My foray into mindless consumerism came to naught when the website crashed for 3 hours, then when it came back, disavowed any knowledge of the Visa corporation. Bugger! Just as well-no one around here rents HD. :mad: 
Mine is very minor compared to some of the others. But, I wish my church would get rid of the politically correct versions of well known carols they’ve been using the past few years.
I seriously doubt even the most fire breathing ultra politically correct person will get upset at, “Glory to the newborn King.” as opposed to, “Glory to the Christ Child, bring.” “O Come Let Us Adore him,” as opposed to, “O Come in Adoration,” and other such unnecessary politically correct revisions.
Especially on Christmas Eve when half the congregation is singing the familiar lyrics anyway!
My mother-in-law and her husband are staying at our house for Christmas. This morning, while we were at my brother-in-law’s for Christmas breakfast, her husband threw his back out. Brother-in-law offered to let them spend the night at his house instead. We pointed out that my MiL’s husband shouldn’t climb stairs in his state, and that there are no bathrooms on the first floor of my house. “That’s okay,” says my mother-in-law, “When we get back to burundi’s, I’ll set him up on the couch with a pee can.” No! A large, immobile man peeing in my living room is not part of my plan for a peaceful Christmas evening. It’s never part of the plan.
(MiL’s husband managed to get up the stairs at my house. Hopefully, he can get back down them again tomorrow morning, because I am so ready to be house-guest free.)
We get lists from my mother of what she wants.
And then we go through the lists, my sister (and now my brother-in-law) and my father and I, and divvy up who will get what.
I claimed the radio-CD player.
Guess what my father decided to add at the last minute for another one of his gifts? You got it: a radio-CD player.
muttermuttermuttermutter
The worst of it, now, is that I’m worrying about just what this presages for the rest of his cognitive abilities.
I hate my kitchen. There’s not enough counter space. Everything’s out of my reach. I have to keep the dry ingredients on the counter until I can climb up and Tetris them all back in at once. The motherfucking faucet has no range of temperature: it’s either cold or scalding. The dishwasher yielded a rack of food-splattered glassware and lightly food-buffed plates. (And yes, I did clear the trashmasher beforehand.) And the whole thing is about the size of an Amtrak restroom. And of course, everyone has to brush past me to get the wine. To get the wineglasses. To get a sharp knife. To get more potato chips. Didn’t mind so much when BIL was in there making his au gratin potatoes, because I knew what he was doing and we were not at cross purposes. But it pisses me right off when I turn around and find someone I didn’t know was there at all between me and the stove.
And note to Mr. Rilch: When I jump back from you, that does not mean I’m losing my shit. It means that I’m wearing velvet, one of my favorite dresses, and you’re coming at me with a big greasy barbecue fork. I’m not going to stand there and wait for tragedy to strike. As a matter of fact, I did have a mishap while cleaning the French press. Hopefully it all came out.
Oh, and fuck you, Payless, for having those shoes in every size except mine, so I had to walk around in stocking feet all night. Seriously, I have no shoes that can be worn with a skirt shorter than ankle length. There just better be something in a post-Christmas sale that I can wear (and afford).
The only gripe I have is that I am here this Christmas, instead of with my fiancé. LDRs suck, sometimes.
Oh, and the Christmas-songs I got bombarded with at work the past couple of weeks.
My only rant is that there is nothing to rant about. I just spent my first Christmas ever by myself, only the third that I haven’t spent with family in Canada. I flew back from Taiwan late Christmas eve and the family and kids are still there until Chinese New Year.
My Dad’s girlfriend broke up with him Thursday last week totally out of the blue. Obviously she couldn’t have done it before he paid for the kitchen remodel for her house, that nice new curio cabinet, oh and that huge ass LCD TV. It’s a good thing her presents were all early this year. Thankfully he hadn’t sold his mortgage free house despite the girlfriend’s repeated requests.
Although it’s really got to suck for my sister to now be living with Dad again (she’s been living at the house rent free for 2 years). If she could actually put a sentence together without lewt speak she’d have a great pit thread about Dad banishing those ‘rare’ cough cough Buffy posters from the living room.
Very minor compared to Br’er Lapin. I’m sorry for your loss.
Br’er Lapin, I’ve very sorry for your loss and how crappy it must have made your Christmas, too.
My rant is about our embarassment of riches - we have both our families in town, so we do two Christmas Eves, two Christmas Days (and two Thanksgivings and Easters, but that’s not important right now). The first part of the rant is aimed at my family - last year they opened all the gifts before we got there, because this bunch of adults couldn’t wait a few hours for us to finish at Jim’s family to open gifts with us there (we didn’t expect the kids to wait, but the adults could have). I talked with them about it this year because it left us feeling left out last year, and nobody seemed to get the concept that we have two sets of family obligations. This from people who have all done/are doing the two family marathons.
The second part of my rant is for Jim’s family, who were calling around frantically, thinking we were dead in a ditch, because we didn’t show up for their family Christmas Eve get-together until 10:00 pm. We were at MY family’s Christmas Eve get-together, like we have been for the last seven years. When imagining the possibilities of where we are, try to imagine that I have a family, too - that you’ve met frequently, that you know very well live in the same city. I may have gotten a little snippy at this point, after having argued with my family for the last couple days about something that they should have understood in the first place.
