Misfit Toys

It's Christmastime, y'all!

I love Christmas traditions. Today, I decorated our tree while listening to the same vinyl that my mom and I used to listen to while decorating the tree when I was 5 years old. (Merry Christmas Johnny Mathis, if you're wondering.) It trips me out that our kids will hear and know those same songs someday. And now that I'm a grown up, I've begun a few traditions of my own, one of which, I'd like to share/confess with you today.

As my college and Nashvillian roommates can attest, I collect hideous Christmas ornaments.

It started in college with a tacky Christmas ornament exchange that spawned in me a rabid enthusiasm for sad, tired, busted looking ornaments. Now, every year after Christmas, I go hunting for new additions to my menagerie of misfit ornaments.

Allow me to introduce you to a few of my favorites:

Brego, the stick horse (He needed a kingly name. He's my favorite. But don't tell the others.)

Levar, the bedazzled butterfly.

Jojo the Circus Bear (you can't tell here, but his right leg is just a bit too short to reach that unicycle pedal.)

Scarebear (crudely crafted and permanently affixed to a single snowshoe)

Sonic, the pinecone hedgehog.

Santa Snake- one of my originals from the tacky ornament exchange listed above.  He may have once been only a shrunken head sporting a fancy holiday hat. He is now a parsel-mouthed transfiguration gone frightfully wrong.

Sexy Strawberry didn't make the tree this year. The manface is just too awkward.

Count Flatley- his feet flail about as if independent from his body! (Also, his middle opens up and you can put some kind of ghastly treasure inside...)

Roadkill- I don't know how this guy made it into the store y'all. It's supposed to be a cat chasing a mouse. I  bought it from Marshalls about 3 years ago. 

Leggy Pup- Also did not make this tree this year. You guys want to name this one? Shoot me some options.

Also-- a lost ornament that deserves a mention: 

Gilded snowman was a thin 2-D metal snowman, painted on one side to look like a traditional snowman. The paint job was evidently horrible because the artist then doused the paint with glue and dipped the snowman's facade into a vat of tiny gold beads, then crudely wrapped the snowman three times with gold wire. I don't know what happened to it, but I've never seen its equal... and I still hold out hope that it will turn up someday.

Trimming the tree with my misfit ornaments has become an annual delight, with more creatures being added to the "family" every year. I can't wait to show them to my kids. We may eventually have a separate, smaller tree exclusively for the Misfits. 

I've become more fond of the weird, shoddily crafted ornaments (Scarebear, Sonic, etc.) than the just plain weird ones (Pup and Strawberry). But all are welcome. So in your decorating, if you come across anything super weird that you're embarrassed to put on your tree, or encounter some hideous beast in your post-christmas shopping trips and you want to add to the collection, I'd be glad to give them a good home. :)

What's your favorite holiday tradition?

Weekend Love

So for the past two weeks, our church has been meeting in our new space in Tower Grove East. It's been wonderful! We've also been hugely blessed by the many people who have come from far and near and offered their time and talents to make this building a more comfortable meeting place and a thriving hub for ministry. We are so grateful for the help! But there is still plenty of work to be done...

Which is why it's really awesome that 50 students from Louisiana Tech have volunteered to come and help us whip the place into shape over the weekend!

Except we were under the impression they wouldn't be here until NEXT weekend... until they called and said they were in town yesterday afternoon. Oh well. :)

So there are 50+ people up at the building right now, working away. The AG pastors are tag-teaming a wedding for a mutual friend tonight at 5:30. And our house looks like six people live in it instead of two people and dog. So I'm at home, cleaning up and making the most of a morning when I feel decidedly non-acidic.

By the way, I know I just kinda jumped back into this after a 3 month hiatus, but I figured that was the best way back. I've been still been writing, but I can't access this site from work and after work I've been exhausted and kind of busy, growing a spicy little person.

Yup, little Baby G and I have been together for 13 weeks today. Second trimester, y'all!!! :)

I'm doing a belly series, probably beginning this week, but i'm not sure when/if/how I'll post it. Stay tuned. :)

Thoracic Drama

Ugh. Can you die from heartburn?! I feel like I might. Well, die of thoracic discomfort.

I don’t think that’s the right word, but it felt right.

And I’m being dramatic, but it is really bad today. I think it might still be that blasted (but delicious) jambalaya from last night.

Word to the wise? If you can avoid it, do not EVER eat jambalaya and then cough and burp at the same time.

The sensation feels probably about like being stabbed in the sternum with a basilisk fang. It took me out for a good couple of minutes.

(And I started book 3 of Harry Potter today. :)

Anyway, babysitting was good last night. They’re great kids, but man having 2 mobile ones under 4 is no small task. (They’re 3 and 9 months) I had the kids for an hour and a half by myself while Todd was at worship band practice, and it was ROUGH trying to keep everyone from tackling or being tackled, and getting everyone fed the things they wanted at the right temperature before somebody started hollerin or wanting something else. Forget about ME trying to eat. Yeah, that didn’t happen until 7:30 after they’d collectively chowed through some cheerios, some saltines, some pasta, some grapes, three crescent rolls, some pureed orange baby food, a sippy cup of Gatorade, 8oz of formula and 4 episodes of Angelina Ballerina.

I hope I’m cut out for this parenting thing. ;)

I’m exhausted today. I need a nap and a cure for this acid in my chest. I went to the store during lunch to buy a thanksgiving card and ended up buying a kid’s cup of chocolate chip gelato. Which was delicious and soothing at first, but the moment it ended, the beast of thoracic sorrow returned. Blech.

Anyway… I’ll get to chill out tomorrow. Wedding rehearsal tonight… but free dinner at Rosalita's Cantina! Wedding tomorrow, but not till the evening, and it’s only 20 minutes from the house. And Sunday we’ll have the whole afternoon after church.

So very happy it's the weekend...

Adventures In Babysitting

Feeling pretty good today… still fighting this disgusting taste in my mouth whenever I’m not eating food. It’s so weird. I’ve been craving eckerich sausage and feel like I could eat about four hot dogs with ketchup and mustard and sprinkle cheese on them for lunch. But Qdoba leftovers will have to do. :)

Until tonight that is… :) We’re babysitting the cutest kids ever at six. I told Leigh that we’d be there as close to 6 as possible, but that I’d be coming from work and then we’d have to grab dinner, etc, so that we’d do our best. She was like “I can cook for you, any requests?” So I was like, “Sure! That’d be great! Whatever’s easy, we’re not picky… or maybe jambalaya. :)” (Because she’s from Louisiana and hers is SO DELICIOUS.)

So she was like, “I’ll see what I can do.”

And then last night, her husband texted Todd a picture of a big ol pot of jambalaya and said “Get ready!”

I’m pretty excited about a free home cooked meal and awesome kids who happen to go to bed around 8. :)

The Absquatulation

This morning, I was trying to compare two spreadsheets for duplicate names. It got complicated. I had to ask my co-worker Eric if there was any easier way to comb 600+ names looking for 100 specific ones. After some googling, he happened upon this extremely complicated formula, which he explained to me (and it worked perfectly).

One of the terms within the formula was the word CONCATENATE. I had never heard it before. It’s apparently a programming term that means basically “to link two fields together”. I was fascinated by this strange and mysterious new word. I immediately googled it when I got back to my desk.

On the dictionary.com website, there was an ad that said “CONCATENATE is one of our favorite verbs. So is (insert crazy sounding verb). What does that mean?” And then it gave you two multiple choice answers. I chose one, got it wrong, and it gave me another word. One I immediately fell in love with.

Absquatulate.

Is there anything more fun to say?!

Maybe Fran-CI-sco. But it’s worth arguing.

Ab-squat-u-late: verb (used without object), -lated-ed, -lat-ing. Slang. To flee; abscond: The old prospector absquatulated with our picks and shovel.

How cool. :)

I immediately told Eric about this word via instant messenger.

Genteman, Juliette (DG-STL)

Eric, i looked up concatenate on dictionary.com because i like how it sounds. and then it had this other word on the page...

absquatulate

it means to flee or to take off with something

don't you want to work that into your vocab? you're welcome!

I liked this word so much, that I decided to pay it the ultimate tribute and post it as my facebook status.

I had just posted my status update containing the definition of my new vocabulary word, when I noticed another status update from my dear friend Annie Parsons, posted just moments earlier:

“Well, for the third time in my life, my car has been stolen. I hope the Hooker Street thief likes dog hair.”

First of all, this is terrible news! I should post a sympathetic comment immediately!

So I did.

“Are you serious. OMG, Annie, that’s horrible! I can’t believe someone absquatulated with your car!!! (I also can’t believe that I JUST learned that word and got to use it in context.)”

I love when life is like a tv show. :) And that Annie was exactly the type of person who could appreciate the beauty of a new word in the midst a wretched situation.

Facebook is weird.

I mean, really. Have you thought about it lately?