After realizing that both of our families just aren’t getting our double commitments, we’ve decided that next year we please ourselves. I’m thinking Christmas in Vegas. 
(And yes, I do realize how lucky we are to have two families who love us and want us to spend time with them.)
Is there some relationship between dishwashers and trashmashers that the world has conspired to keep from me for all these years? And what is a trashmasher, anyway?
My dishwasher leaked the last time I ran it. When the plumber comes and says “did you clear the trashmasher?” I don’t want to stand there looking like an idiot.
Trash compactor, garbage disposal, whatever you call that gadget in your sink that grinds up food. Actually, I think a trash compactor is for dry garbage like cardboard. So it’s actually a garbage disposal. But at any rate, trashmasher is easier to say than garbage disposal.
As for why I should have cleared it, they share a pipe. Or so it would seem, because when the dishwasher is in the rinse cycle, it comes near to spewing water back up from the same drain where the trashmasher is. ISTR more primitive dishwashers that would fill that side of the sink while rinsing. So if there are any loose bits in the trashmasher, they’ll end up in the dishwasher.
This is not a Christmas mini-rant, more an observation.
So we went to the post Chrissy sales today. Everyone’s out of Wiis, but that’s neither here nor there. What boggled me is that today is the first day that shops were open after Christmas and every, EVERY store had lines of people going out the door trying to return things.
Now I’m happy to accept in some situations there’s going to be faulty goods or things someone’s already got one or two of and don’t need any more of. But that can’t possibly count for all of the (at least) 150 people we saw in lines, waiting to return gifts.
Did these people make their loved ones give them the receipts with their gifts? Or did they just front up on boxing day going “I don’t like this, give me the receipt and I’ll go return it”?
Who are these fucktards who create overly complicated packages for children’s toys?
They’re fucking insane. Shit, just wrap the toy in barbed wire and concrete, it’d be easier to open, m’kay?
It seems the standard toy is now in a box (taped shut), then has heavy-duty twist-ties holding the toy into place in the box, and the ends of the twist-ties are taped into place. Count on a minimum of three twist-ties per item in the box. WTF? It’s a children’s TOY! It should not take an adult 15 minutes to open the goddamn box!
One box was so ridiculously complex, it came with INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO UNDO THE MOTHERFUCKING INTERLOCKING PLASTIC TABS. No effing way is any child opening this thing, let alone a grandparent.
By the time I finished opening all these sorry boxes I had a hefty stack of plastic and metal destined for the recycling bin.
What the goddamn hell is the point of putting toys into restraint devices straight outta Gitmo? Why? Why? Why?
PS It sucks that Xmas was my only day off, but the 40 hours of OT I’m getting this week will be nice.
5 fucking hours. Just south of Philly to just south of DC. 5 fucking hours in the driving rain.
My mp3 player cover from my bro-despite bearing the brand of the player itself-does not fit the player. I’m going to take it back but Bestbuy doesn’t do returns until Friday. Bro had the receipt taped to the back of it just in case. If it had fit I would have kept it.
Mine’s not so much a rant; Christmas made me melancholy this year. My parents caught some kind of bug (the docs have now diagnosed dad with bronchitis, so he finally gets his codeine and will sleep, and mom with some kind of lung infection), and so didn’t come to Christmas. My brother brought his GF, and it always makes me sad to see them together, because she loves him so much and he barely knows she’s alive.
And then my BIL said that my brother will likely marry his GF, because he thinks it’s his duty to the family to get married, and she’s hot so why not marry her? That’s just so wrong. And I miss being a kid; I miss the excitement and fun of Christmas. It’s becoming just another Thanksgiving; not that Thanksgiving is bad, it’s just Thanksgiving, not Christmas. So, all in all, a melancholy Christmas.
Plus I put my old, kidney-failing, heart-failing cat to sleep a week or so ago; right after I came back from the vet, I cleared the house out of all her things, but I keep finding things I missed, and I keep seeing her out of the corner of my eye, and then remembering.
Stomach! Quit sticking out! Just because you have food in you, doesn’t mean you have to announce it to the world, like I never feed you. You’re ruining the lines of the dress. Settle down.
My grandmother had to deal with pissy, immature, spoiled brats on Christmas, bought gifts for some family members to give to their parents, got no thank you in return, and my gift to her, the one bright spot she has no doubt she’ll adore, didn’t arrive in time.
Because apparently FedEx thinks Priority Overnight means they have seven days to send a 3 pound package. Seven fucking days!
And fuck my cousin with a rusty spoon. Grow up.
My church uses those too. We’ve been doing them for a while, maybe ten years or so, and most of us still aren’t used to it (I’m not, and ten years is almost half my life). I’m a fan of inclusive language, but what’s wrong with gendered pronouns for Jesus? And the attempts at modernization (ex. “O Come All You Faithful”) are just irritating.
We went from Baltimore (north and east of the city) to Philly on Saturday afternoon, and it took us four hours. Normally I can get there in 90 minutes.
This describes my kitchen perfectly. I am sooo stealing this line.