I had this realization at work today…

I am friends on facebook with a guy who I met in Florence, Italy in 2004. He and his roommate took our visiting group of friends out to see the city and eat gelato and piadini in the pouring rain. Three years later, he ended up moving to Nashville with his girlfriend and the 3 of us hung out ONE TIME downtown. Now I live in St. Louis, and he lives in Nashville with his then-girlfriend/now-wife and they have a little baby daughter. Yesterday, I found out from his status update that Netflix was raising their monthly fees.

Now, this guy is a perfectly nice person… but I SHOULD NOT KNOW THIS MUCH ABOUT HIS LIFE. We’ve seen each other probably 4 days of the 27ish years we’ve both been alive. Yet I know his birthday, his child’s middle name and how much he pays to watch movies every month. Isn’t that WEIRD?!

How about this! I am friends on facebook with a girl who was my bestie for the 1 school year I attended Hillside Academy of Excellence. It was first grade—we were 6 years old. We could barely write our names. The only cell phones that existed were on Saved By the Bell—and I don’t even think those existed yet. There were only CAR PHONES. I switched schools the following year. But I can tell you this girls husband’s name and what color her hair was at her wedding and what color pillows are in her living room. Creepy, right?

Or is that totally normal now? And totally okay, as long as the info is volunteered?

There is no such thing as a mystery man or woman anymore, unless they are completely out of the social media loop.

I’m going to purge my friends list. Because there is no reason why my 3^rd grade crush needs to know what I made for dinner last night.

Como te llama?

I LOVE NAMES.

I love them. I always have. When I was growing up, I used to read AVON magazines-- absorbing the title of every shade of lipstick, eyeshadow and nail polish color. I memorized all the cool sounding names of Crayons (cerulean! burnt sienna! cornflower! cadet blue! periwinkle! dandelion! denim!) When I started writing stories, I AGONIZED over the names of my characters, scouring baby name books (because there were no websites, way back when) for meaningful, unique monikers.

When I started to have favorite movies with ensemble casts, I would write out all the character names in my school notebooks and pick out the ones I liked best. I ALWAYS had a favorite boy name and girl name, as well as running lists of names that I loved and might want to use for something. I always looked forward to getting new stuffed animals and or pets, because I got to choose names for them all by myself. (Back in 1995 when my family finally got a computer, I remember typing a roster of all my stuffed animals, complete with names and physical descriptions of each. Just in case, you know?)

I was also always interested to know people's middle names. I remember being SO disappointed the few times I discovered that one of my friends had NO middle name. I was appalled. I was like "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR PARENTS?! WHY WOULD YOU BYPASS SUCH AN AMAZING OPPORTUNITY?!"

Naming something or someone is a huge privilege to me.

A few names from my past that I was rather proud of included:

• Cable- my dad's truck, the first car I drove on a regular basis in high school. Named after an obscure superhero.
• Jade- MY first car. People though it was because she was green, but really it's because I was a huge nerd. Jade was just her first name.
  
• Jack- my dad's little black Civic, which we got during the summer that the first Pirates movie came out. So of course it was originally the Black Pearl, but you can't call your car that when you're yelling at/coaxing it. So Jack it became.
• Bruce Wayne- my laptop. When I got it, it was sleek and very high tech with lots of gadgets. It felt appropriate.
• Sawyer- the guitar I bought from a pawn shop after my old one got stolen when my car got broken into.
• Gotham- my sweet, rotten, furry boy who is dark as the night/knight himself.

Pretty much all of my important stuff is named after nerdy things. Pretty sure at least one of our kids will follow suit.

I still keep a running list of names that I love. I collect them in a notes app on my phone. Every time I get the alumni publication from my alma mater, I comb the "Born to be a Wildcat" section, reading all the names of the new babies and silently judge people for their lack or overabundance of creativity. And I think I pester Todd one a week about what we should name our kids.

I CANNOT WAIT TO NAME OUR (currently nonexistent) KIDS.

I think about it all the time. I mean, is there any greater task than branding a person with the title they will use for life?! Not a job to be taken lightly.

I want to tell you my top four (current) kid names so badly. But I won't. I don't know why, but I won't.

I will tell you this. They are all named after characters, but not in a glaring way. The boy names are more well known characters (and one is kind of glaring, but whatever. I think it's cool and noble.) And the girl names are similar to each other-- and similar to mine too. And all the middle names are family-related. Except one. But that one relates to the family in a different way.

I just typed them all out. And deleted them. Maybe I'll spill when I'm pregnant. :)

p.s. In college, I was voted (by my roommates) "Most Likely to Name Her Children After Superheroes"-- I don't want to disappoint.

Any unique names that you're fond of, but wouldn't inflict on your kids?